Post Modernism

Postmodernism

Post modernism is opposite to modernism. Modernism was initially born out of optimism, an aspirational reaction to World War 1, with a view to harnessing technology to improve people’s lives. Ends up doctrinaire, almost blind obedience to rules. Form follows function.

The characteristics of modernism is more fun and joyful, this is the opposite to postmodernism. The harnessing technology introduces the progress of celebrating the new.

Modernism is associated with experimentation, innovation, individualism, progress, purity, originality, seriousness.

The postmodern condition is characterised by exhaustion, pluralism, pessimism, disillusionment with the idea of absolute knowledge.

The overlaps include: modern life, technology, new material and communication.

Origins of postmodernism

In 1917, German writer Rudolph Pannwitz, spoke of nihilistic, amoral, postmodern men. In 1964, Leslie Fielder described a post culture, which rejected the elitist values of Modern Culture.

Uses of the term postmodern

Postmodern is after modernism. The historical era following the modern. Contra modernism, it is equivalent to ‘late capitalism’ (Jameson). Postmodernism includes an artistic and stylistic eclecticism. ‘Global village’ phenomena: globalization of cultures, races, images, capital and products.

The distribution of the Pruitt- Igoe developments, St Louis happened on 15 July 1972. This was known for when modernism dies, according to Charles Jencks.

The death of modernism was based on the architecture collapsing.

1960 was the development and the beginning of modernism

1970 is the year of establishing terms, established by Jencks

1980s recognises style which leads onto 1990s which introduces a dominant theoretical discourse.

Postmodernism has an attitude of questioning conventions. Postmodernism aesthetic equals a multiplicity of styles and approaches which leaves space for a new voice.

Postmodernism only rule is that there are no rules.

J-F Lyotard

‘The Postmodern Condition’ 1979

Incredulity towards metanarratives. Metanarratives equals totalising belief systems. This results to crisis in confidence.

This introduced the divide in high art and low art.

Post-modern artists like to mix the highbrow and the populist, the alienating and the accessible, and to sample elements from different styles and eras.

At the end of the 1950s the purest form of modernist painting was formalism, theorised by the critic Clement Greenberg.

Crisis in confidence, however introduces freedom and new possibilities. It questions the old limitation as well as space for marginalised discourse: women, sexual diversity and multiculturalism.

An inconclusion

Pro-Mo attitude of questioning conventions, especially modernism.

Pro-Mo aesthetics equals multiplicity of styles and approaches. Shift in thought and theory investigating crisis in confidence. Perhaps it is de to the rejection of technological determinism.

Examples of architecture

Future systems, Selfridges Birmigham 1999-2003

Quinlan Terry (1992)

'The Maitland Robinson Library at Downing college." Cambridge University

Prince Charles (1984), A version of Britain. A personal view of Architecture, London, Doubleday. "Is somebody proposing to dive from the tower?"