"There's this expression called postmodernism," choreographer Twyla Tharp once remarked, "which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything."
Throughout my undergrad years in the late 1990s, my classmates and I seemed to do nothing but eat, sleep and breathe notions of "poststructuralist fragmentation" and "performative gender-based subjectivities." But it was Tharp's off-the-cuff quip, which I stumbled across years later in her book The Creative Habit, that best brought home the notion my shaggy student friends and I had so desperately tried and failed to grasp: postmodernism – the intellectual and artistic equivalent of anti-matter. A loud creative sucking sound. The concept that was all around us, everywhere and everything at once, and yet nowhere and nothing at all.
See? Just writing about it makes me sound all French-feminist-caught-in-a-vortex-of-paradox. Oh postmodernism, you bore and you fascinate. Above all, I kind of wish you'd go away.
It was for the reasons above that I was delighted and frustrated by turns this week while wandering around a new exhibit at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990. It's an ambitious undertaking, no question, the notion of summing up two decades of cutting-edge art, design, fashion, architecture, film and music, but that's what a sprawling and eclectic institution like the V&A is for.
I took my Dutch friend, Marthe, a gypsy artist who speaks in philosophical haiku and subsists on figs and thin cigarettes. Entering the exhibit, we were confronted first with a model of Italian furniture designer Alessandro Mendini's burning chair. In front of us is a spare, white, modernist throne, and behind it images of an identical model's 1975 immolation on a beach. It is a symbol, we are informed, of the end of modernity in all its clean, utopian ideals.
Marthe frowns and shifts from one scuffed black ballet flat to the other. "It's a bit uninspiring, no?" she says. Which is, of course, exactly the point.
Further evidence of the destruction of meaning, the dissolution of culture: images of the dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe, a public-housing project in St. Louis, Mo., which had been created by minimalist architect Minoru Yamasaki. Constructed amid the high hopes of the postwar boom, by the late sixties the project has slipped into poverty, despair and general ghetto un-fabulousness. Its dramatic and well-documented demolition in 1972 is considered by most architectural critics to mark precisely the moment modernism died.
Yamasaki's more famous yet similarly ill-fated project was the World Trade Center. The poor man is perhaps less an architect, I think, than a designer of spectacular disposable bookends; exploding pinatas of glass, steel and hope, to be detonated at the beginning and end of an era.
So, after the obliteration of idealism and rational thought, what's left to say? Apparently quite a lot, starting with this mixed-up assembly of random stuff. What we think of as eclecticism, the French call something fancier: bricolage. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the term and subsequently every pomo collage artist, sculptor and architect jumped on it, making buildings with bent angles and deconstructed lines (Frank Ghery) and films of erratic, ecstatic found footage (Derek Jarman).
"My world is in fragments, smashed to pieces, I doubt I will ever put them back together," Jarman said, an observation that describes both the subject and form (spliced-together Super-8 images) of his early work. This disintegration of boundaries, the puncturing of the membrane between the outside and inside of things, is, I think, maybe a clue, to what this exhibit might actually be about. I put this to Marthe and she shrugs her skinny shoulders. "Perhaps you are correct," she says. "I'm going outside for a cigarette."
In all, the exhibit is a crazy collage of high and low, a mass of contradictions. It's a stroll down the seedy back alley of late-20th-century culture. But is postmodernity really over? And if so, what are we left with now?
Standing outside the museum, Marthe smokes while I check Facebook on my phone. Several people have reposted a picture. It's an image of a young man in a bow tie holding a street sign that reads "The Beginning is Near." I show the image to Marthe and she smiles silently and nods.
Postmodernism, you were fun while you lasted, but the new era has begun.