By JULIE V. IOVINE
London—Postmodernism confuses people, right down to the way it is spelled: one word or two? Is it capitalized? Postmodern revels in such ambiguities.
One thing is certain, and it is the underscored point in an expansive exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990.” Postmodernism liberated the arts, and especially architecture, from the puritanical rationalism of late modernism. Trouncing functionalism, efficiency, the monochromatic and just about every other revered tenet of the postwar modern, postmodernism unleashed a bacchanalia of creative output, a vast sampling of which is here on display.
Postmodernism: Style & Subversion 1970-1990
Victoria & Albert Museum
Through Jan. 15
Arranged as a journey from postmodernism’s beginnings as an architectural revolt and recapturing of history, and passing through spaces shaped like vectors, the exhibition is chockablock with material at all scales—from the tiniest polished-steel spoon with Mickey Mouse ears to the true-to-size reproduction of the towering “historical” columns from the 1980 architecture biennale in Venice. There’s a re-creation of the entrance to Garagia Rotunda, the garage studio in Cape Cod, Mass., designed by architecture critic and historian Charles Jencks, who purportedly coined the term postmodernism.
Postmodernism cannot easily be pinned down as a practice, a process, a style, an attitude or a gesture. And the exhibition doesn’t even try. It’s the brooding futuristic noir of Ridley Scott’s movie “Blade Runner”; rogue furnishings of the Memphis Group; Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits of herself as exotic others; David Byrne’s big white suit and deadpan lyrics. It is most unfortunately Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building, with its dated punch line of a broken Chippendale pediment scraping the Manhattan skyline like chalk on a blue blackboard.
V&A Images
A show almost too effective at capturing the movement’s frenetic energy.
With jumbo screens running “Blade Runner” clips and a video looping through a Laurie Anderson performance, among quite few other video clips and soundtracks, the exhibition is almost too effective at capturing the frenetic energy of the movement. More celebration than evaluation, the show attempts to rescue postmodernism from its bad rap in recent years as glib, consumerist, cynical and prone to really bad puns and awful colors. Rightfully, it gives pride of place to architecture for its early engagement with PoMo. It was architects who most needed to wrestle free from the straitjacket of modernism.
Forget the sleek fabulousness of midcentury modern decor now starring in “Mad Men.” Modern architecture in the 1960s and ’70s was often doctrinaire, narrowly prescriptive, alienated from context and joyless. Architects today who studied at such modernist bastions as Harvard recall that Frank Lloyd Wright was persona non grata—never taught, not discussed. The modernist credo sworn in at the Bauhaus and dedicated to function and transparency in service to the masses, devoid of ornament and disdainful of local color, had evolved into the International Style, a corporate-friendly, glass-and-steel aesthetic seen at its best in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. In the wrong hands, however, modernism let loose an endless march of featureless office towers, sitting ducks for Tom Wolfe’s ridicule in “From Bauhaus to Our House,” where he gleefully nicknamed the Avenue of the Americas “Rue de Regret.”
Mr. Jencks stated famously that the postmodernist movement began at 3:32 p.m. on March 15, 1972, with the dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe, a cereal-box housing complex in St. Louis routinely vandalized by its own occupants and so loathed that its violent destruction was celebrated. The exhibition begins with a wall-mural photo of the explosion and the Jencks quote that went with it, directed at Modernism: “After all, since it is fairly dead, we might as well enjoy picking over the corpse.”
The show does not mention more recent studies showing that residents of Pruitt-Igoe were actually happily at home in those of the towers that were properly maintained. It was not the architecture they rejected but management’s dereliction of duty.
If anything, postmodernism was about reanimating history. Where the International Style promised the same glass tower in a plaza anywhere in the world, postmodernism believed in history and context, the more the merrier: The elegant black glass with tasteful reflecting pools of the Seagram Building in New York versus the riot of classical arches and ionic columns, fountains and broken pediments of Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans. On a more serious note, postmodernism’s lively appreciation of the past fueled a wider interest in the preservation movement just when hardcore modernists were most intent on wiping the urban slate clean.
The exhibition does not reach back further than the usual PoMo landmarks to illuminate postmodernism’s origins. Much wall space is given to the 1966 Las Vegas road-trip taken by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (with Steven Izenour and a load of Yalies), who were soon to be crowned the movement’s erudite pop philosophers for such thought-ticklers as “Less is a Bore,” “Main Street is almost All Right,” and “the decorated shed”—foundational concepts presented in their books “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” and “Learning from Las Vegas.”
In contrast, at the recent conference “Reconsidering Postmodernism,” organized by the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in New York, European scholars Michelangelo Sabatino and Martino Stierli convincingly revealed how Ernesto Rogers and other postwar Italian architects were already thinking postmodern thoughts in the 1940s and ’50s. Even jaded academics took notice when an image flashed on the screen of Luigi Moretti’s 1950 Il Girasole, a kissing first cousin to Mr. Venturi’s 1962 Vanna Venturi House, one of the seminal icons of postmodernism.
Parody, collage, pastiche and posturing were all part of the postmodernist approach in what the V&A exhibition’s curators call an “unstable mix” of means and methods. The Internet’s instant access and global information reach and the horrors of 9/11 have made postmodernism’s ironic pose and backward glance seem almost quaint by comparison. “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion” has assembled a great many artifacts under its rubric, especially fascinating if you didn’t have to live with them the first time around. It does justice to the expansive plurality of the movement’s ideas but does not bring that past into our present. It all seems so long ago.
Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.
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