Independent Research

Of all movements in art and design history, postmodernism is perhaps the most controversial. This era defies definition; an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical, postmodernism was a visually thrilling multifaceted style that ranged from the colourful to the ruinous, the ludicrous to the luxurious.

Postmodernism shattered established ideas about style. It brought a radical freedom to art and design through gestures that were often funny, sometimes confrontational and occasionally absurd. Most of all, over the course of two decades, from about 1970 to 1990, postmodernism brought a new self-awareness about style itself.

Postmodernism was a drastic departure from modernism’s utopian visions, which had been based on clarity and simplicity. The modernists wanted to open a window onto a new world; postmodernism’s key principles were complexity and contradiction. If modernist objects suggested utopia, progress and machine-like perfection, then the postmodern object seemed to come from a dystopian and far-from-perfect future. Designers salvaged and distressed materials to produce an aesthetic of urban apocalypse.

As the 1980s approached, postmodernism went into high gear. What had begun as a radical fringe movement became the dominant look of the ‘designer decade’. Vivid colour, theatricality and exaggeration: everything was a style statement. Whether surfaces were glossy, faked or deliberately distressed, they reflected the desire to combine subversive statements with commercial appeal. The most important delivery systems for this new phase in postmodernism were magazines and music. The work of Italian designers – especially the groups Studio Alchymia and Memphis – travelled round the world through publications like Domus. Meanwhile, the energy of post-punk subculture was broadcast far and wide through music videos and cutting-edge graphics. This was the moment of the New Wave: a few thrilling years when image was everything.

As the ‘designer decade’ wore on and the world economy boomed, postmodernism became the preferred style of consumerism and corporate culture. Ultimately this was the undoing of the movement. Postmodernism collapsed under the weight of its own success, and the self-regard that came with it. The excitement and complexity of postmodernism were enormously influential in the 1980s. In the permissive, fluid and hyper-commodified situation of 21st-century design, we are still feeling its effects.

This content was originally written to accompany exhibition Postmodernism: Style & Subversion 1970–1990, on display at the V&A South Kensington 24 September 2011–15 January 2012. 

Source: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/postmodernism/

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Postmodernism according to friends, foes, and spectators

When people talk about postmodernism, the problem is that they are referring to something very elusive and slippery. In the academic world, it is best understood as a new Weltanschaung - a new organizing principle in thought, action, and reflection, connected to many changing factors in modern society. The term postmodern was first applied, around 1971, to a new architectural style which combined old, classical forms with modern pragmatism and scientific engineering. Since then, the postmodernist advocates have used the term to describe their movement as a reaction to the wholesale failure of modernity - the betrayals of the modernist movement in the arts, primarily, but also modernity understood as a social process - industrialization, urbanization, centralization, and 'progress' and 'civilization' as those terms are often used popularly. This movement is not called 'antimodernism' because it is not a rejection of modernity in toto , but as its advocates claim, an effort to combine the best of the modern world with the best elements of the traditions of the past, in an organic way that eliminates the worst parts of both.
Critics of postmodernism come mainly from the Marxist camp. They feel that postmodernism is a diversionary tactic, the last ditch of a late capitalism in the process of dying. They dislike fervently the way that postmodern aesthetics rejects socialist realism - and, for that matter, epistemological realism. They often point out how semiotics and the postmodern idea that everything is image and nothing is substance are used cynically by advertising agencies - which, unable to sell us real goods of real production, can now only sell us images of satisfaction and packaged happiness. Marxists also dislike postmodernism's relativist treatment of science, since as they see 'criticism' (the critical method) and science as being identical. And they are not all too pleased by postmodernism's rejection of the proletariat and industrialism as liberators, nor its insistence (dating from the Situationists) that liberation of leisure may be more important than liberation of work... the way postmodernism intertwines with Nietzschean thought, deep ecology, mysticism, and libertarian individualism makes many Marxists view it as right-wing, reactionary, perhaps even fascist!
Non-Marxist critics of postmodernism abound, too. The right wing foams at the mouth at the way it dovetails with multiculturalism, feminism, 'direct democracy,' the "communitarian" movement, and some concerns they see as left-wing. The right-wingers feel that postmodernism is the last-ditch effort of a dying left wing... that left-wing academics, disappointed with Papa Joe Stalin and Pol Pot, have found a new weapon with which to smash Western civilization and rationalism. Other critics of postmodernism feel it is trying to have its cake and eat it too. From the modern world, it wants to take McLuhan's electronic technology and the 'global village' it allows while ditching other parts of modernity; without acknowledging that, sans modernity, such communication would not be possible. From the premodern world, it wants to recover the 'religious sensibility' and 'traditional values' of the past while jettisoning the intolerance and fundamentalism of religion or the "crushing weight" of tradition upon free thought. The postmodernists, their critics claim, do not see that both tradition and religion can be both liberating and stultifying, but you cannot "pick and choose" from both and claim to be doing anything but generating fictions.
Sociologists see postmodernism at work everywhere. Take scientology or radionics, for example - which combine sophisticated technology and scientific-sounding concepts with some very, very old, perhaps antiquated ideas. If postmodernism is anything, I think, it is perhaps a rejection of linear narrative, and our central linear narrative is History. Associated with that constellation are ideas like Progress, whether one views it as the Hegelian spirit of consciousness or the inevitable progression of the factors and relations of economic production. Scientists hate postmodernism because it suggests there is no such thing as "superstition." In the discourse-world of Foucaultian geneaology, there can be no ideas which are consigned to the "dustbin" of history. They can lose meaning as new discourses are adopted, perhaps even be abandoned as parts of discourses, but that does not mean they are "gone," for humanity never to reconsider. In the postmodern world, all things are subject to reconsideration . And that is how one can look at postmodernism: a reconsideration of the central constellation of ideas in the arts, economics, politics, philosophy, and sociology.

Source: http://www2.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/pomo.html

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Definition of Postmodernity

post·mod·ern  (pst-mdrn)

adj.

Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: "It [a roadhouse]is so architecturally interesting . . . with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock" (Ruth Reichl).