"Postmodernism" at the V & A.
Postmodernism is a singularly slippery term and there is still much argument about its meaning and application. What was the word coined to describe? A style? A movement? A period of history? An intellectual attitude? A little bit of all of those things, or none at all? The V&A’s new exhibition, a vast and thoroughly sense-stunning display encompassing pretty much all the art forms and entitled "Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990", raises all of those questions once again. Anyone entering its labyrinth would be advised to bring their own thread.
Insofar as postmodernism was ever truly a style, it was one born out of a spirit of rejection – a rejection of the values that modernism itself was presumed to stand for. So if modernism represented purity, clarity, singleness of purpose and a belief in progress, postmodernism embraced confusion and plurality. The clearest expressions of this were to be found in architecture and design.
A building such as the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie of 1977-84, by James Stirling & Michael Wilford & Associates, was exemplary of the trend: spatially disorientating and stylistically eclectic, formed from a bewildering collage of pastiche elements drawn from the architectural vocabularies of the Greek, Roman and Egyptian past, combined with high-tech detailing including a glass curtain wall and garishly green rubber floors.
So too were the Milanese designs of Ettore Sottsass, leader of the Memphis group. His Casablanca sideboard was a riotously colourful, theatrically exuberant riposte to the pared-down, form-follows-function aesthetic of high modernist design: a hopelessly impractical object, with its sloping, open-ended bookshelves, brandished like the arms and legs of some strange computer-game biomorph, clad entirely in brightly coloured plastic laminate. Design need not be serious, Sottsass proclaimed; it need not strive for profundity. Playfulness is allowed. Superficiality can be...
