Lecture notes from the Post Modernism Lecture - 12/10/11
Post Modernism
- difficult to define
- follows and responds to modernism
Modernism:
- experimentation
- innovation
- new design solutions
- individualism
- progressive
- purity to each discipline
- originality
- seriousness
- taking the binary opposites of the aspects of modernism pretty much gives you post modernism - a shift in thought and theory
"Post Modern Condition" - attitude
- exhaustion
- pluralism
- pessimism
- disillusionment with the idea of absolute knowledge
- questioning conventions
- reaction to modern life/ technologies
- new materials/ communication - as opposed to the subjective expression of these things in modernism
Origins of Post Modernism
Timeline of Post Modernism
Charles Jencks
- 15th July 1972 - 3:32pm = "when modernism ended"
- the demolition of the Pruitt - Igoe development, St Louis
- demolished 4 years after being built - symbolises death of the modernist dream
- utopia + technical determinism
= blind belief that technology will make things better - a total rebellion against modernism
Post modernism
- only rule is that there are no rules
- celebrates what might otherwise be termed as kitsch
- critique of the international style
Post Modernism architecture
Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building, New York, 1957
Park Hill Flats - Sheffield 1960s
- copies of the Seagram building out of materials lacking in quality - now crumbling down
Frank Gehry, Guggenheim museum, Bilbao, 1997
James Stirling, Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany, 1977 - 1983
- makes you think and doesn't stick to rules
Failure of Modernism = design principles being put above needs
- post modernism is a reaction to this and an attempt to humanise it
‘The Postmodern Condition’ 1979
‘Incredulity towards metanarratives’
- metanarratives = totalising belief systems
- modernism was a metanarrative
- result – crisis in confidence - anxiety in where the world is going
Modern Movements
- simplified aesthetics
- Utopian ideals
- truth to materials
- modernist utopia => postmodernist dystopia
Post modern aesthetics = "taking the piss out of modernism"
- complexity chaos - mixing: materials/styles (bricolage)
- re-using images: parody & irony
High Art / Low Art
- divide begins to crumble
- multiculturalism
Andy Warhol
Marilyn Monroe diptych 1962
- critique of technology
- critique of celebrity culture
- critique of art
Jackson Pollock
- truth to materials
Roy Lichtenstein
Red Painting (Brushstroke) 1965
- truth to materials
Red Painting (Brushstroke) 1965
“Advertising is the greatest artform of the 20th Century”
- Marshall McLuhan
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