Postmodernism - Style and Subversion at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Postmodernism - Style and Subversion at the Victoria and Albert Museum

22 September, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys feels a little let down by Postmodernism - the movement more than the V&A's major new exhibition.

Postmodernism – is it over yet? What even was that? If Postmodernism can be said to have had a definite end-date, it is 9/11. Baudrillard called 9/11 the “absolute event”, and certainly it marked the end of Postmodernism's increasingly self-satisfied penchant for ironic game-playing. Richard Dawkins, the War on Terror and the return of ideology as a global battleground showed us that liberal democracy is not the catch-all solution, that the self-referential is not the ultimate in human achievement.
 
Now, ten years on, perhaps we can try to look at Postmodernism as a moment in history. That's certainly the view espoused in the V&A's major new show, Postmodernism - Style and Subversion. The V&A, perhaps a little cautiously, dates the 'movement' from 1970 to 1990 and seeks to draw out, not so much a definition (which for a number of reasons would probably be impossible) but an assemblage of prominent characteristics.
 
If Modernism could be characterised as a drive for purity, then Derrida showed us purity's impossibility, and Postmodernism expressed itself, above all, as an embrace of the impure. Likewise, where Modernism saw the fragment as expressive of a greater whole, Postmodernism severed the ties of regret and rejoiced in the fragmentary. This resulted in a cacophony of clashing colours, collage, quotation, irony, and a concerted attempt to splice together as many apparent oppositions as possible. It was an approach that, as this exhibition reminds us, spanned architecture, design, art, music, film, and fashion – in short, pretty much every aspect of contemporary cultural expression.
 
Although it takes the form of a chronological narrative of progression (exactly the kind of narrative Postmodernism claimed to have done away with) Postmodernism - Style and Subversion does at least seek to ape the movement's jumbled aesthetics. As a result, visiting is a pretty hectic experience: Karl Lagerfeld's early designs for Chanel side by side with quotations from Martin Amis; architectural models next to archive photographs, clips from Blade Runner on the big screen; Talking Heads playing in the distance.
 
In amongst all the clutter, there is some wicked stuff. My favourite piece by some distance is Pieter de Bruyne's Chantilly chest from 1975. It consists of a sawn-off quarter from a nineteenth century (faux Baroque) cabinet juxtaposed with slickly lacquered chipboard in white, black and vivid blue. It encapsulates both the wit and the daring that characterised the best in Postmodernism, but also does so with a degree of charm that’s rare in this exhibition. James Wines’ designs for SITE are another high point, as he turns a commission from American retailers Best on its head: instead of the kind of glossy modern showroom you might expect, he presents dilapidated structures, already overgrown with foliage. They look closed before they even opened.
 
Other notable items include Peter Saville’s design work for Joy Division and New Order, Shin Takamatsu’s beautifully dense drawing for The Ark, a monumentally bizarre structure that actually houses a dental clinic; a delightful rendering of Johnson’s controversial AT&T building in New York; Swid Powell’s increasingly ludicrous (and costly) collaborative product designs; and Shiro Kuramata’s surprisingly elegant chair, Miss Blanche, which features vivid red paper flowers floating inside clear acrylic.
 
One problem though, I think, is that a movement that took pleasure in the low, ugly and ephemeral does not lend itself particularly well to museum treatment. And so much of what is on show is vile and silly. The furniture and product designs in particular are largely ridiculous; the art – Ai Weiwei, Gursky, Warhol, Koons, Raushenberg – is predictable; and the lengthy sections that focus on the more pop culture elements – fashion, music and music video, poster design, magazines – start to feel a little like artfully laid out versions of those I ♥ the '80s programmes that were all the rage on TV a while back.

Part of this is down to the very concept of putting Postmodernism in a museum context – where a description of a piece of pottery as “among the earliest examples of postmodern method in ceramics” (like it's something from the middle ages) is more than a little jarring. Ditto, warnings like “Please do not climb”, that sap the joy from a reproduction of Charles Jencks' Garage Rotunda.

But the problem fundamentally is Postmodernism’s own, for it never got over its own structural contradictions. This is best encapsulated by the V&A’s inclusion of Robert Venturi’s famous espousal of the inclusive, embrace-all ‘both/and’ of Postmodernism as opposed to Modernism’s discriminatory ‘either/or’. The problem of course is that by attempting to do away with binary oppositions, Venturi has simply introduced another, and Postmodernism’s anti-programme turned out to be just another programme. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Where now? Back to the start.

Postmodernism - Style and Subversion is at the V&A from Saturday 24th September 2011 to 15th January 2012.

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Tom Jeffreys