Postmodernism: style and subversion 1970-1990

Review of the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition, September 2011 - January 2012

This exhibition makes an engaging counterpoint to our many discussions of postmodernism as a philosophy. The V&A takes us on a visual journey through two decades of its expression in architecture, clothing, and industrial and graphic design. The results of such determined playfulness and clear-eyed nihilism are by turns smart, funny, intriguing, odd and depressing.

The curators emphasise the ‘post’ in postmodernism, representing it as a reaction against modernism. However, the attitudes and values that characterise postmodernism can also be understood as the flip-side to modernism, and have been in evidence for as long as modernism, in for instance Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The spirit of Duchamp hovers over much of the work, and some of the postmodern ‘bricolage’ – or cut-and-paste objects – are very similar to the Dadaist constructions of Schwitters and Höch.

What changed in the 1970s and 1980s was that the values of postmodernism gradually came centre-stage. The exhibition charts the path of postmodern design from a serious-minded endeavour of a few in 1970 to the cultural mainsteam of the 1980s, when it was overwhelmed with the depressingly predictable concerns of wealth and status.

Postmodernism’s architecture was, by necessity, more seriously purposeful than its applied arts: few clients will pay for genuinely nihilistic buildings. So playfulness and stylistic promiscuity are to the fore in the work of Philip Johnson and Robert Venturi. The series of Best Products department stores designed by James Wise and the SITE group are delightfully creative and amusing. The exhibition also reminds us what a welcome relief postmodern architecture was in the 1970s, a redemptive rejection of the inhumanity of late modern and brutalist architecture.

Frank Schreiner: Consumer's rest chair (1990) Copyright Frank Schreiner for Stiletto Studios

The exhibition offers much to enjoy and to reflect on. But in all the borrowing and posing there is a deep lack of conviction that is very sad.

This review was first published in Third Way (December 2011)