KhrióMagazine / Inspire
01/12/2011
Let’s Do the Po Mo Timewarp – again
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If you think that post-modernism is a design style which blew everyone away in the 80s (remember that amusing Memphis bookcase?) but then disappeared you will think it absurd for me to devote yet another column to it. But it isn’t. And while I, like any good surrealist, am happy to live in an absurd world and to behave accordingly, what would be truly absurd would be ignore the importance of the shift into the age of the ‘post’.
Especially if, like me, you’re old enough to have lived through the 50s and 60s when modernism ruled supreme. As recent TV programmes like Mad Men and the new (sadly, I think disappointing) Pan Am demonstrate, there once was a time when that optimism, yearning for the future and blind faith in technology which lay at the heart of modernism were beyond dispute.
A worldview as well as an aesthetic, modernism celebrated change – including change for its own sake as could be seen in a fashion system which in its hunger for the next ‘New Look’ had no room for the ‘timeless classics’ which now, in a post-modern age, seem increasingly desirable. In the 50s and 60s that which was new was ipso facto better than what had come before. Now we’re more sceptical and more often than not opt for the tried and true and timeless.
Throughout the vast majority of human history traditional societies sought to maintain the status quo at all costs. It was only in the last, say, 500 years, initially in Europe, that a new, rising middle class (who had themselves experienced change as an improvement rather than a disaster) came to welcome rather than fear the transitory and fleeting. This optimistic worldview would come to be called modernism – and it reached a crescendo in the post-war, booming 50s and 60s.
Then – bang! – in the 70s everything started to fall apart as an oil crisis, recession and stagflation, for the first time since the war, caused many to question modernism’s key presumption that things would always get better. Prefiguring all the key elements of post-modernism the British Punks summed up this new mood: ‘No Future’. The film Blade Runner stared into the future and saw a decaying, chaotic era when retro ruled and technology was the problem rather than the solution.
Sound familiar? Worse yet we’re living in an age which is defined only by what it is not: not modern. This then is our first and most fundamental task – to figure out what we are and thereby to move beyond what we are not.
What do you think?
