On Monday I travelled down to London to visit the Victoria and Albert museum for the Postmodernism exhibition there. I found out about the exhibition over the internet a few months ago and thought it looked really interesting and ti was. I spent 2 hours in there and didn't even get round everything before we had to leave, if you didn't have to pay to get in I definitely would have gone back the next day. Unfortunately, we were not able to take photographs of the exhibition however I did take notes and I was able to understand more as a lot of the information advanced on the aspects already looked at during our Postmodernism lecture with Richard a few weeks ago. Here are some images from the internet;
Here are some of the notes I made; unfortunately I didn't make it to the end and missed some vital points which I would have liked to learn more about;
Tadanori yokoo
Pioneer of post modern appropriation and bricolage. Posters for tatsumi hijikata and garumella dance company. Three years apart show how he encircles back on own tracks, second cannibalises the first. Requiring photograph of hijikata. Sun is taken from Japanese flag and a pair of nudes from 16th century French painting. 1965&1968 screen print japan.
Bricolage - no single strategy bind postmodernism together. The movement was a convergence of like-minded practitioners, not a group marching in lockstep. Nonetheless, many key players in architecture and design adopted one particular method : the cut and paste technique of bricolage.
Pioneer of post modern appropriation and bricolage. Posters for tatsumi hijikata and garumella dance company. Three years apart show how he encircles back on own tracks, second cannibalises the first. Requiring photograph of hijikata. Sun is taken from Japanese flag and a pair of nudes from 16th century French painting. 1965&1968 screen print japan.
Bricolage - no single strategy bind postmodernism together. The movement was a convergence of like-minded practitioners, not a group marching in lockstep. Nonetheless, many key players in architecture and design adopted one particular method : the cut and paste technique of bricolage.
Anthropologist claude Levi-Strauss defined the bricoleur as someone working with 'oddments left over from human endeavours'. Postmodern bricolage can look like the modernist collages that preceded it, by artists such a jury schwitters and Hannah hoch. but it ranges more widely, embracing the full diversity of the world around us rather than synthesising its found components into a unified whole.
Strada novissima - 1980. Philosopher jurgen Habermas attacked it for presenting an 'avant garde of reversed fronts'. The architects had 'sacrificed the traditions of modernity in order to make room for a new historicism'.
If modernist objects suggested utopia, progress and machine-like perfection, then the postmodern object stemmed to come from a dystopian and far-from-perfect future.
The first design group to embrace postmodernism fully was studio alchemist, founded I. Milan in 1978. Les my alessandro Guerriero and alessandro mendini. The groups aim was as mendini Later wrote, to occupy 'a state of waste, of disciplinary, dimensional and conceptual indifference'.
As the 1980's approached postmodernism went into high gear. What had begun as a dominant fringe movement became the dominant look of the 'designer decade'. Vivid colour theatricality and exaggeration: everything was a style statement.
Strike a pose
Dancers choreographers art directors performance artists drag queens pop stars partygoers, poseurs and nightclubbers; these were some of the unlucky authors of some of postmodernism's most influential style statements
Mick rock b.1949
Andrew Logan as alternative miss world host/hostess 1973 printer and framed 1979
The alternative miss world pageant founded by jewler and sculpted Andrew Logan was a showcase for London artists fashion deisgners and drag queens. In an early example of postmodern gender play Logan styled himself the 'host/hostess'.
Annie Lennox
A distinctive feature of postmodern celebrity was its freedom with regard to the gender norms.
Style wars
Post modern graphics and photography involved the use of bricolage, fragmentation and quotation; like other media. while artists like Richard prince appropriated advertising images into their work, graphic designers like PETER SAVILLE did the same with 'found' art images.
Magazines bought it all to their eager, young, style conscious, audience many of whom experienced post modernism for the first time through issues of 'the face' or 'i-D' or the cover of a favourite record. For this generation, there was no space between avant-garde and commercial spheres. The complete blending of the two was itself a postmodern phenomenon.
Emigre 1988-1989
ed fella b.1938
Detroit focus gallery poster 1987
Wolfgang weingart b.1941
Kunsthalle basel kunstkredit 76-77 poster 1977
frank schreiner b.1949 for stiletto
Consumers' rest chair 1990
I will complete more reading and research around these points in order to complete my research for my essay on Postmodernism.
