A review of the V&A exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990
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| Marcus A. Jansen, 'Surreal' (2009) |
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
22.10.11
Are we still Postmodern?
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
4.9.11
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 - 1990
V&A Exhibition | 24 September 2011 - 15 January 2012
The following is taken from the V&A website:
About the exhibition
Of all movements in art and design history, postmodernism is perhaps the most controversial. This era defies definition, but it is a perfect subject for an exhibition. Postmodernism was an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical. It was visually thrilling, a multifaceted style that ranged from the colourful to the ruinous, the ludicrous to the luxurious. What they all had in common 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, by contrast, was more like a broken mirror, a reflecting surface made of many fragments. Its key principles were complexity and contradiction. It was meant to resist authority, yet over the course of two decades, from about 1970 to 1990, it became enmeshed in the very circuits of money and influence that it had initially sought to dismantle. 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, postmodernism brought a new self-awareness about style itself.Presence of the past
The 1960s and 1970s saw widespread experimentation with architectural styles from the past. This tendency was attacked by hostile critics as a retreat, as pastiche or as merely ironic. But historicism could be radically expansive and optimistic, or inspired by an elegiac sense of the past that modernism had excluded. Postmodernism lived up to its central aim: to replace a homogenous idiom with a plurality of competing ideas and styles. That wide embrace was reflected in Hans Hollein’s façade for the Venice Biennale in 1980, which had as its centrepiece a ‘street of styles’ named the Strada Novissima. Hollein designed a set of columns that reprise the history of architecture, from the primitive garden through classical ruin to a modernist skyscraper. This extraordinary set piece is recreated in the V&A exhibition at full scale.
Apocalypse then
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. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film 'Blade Runner' was a postmodern exercise par excellence, while Ron Arad encased a turntable, speakers and amplifier in reinforced concrete: an apocalyptic stereo, a hi-tech commodity recast for a post-industrial world.
New wave
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.
Money
In 1981, as if to greet the new decade, Pop artist Andy Warhol created one of his signature silkscreen paintings. It featured a big, beautiful dollar sign. This ironic acknowledgement of his own work’s market value exemplifies postmodernism in its final stage. 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. Yet looking back, we can learn a lot from postmodernism’s fatal encounter with money. Today, when the marketplace has again had its way with us, it is useful to consider the words of theorist Fredric Jameson. Faced with Warhol’s paintings, he wrote: ‘they ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, one would certainly want to know why.'
Postmodernism Redux
The excitement and complexity of postmodernism were enormously influential in the 1980s. But do we still live in a postmodern era? In the permissive, fluid and hyper-commodified situation of design today, we are still feeling its effects. The postmodern subject was well depicted by Robert Longo in his series Men in the City. In each of these images, a man in a suit is captured in the throes of a mysterious convulsion. Is he dancing? Or is this the scene of a crime? It is impossible to tell, and that is the artist’s intention. The figure is at once ambiguous, unsettling and ecstatic. In this sense, at least, we are all postmodern now.
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24.10.10
Disjecta: This week's links
Your guide to this week's best cultural links
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| Philip Roth. Photograph: Steve Pyke. |
Literature:
Samuel Beckett: The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956 will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2011Samuel Beckett: Lois Overbeck to speak at the Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive conference in York, June 2011
James Joyce: This week, Frank DeLaney's podcast readings of Ulysses find Stephen discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet
Joseph Conrad: 3:AM Magazine reviews graphic novel adaptation of Heart of Darkness
Philip Roth: Elaine Showalter compares Roth's new novel, Nemesis, with Albert Camus' The Plague
Philip Roth: Nemesis gets The Complete Review treatment
Tom McCarthy: Jen Craig reads C, and asks whether McCarthy really is a modernist writer
Paul Celan: Translating Celan Conference, London, 23 November 2010
William S. Burroughs: Oliver Harris on re-editing the first trilogy (Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters)
Harvard University Press: Spring Catalogue 2011
HTML Giant launches literary magazine club
Indie Literary Sites start coming of age
Spike Magazine: The Book (Free PDF download)
Philosophy & Critical Theory:
History of Philosophy Podcast: Based at King's College, LondonSocrates - a man for our times
Film:
Werner Herzog: A selection of documentaries to be shown at DocNYC.Werner Herzog: The Guardian's Jonathan Jones on Herzog as performance artist
Blade Runner: The Guardian profiles Ridley Scott's science fiction masterpiece as part of its ongoing film season
Etc.
Melvyn Bragg: Discussions from radio programme In Our Time published in a new collectionThank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.
14.3.10
Disjecta: This week's links
Jenny Trigg directs an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable
This week we have a number of exciting Beckett-related news items for fans of literature, theatre, photography and film. A letter reveals Philip K. Dick's personal response to seeing Blade Runner realized on-screen. The Brick City Bike Collective traces a path to Philip Roth's childhood home. And Martin Scorsese directs a tribute to one of his directing heroes, the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock.
Literature:
Don DeLillo: On White Noise and Point OmegaDon DeLillo: Jewish Journal reviews Point Omega
Samuel Beckett: Beckett and contemporary atheism
Samuel Beckett: An extract from The Unnamable
Philip K. Dick: A response to seeing Blade Runner realized on-screen
Thomas Bernhard: On uncanny primates
Thomas Bernhard: Correspondence with publisher released
William Shakespeare: New Cardiff Shakespeare website launched
William Shakespeare: The Guardian asks 'Who really wrote Shakespeare'?
Philip Roth: Brick City Bike Collective visits Roth's childhood home
William Faulkner: On writers and their work
Keith Ridgway: John Self on Ridgway's Horses
Haruki Murakami: Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood to score Norwegian Wood adaptation
52 Poems: Faber & Faber's poem of the week
Philosophy & Critical Theory:
Jean Baudrillard: The Violence of the Image (2004)Samuel Beckett: A Lacanian reading of the Three Novels, 'Undermining the Symbolic'
Film:
Samuel Beckett: Jenny Trigg's adaptation of The Unnamable, reminiscent of early David LynchStanley Kubrick: Film poster artwork
Andrei Tarkovsky: Graphic artwork of Tarkovsky's films
Alfred Hitchcock: Review of David Thomson's The Moment of Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock: Exploring Hitchcock's influence on Martin Scorsese
Alfred Hitchcock: Scorsese directs Hitchcock tribute, Key to Reserva
Chris Petit: Iain Sinclair on Content
Art and Photography:
Samuel Beckett: Bob Adelman's photographs of Beckett in ParisSamuel Beckett: Save the Portobello Road Mural campaign
Andy Warhol: Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol
Theatre:
Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.
11.11.09
Gothic tradition in Alien and Blade Runner
Excerpts from Fred Botting's critical introduction
Fred Botting explores the gothic conventions in Ridley Scott's Alien:
In Alien (1979) other Gothic associations are brought to the fore. The wrecked alien spaceship and the bleak planet suggest the gloom, ruin and awful desolation of Gothic architecture and landscape. The coded message the spaceship transmits is not a distress signal, but a warning which goes unheeded by the human cargo ship that attends the call. Unaware of the dangers that their employers, another sinister and powerful corporation, have put them in, the crew are unwitting victims of their attempt to secure the power and profit of possessing such an efficient and utterly inhuman killing machine. The horror of the alien lies not only in its lethal power: its parasitical mode of procreation, using human bodies as hosts, means that it is a threat that emerges from within. Indeed, brought aboard inside a member of crew, the alien runs amok. In the cavernous and labyrinthine cargo ship the atmosphere of terror and suspense sustained by the reversible dynamic of hunters and hunted follows Gothic patterns. This is reinforced by the film's focus on a woman, Ripley, who becomes a science fiction Gothic heroine. The strength and self-possession of the heroine, however, distinguishes her from earlier figures, whose faintings and flight signalled the powerlessness of persecuted femininity. Sexual differences, moreover, are presented in the maternal images suggested by the design of the alien 'mother' ship. The vessel is a giant womb, the repository of the eggs that turn into monstrous and destructive progeny. Associations with the conflicting emotions evoked by the mother in 'female Gothic', however, are complicated by the irony of the corporate computer's name, 'Mother': it suggests that the matrix of technology and artificial intelligence has supplanted human figures.Botting also remarks on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, another science fiction work that exhibits some of the hallmark conventions of the Gothic genre:
Fred Botting, Gothic
In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, the undertones of nineteenth-century Gothic are never far from the surface of the futuristic dark detective film. Set in a gloomy, ruinous and alienating Los Angeles of the future, the film follows the fortunes of a group of renegade 'replicants', artificial creations virtually indistinguishable from humans, as they try, like Frankenstein's monster, to make their creator, the scientist controlling the Tyrell corporation, accede to their demands for a more human lifespan. The disaffected blade runner, Deckard, whose task is to identify and terminate the replicants, is the parallel subject of the film as it divides sympathies between pursuer and pursued. Caught between blade runner and replicant, human and android, the narrative gradually erodes the differences distinguishing one from the other, leaving doubts that haunt the properly simulated romantic ending of the first version of the film [the original theatrical release].More at A Piece of Monologue:
Fred Botting, Gothic
RIBA celebrates architecture in film
A retrospective
As the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) celebrates its 175th anniversary, a season of films explores the most distinctive and influential examples of architecture in film. Jonathan Glancey names his top five, which include Fritz Lang's German masterpiece Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps inevitably, Ridley Scott's dark and dystopian science fiction film, Blade Runner, also receives a worthy mention:
Metropolis translated into another futuristic dystopia, this time a vision of LA in 2019. The opening shots, as the camera pans over a 700-storey skyscraper and the sky glows with industrial smoke, fire and acid rain, is as magnificent as it is disturbing. It's another interpretation of the Tower of Babel, of course; this time the headquarters of the company that makes the humanoid "replicants" that do the dirty work for human beings.More:
Scott says that the sets were conjured from a variety of haunting images: Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, the skyline of Hong Kong at night, the fiery industrial landscape of Tyneside and Teesside of Scott's childhood, the French comicbook Métal Hurlant [Heavy Metal], and, quite clearly, Metropolis. Scott places these nightmarish exteriors in architectural contrast to the theatrical, spooky inside of LA's real-life Bradbury Building, designed by George Wyman in 1893, which is cast as the headquarters' interiors. Significantly, the original architect claimed that his style was influenced by Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward (1887) – itself a work of utopian sci-fi. Wyman admired the passage in which Bellamy describes a typical commercial building of the future as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above". [Read More]
9.4.09
Mr. Movies: Mark Kermode talks to Mark Lawson
'Horror is at the (skewered, bleeding) heart of his obsession with films - not even the director of The Exorcist has name-checked it so often in public - and one inevitably seeks a Freudian explanation in his childhood. Did someone jump out of a cupboard and frighten him at an impressionable age?'The Guardian has published a wonderful interview with popular film critic Mark Kermode, written by cultural commentator Mark Lawson. I've been an avid fan of Kermode's reviews since I was thirteen, after catching him in a documentary he wrote and presented on the film Blade Runner. His knowledge and his enthusiasm shine through whenever he is discussing the films he loves, but he is often equally passionate about the films that he hates. He co-hosts a Radio 5 programme with Simon Mayo on Friday afternoons, which has become popular for his rantings as much as for the banter. But whatever you might think of Kermode, or his opinions, he is rarely less than entertaining.
'[Kermode:] "Ha! From when I was very young, I always liked horror films. I remember very clearly seeing the trailer for The Exorcist when I was 11. I knew that I couldn't go to see the film - but just the idea of it was enough. A car pulling up outside a house, and a voice saying that something beyond comprehension is happening to someone inside. I remember the sense of transcendent terror; a sense of something beyond this world and beyond our comprehension. For some people it's football, for some people it's girls, for others it's pot and, for me, it was horror. And I want to be very clear about this: it made me very happy to be scared. I really liked the feeling and I cherished those nightmares."'
Lawson's interview touches on Kermode's radio programme, its possibilities for the future, and the reviewer's recent forays into presenting with BBC arts programme The Culture Show. Kermode shares his passion for the horror genre in particular, and discusses the influence that his wife, film professor Linda Ruth Williams, has on his reviews. Lawson suggests that Kermode's relationship with his wife could be his main weakness as an interpreter of modern cinema; I think that he's just an occasional sucker for sentimentality.
You can read The Guardian's interview in full by clicking here; you can find the official BBC Culture Show website here; or, if you'd like to find out more about Mark Kermode's weekly radio show with Simon Mayo, you can listen live or download a recent podcast here. Enjoy!
4.3.09
Building Dystopia: Hollywood and Frank Lloyd Wright
'Wright's work particularly lends itself to science-fiction movies set in the-not-too-distant future, and it's usually a not-too-pleasant future. The camera loves those unorthodox geometries, soaring perspectives and pure white surfaces – it's like he designed them with expensive tracking shots in mind, not to mention sterile, authoritarian futures. It's not what he would have wanted (in fact, it's the exact opposite) but in the movies, Wright has become the architect of dystopia.'
Following the release of the Clive Owen thriller The International, The Guardian's Steve Rose leads us through Hollywood's fascination with architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Although his minimalist, modernist designs were intended to enrich and enable human society, it seems that Wright's work is often represented in its very antithesis.
Rose points out that for many years, Wright's architectural designs have become emblematic of dystopian future visions in countless science fiction movies - promoting images of austerity and totalitarianism. Of course, not all dystopias are characterized by minimalism and looming government authorities, but even the exceptions - the excellent Blade Runner among them -appear to find space for a Wright design here or there. You can read the article by clicking here.
13.6.08
The Transparent City
A new photographic exhibition
Photographer Michael Wolf has compiled an 'Edward Hopper meets Blade Runner' exhibition based on Chicago's city landscape. The exhibition is entitled The Transparent City (which, in itself, sounds like the title of a J. G. Ballard story) and you can check it out here.
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