Is it possible to describe any aspect of visual communication today as post-modern(ist)?
First I need to define post-modernism which is difficult as post-modernism doesn’t lend itself well to being defined. Post-modernism seems to be a response to modernism so I will define modernism first. Modernism in design dictates work should be anti-historical, true to its materials, form must follow function, there must be an effort for to put cultural differences to the side and modern technology must be embraced and used.
“A dynamically asymmetrical distribution of spaces. An absence of ornament or historical reference Calvanist in its rigor, an “abstraction,” and a resulting emphasis on the composition play between elements or volumes.” Goldhagen, 2005. Journal of the society of architectural historians, Vol. 64, no. 2
Post-modernism came out of the belief that modernism was in fact limited and essentially flawed after modern architecture was shown to increase crime and anarchy instead of increasing peace and unity.
The Pruit-Igoe, St Louis Missouri – Minoru Yamasaki
Architectural theorist Charles Jenkes said that Modernism died on the 15th of July 1972 at 3:32pm when the demolition of the Pruitt, St Louis, happened. It was a community-housing block for the poor, giant housing towers where people lived in individual identical flats, The Projects as it became called, were the failure of modernist architecture. However as early as 1917, Rudolph Pannwitz is quoted talking about nihilistic, amoral, postmodern men. The senseless butchery of World War one and two also had a part to play in the demise of modernism as the zeitgeist. As a result, post-modernism could be described as the opposite of modernism. It is full of historical references, it can be purely aesthetic and practically useless, cryptic or without any meaning at all and old technology can be celebrated and experimented with. Overall there is a feeling of pessimism and deconstruction which is evident in Hip Hop and Punk culture.
Since modernism was a collection of aesthetic movements reacting to living in a state of modernity, the suggestion that postmodernism may be a response to living in a state of postmodernity may be valid. Malcolm Barnard says that postmodernity is defined by these central features; “globalisation, a post industrial world of consumption and communication, the challenging of cultural values and difference.” Barnard. 2005. Graphic Design as Communication. P.138 Routledge Publishing. So if postmodernism is a reaction to living in a world of consumption and communication, we can assume that postmodern ‘visual communication’ must exist in the form of a collection of aesthetic movements.
On postmodernism as a critical practice, Rick Poyner talks about Hal Foster who “advanced the idea that there are two kinds of postmodernismm, a neo-conservative postmodernism of reaction and a post structuralist postmodernism of resistance.” Poyner, 2003, No More Rules, Lawrence King Publishing
He goes on to talk about how the postmodernism of reaction is cosmetic and therapeutic by reducing modernism to a list of styles which can then be used and twisted. By doing this though, it does reafirm the status-quo making it conservative in nature. Since postmodernism always tends towards having more than one interpretation he goes on to talk about an ‘oppositional postmodernism’ that resists the offical modernist culture and the reactionary postmodernism. These ideas about reducing modernism to a list of styles to be used and being open to interpretation, reinforce the idea that such things as postmodern ‘graphic design’ or ‘visual communication’ certainly are possible.
Frank Gehrys design for the Guggenheim museum is regularly used as an example of post-modern architecture. It is built out of glass, limestone and covered in titanium sheets disguising the actual structure of the building. The building is designed to look roughly like a ship as it is built in Bilbao, Spain which is a port town. Frank Gehry also has a history in ship building, so that is a reference to history and a montage of two architectural styles, both of which have been described as attributes of post-modern design.
To talk about post modernism in visual communication, we can start by looking at Andy Warhol’s work and The Factory. A lot of the work that came out of the factory was not made by Andy Warhol but probably conceptualised by him, which is where the name “The Factory” came from. This is an attack on the role of the artist, traditionally the artist design and creates his own work but in having other people make his stuff for him he puts art and mass production together, contrasting modernism and its quest for new ideas, a constant strive for individuality and originality and as a tribute to Kitsch culture. Hegdige talks about 'questioning cultural hierarchies,' which Warhols work did by putting mass produced work into galleries. It maintains a place in the field of art by having a concept or clever idea behind it.
God Save The Queen – Jamie Reid
“One chord is fine, two chords is pushing it, three and you’re into Jazz.” – Lou Reed
God Save The Queen by Jamie Reid is an example of post-modern design in a movement that is explainable as postmodern. Punk was a nihilistic movement that came out of pessimism and anger directed at the establishment and the academics in art and music. Punk didn’t require people to have great skills in music, the three chord song was a term used to describe the generic punk record. The image above is a montage of newspaper cut outs and photography that has been deconstructed. Photography could already be classed as postmodern in the sense it captures something that has already happened, and the fact that this image is a famous image already taken by another photographer adds another step to distancing the artist from the image and creating a montage. It is also referencing traditional British culture with the reference to the national anthem by physically deconstructing it using British newspaper cuttings. It has “drawn heavily on recognisable imagery, presented in visual terms that reflect late twentieth century life.” Fehr, 1994, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 35, No. 4.
Now this image has become just as much a British icon as the image of the queen herself. The fashion designer Vivienne Westwood also used these ideas in her clothes. She made items of clothing out of other bits of clothing, torn, cut and stitched back together, montaging and references previous design ideas. The shop she opened to sell these clothes was called SEX boutique, this was typical to Punk, trying to shock and annoy the establishment. It is like calling a band “The Cunts” (a Chicago punk band) or the Sex Pistols swearing on the BBC when they were specifically asked not to. Geoffrey Sirc relates Hip-hop to Punk through this idea that ‘Gangsta (Hip-hop, Gansta Rap,) like Punk, like Malcom X, is all about using a kind of plain speak grammar and lexicon, charged with as much poetry as one can muster, to fashion a desperate politics of decency in an indecent world.’ Sirc, 1998, College Composition and Communication Vol. 49, No. 1.
Being offensive just for the sake of being offensive reflects the post-modern ideology of art for art’s sake or a focus on the aesthetic. It was not practical for the Sex Pistols to start swearing on Live TV, but they did it anyway. Punk was also associated with Anarchy and Autonomy. Autonomy fits in with the post-modern ethos (if you’re allowed to call it an ethos.) Autonomy exists in its own sphere, it is not concerned with fitting into society or having a particular message (what Hebdige calls 'implosion of meaning') but this is not to say that it doesn’t carry a message, if that were the case then you wouldn’t be able to discuss it. This reflects how post-modernism can be a subject to discuss without having a particular definition.
Hip Hop Rat – Banksy
‘The four elements of Hip Hop are Graffiti, Emceeing, Deejaying and Breaking.’ – DJ Africa Bambaata
Malcom Barnard quotes Hebdiges list of some of the things that have been labelled as postmodern in his book ‘Graphic Design as Communication.’
“the décor of a room, the design of a building… a television commercial or an arts documentary… the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal… the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity… a fascination for images, codes and styles… the ‘decentring’ of the subject … the ‘implosion’ of meaning, the collapse of cultural hierarchies [and] ‘placelessness’ (Hebdige 1988:181-2) Barnard. 2005. Graphic Design as Communication. P.139, Routledge Publishing
Graffiti and Deejaying, it could be argued, are both postmodern practices. In Promise and Paradox: Art Education in the Postmodern Arena, Dennis Fehr says ‘Thus far the art of this era called postmodern has drawn heavily on recognisable imagery, although often presented in visual terms that reflect late twentieth century life, such as neo expressionism, installations, graffiti art, performance art, and computer and video imagery.’ Fehr. 1994, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 35, No. 4. In Deejaying you have a musician that is also a technician. He samples other people’s works and plays them in a sequence of his own choosing and style. He creates a montage that is homage to other artists and styles of music and art. The audience are also an active part of the performance, a Deejay may change his set according the audiences reaction so it is constantly criticized and adjusted. The turn table was designed to play a record. It was a modern device and a celebration of being able to recreate recorded music on mass. A recording artist, before the deejay movement, made his musical pieces to be played from start to finish, the deejay ‘decentres the subject’ by sampling parts of the music to create a new subject. The same can be argued with graffiti art (art, painted in the street, outside of galleries, in an urban environment.) An architect, structural or civil engineer comes along and designs a building or public installation to serve a function and to look how he wants it too. More often than not in urban environments the designs are modern. He may express modernity through the medium of his structure. A graffiti artist then comes along and uses this structure as a canvas, ‘decentring’ the original subject and responding to it. He paints a design of his choosing montaging style of the building with his own work and whatever references to other ‘codes and styles’ it contains, creating a post-modern piece of artwork. In this method, the ‘Graff artist’ also questions ‘cultural hierarchies’ by placing what is sometimes a skillfully painted image outside of the gallery. This could be compared to Warhol's postmodern practice of putting mass produced work into galleries.
In Banksys piece above he homages Hip Hop culture through depicting a rat (a character he frequently uses in his own work) wearing clothes associated with the Hip-hop movement, it wears a New York City hat, (the Bronx in New York is generally seen as the origin of Hip Hop) in an urban environment with a boom box. He presents the work on another piece of design (the building.) In doing this Banksy in line with Hebdiges definition of postmodernism, ‘decentres’ the subject and makes it into something else, a canvas.
Banksy as a phenomenon fits in well with Hebdiges definition. As an artist he questions the cultural value of graffiti art. His work sells for thousands of pounds, whereas graffiti in a modern environment before was seen as vandalism. He is constantly referencing other codes and styles as with his ‘Hip-hop rat,’ above. He was also recently seen to try and ‘decentre’ himself and his work as the subject in his recent film “enter through the gift shop” which was marketed as the Banksy film but in fact was (in the simplest interpretation) a documentary made by him, but about another artist.
My understanding of Postmodernism is that it is a concept used as a tool for academics to discuss something that is part modern, part something else. As post-modernism doesn’t lend itself well to being tied down and defined, it becomes almost useless as a concept for anyone who isn’t involved in the academic art world. Charles Jenkes supports this by saying it is ‘doubly coded, one-half Modern and one-half something else in its attempt to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects.’ Jenkes, 1987, Chicago Review, Vol. 35, No. 4
In this essay I have defined postmodernism, and sought to prove that aspects of visual communication can indeed be classed as ‘postmodern,’ by showing that postmodernism is a response to living in a state of postmodernity and reacting to that in the form aesthetic styles.
Bibliography
http://www.movmnt.com/monsters-of-hip-hop-2_003332.html
(DJ Afrika Bambaata quote)
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vivw/hd_vivw.htm
(Vivienne Westwood – The mother of punk)
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/postmodernism.htm
(Postmodernism in the visual arts)
http://tomwctt.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html
My lecture notes
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timtimes/3219609202/
Source for hip-hop rat
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=11733
Pop, politics, hip-hop and post punk
http://thebesttraveldestinations.com/guggenheim-museum-bilbao-spain/
Source of Guggenheim image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pruitt-igoeUSGS02.jpg
Source of Pruitt image
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/brad_holland.html
Source of Brad Holland quote
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130515/
Andy Warhol’s “Blow Job”
Goldhagen, W, S. 2005. ‘A dynamically asymmetrical distribution of spaces. An absence of ornament or historical reference Calvanist in its rigor, an “abstraction,” and a resulting emphasis on the composition play between elements or volumes.’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 64, No. 2.
Jenkes, C. 1987. ‘Doubly coded, one-half Modern and one-half something else in its attempt to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects.’ Chicago Review, Vol. 35, No. 4
Sirc, G. 1998 ‘Gangsta (Hip-hop, Gansta Rap,) like Punk, like Malcom X, is all about using a kind of plain speak grammar and lexicon, charged with as much poetry as one can muster, to fashion a desperate politics of decency in an indecent world.’ College Composition and Communication Vol. 49, No. 1
Fehr, D, E. 1994. ‘Thus far the art of this era called postmodern has drawn heavily on recognisable imagery, although often presented in visual terms that reflect late twentieth century life, such as neo expressionism, installations, graffiti art, performance art, and computer and video imagery.’ Studies in Art Education, Vol. 35, No. 4.
Poyner, R. 2003, “advanced the idea that there are two kinds of postmodernism, a neo-conservative postmodernism of reaction and a post structuralist postmodernism of resistance.” No More Rules, Lawrence King Publishing
Barnard. M 2005. “globalisation, a post industrial world of consumption and communication, the challenging of cultural values and difference.” Graphic Design as Communication. P.138, Routledge Publishing
“the décor of a room, the design of a building… a television commercial or an arts documentary… the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal… the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity… a fascination for images, codes and styles… the ‘decentring’ of the subject … the ‘implosion’ of meaning, the collapse of cultural hierarchies [and] ‘placelessness’ (Hebdige 1988:181-2) Barnard. 2005. Graphic Design as Communication. P.139, Routledge Publishing
Appendix:
This is stuff that I took out becuase it sort of distracts of takes off from the main point but I want to leave in becuase it feels like relevant speculation.
Andy Warhol made a film with DeVerne Book Walter, an actor. However, in the film Bookwalter is not acting, he is in fact getting a blow job from a university professor. The medium of film is easy to define as post-modern because as a medium is records something that has already happened and reproduces it for the masses. There is no truth to materials and as an art form it is already historical.
