Signs of a Struggle at The Victoria and Albert Museum

Signs of a Struggle at The Victoria and Albert Museum

12 August, 2011
by: Jumanah

 Jumanah Younis dabbles in postmodernism at the V&A.

Postmodernist art is a heavily nuanced business. It’s a bit like a temperamental teenager: ironic, suspicious, parodic. Signs of a Struggle has reams of the dry, slightly unsettling humour which characterises the postmodernist movement, but the interesting thing about this exhibition is that it suggests that the tendency still features in photography today. With works spanning from the 1970s to the present, the collection draws links between photographic practices throughout the history of postmodern photography, implying the continuity of ‘classic’ postmodernism. The exhibition shies away from a strict definition of postmodernism, and identifies key strands of the movement instead to unify work from different decades.

One highlight is the work of Calum Colvin, a particularly interesting artist/photographer and part of the 1980s postmodernist cabal. His photographs feature objects he has assembled in his studio and painted over, creating a sort of optical illusion and playing with the idea of perception and perspective. Similarly, Keith Arnatt’s Canned Sunsets (1990-1991), a close-up shot of a tin can he found in a rubbish dump, is masterfully constructed, with glinting red and yellow light on the semi-circle bottom of the jar to create the illusion of a pathetically beautiful sundown. Continuing the theme in more recent photography, Tess Hurrell’s Chaology depicts moments of mass destruction using banal materials such as cotton wool and talcum powder.

Parody doesn’t work for all of the pieces included in the collection, however. Helen Chadwick’s not-so-subtle Madonna, One Flesh (1985), assembled from photocopied images, is a heavy-handed satire of cheap reproductions and mass culture. Scissors hover over the uncut umbilical cord of a female messiah suckling at the exposed breasts of her mother. The piece is overloaded with imagery and meaning, showed up by the more nuanced work on display in the same exhibition. James Welling’s Drapes (1981), for example, is from a similar period but is a more interesting piece altogether. The photograph shows draped folds of cloth, usually associated with the background of a still life composition. Stripped of its common function, the tonal quality of the fabric itself is thrown into relief (interestingly, the tones are literally accentuated due to Welling’s printing technique).

But it is Clare Strand who stands out as the clear highlight of this exhibition. Her series of photographs of crime scenes are eerie, unsettling and full of emotion; subverting an ostensibly utilitarian form of photography. Entirely monochrome, the scenes are uncomfortably empty, abandoned. The domestic spaces which feature among the collection are particularly haunting – a living room with one dining-table chair knocked over, an empty garden – and the photographs carry a sense of interrupted action. The pieces are uncomfortably intimate, and yet by their nature anonymous. This investigation into the layers of meaning and possibilities for representation and reinterpretation are key elements of postmodernist photography, made all the more impressive by the ability of the photographs to express themselves without any accompanying explanation.

In trying to draw together work from different artists over four decades on a topic as complex and broad as postmodernism, the exhibition is certainly ambitious, despite its small size. This does result in some pieces being over-contextualised with excessive wall text explaining how - despite how incongrous a piece might seem - it really does fit in with the rest of the show. Nevertheless, walking through the exhibition you get a strong feeling of the sense of irony and subversive humour that underlies postmodernism, and the show acts as a neat introduction to the V&A's major autumn exhibition, ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion’, which opens on September 24th.

Signs of a Struggle is at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 27th November 2011.

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Jumanah