Postmodernism

Postmodernism. A term that has been used in a broad and diffuse way, with reference to a wide range of cultural phenomena, to characterize a move away—beginning in about 1960—from the highbrow seriousness of modernism in favour of a more eclectic and populist approach to creativity; according to one of the leading writers on the subject, ‘Post-Modernism is fundamentally the eclectic mixture of any tradition with that of its immediate past: it is both the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence’ ( Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism?, 1986). The word came into common use in the 1970s and has featured prominently in discussions of contemporary art, on both an academic and a journalistic level, since about 1980. It has been employed both as a stylistic term (one can speak of Postmodern paintings or films) and as a period designation (the Postmodern age), but there has been much disagreement about how it should be used and even about whether it is worth using at all (as modernism is in itself a difficult concept, is it hard to be clear about the ways in which Postmodernism can be regarded as a development from it, and some writers even choose to refer to Postmodernisms). The diversity that is inherent to the concept of Postmodernism makes it particularly resistant to definition or summary, but Chris Baldick makes a brilliant attempt in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (1990): ‘it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles—most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense … postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals … in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self-consciously “depthless” works … those who most often use it [the term] tend to welcome “the postmodern” as a liberation from the hierarchy of “high” and “low” cultures; while sceptics (sometimes dismissively referring to the postmodern enthusiasts as “posties”) regard the term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity.’

The term was evidently first used by the Spanish literary critic Federico de Onís in his Antología de la poesía española e hispano-americana, 1882–1932 (1934) and soon afterwards by the British historian Arnold Toynbee in his multi-volume work A Study of History (the part in which it appears was written in 1938 but not published until 1947). Toynbee used the word in a largely negative sense. He thought the Postmodern age began in about 1875 and was characterized by the decline in Christianity, capitalism, individualism, and the influence of the West. After Toynbee, the word appeared sporadically for the next two decades, mainly in literary contexts, and it was introduced to serious discussion of the visual arts by Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83) during the 1960s. Pevsner used it in connection with architecture, and the writer chiefly responsible for popularizing it in English is the Anglo-American architectural historian Charles Jencks (1939– ), author of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1975) and other books on the subject. Jencks used the term to describe a reaction against the austere, rational, clean-cut International Modern Style (see MODERN MOVEMENT) in favour of brash eclecticism, and it is in this sense that Postmodernism as a style has its clearest meaning. Postmodern architects returned to regional and traditional sources, introducing colour and ornament, often in a ‘jokey’ manner. One of the best known among them, the American Robert Venturi (1925– ), wrote that he liked ‘elements which are hybrid rather than pure’ and preferred ‘messy vitality’ to ‘obvious unity'.

Outside architecture it is usually less easy to categorize works as Postmodernist, but the word is often applied to paintings and sculpture that similarly blend disparate styles and make knowing cultural references, often in an ironic way. Pop art, for example, has been retrospectively labelled Postmodernist, and there is indeed a kinship in the way it emphasized style and surface and blurred the distinction between high art and popular culture. More recently, the paintings that have been described as Postmodernist include the pseudo-classical works of the British artist Stephen McKenna (1939– ) and of the Italian Carlo Maria Mariani (see PITTURA COLTA), as well as Peter Blake's The Meeting or Have a Nice Day Mr Hockney (Tate Gallery, London, 1981–3), a playful reworking of a picture by the 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet, showing Blake, David Hockney, and Howard Hodgkin as the main protagonists. Other works that have been labelled Postmodernist range from pop songs by Madonna to novels by Salman Rushdie to films such as Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981), which uses elements of plot, setting, and character from several different cinematic genres. More broadly, some critics believe that Postmodernism pervades the whole of contemporary Western society; they argue that in a world dominated by technology and the mass media, culture inevitably becomes superficial and self-referential.