Review: Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990

Abstract

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 . Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 24 September 2011–15 January 2012. In his 1994 essay “The Generic City,” Rem Koolhaas wrote: > Postmodernism is the only movement that has succeeded in connecting the practice of architecture with the practice of panic. Postmodernism is not a doctrine based on a highly civilized reading of architectural history but a method, a mutation in architectural practice that produces results fast enough to keep pace with the Generic City’s development. Instead of consciousness, as its original inventors may have hoped, it creates a new unconscious. It is modernization’s little helper.1 This remains perhaps the only really insightful thing ever written on the subject of architectural postmodernism—unless, that is, one also includes the statement from around the same date by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck—an arch critic—when he described postmodernism generally as a meaningless concept “used by blind people who don’t know what’s going on.”2 There was certainly a sense of both of these tendencies—panic and blindness—in the 2011 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the subject of postmodernism. If, as Manfredo Tafuri declared, the deeper function of bourgeois art is “to ward off anguish,” then the visitor could see that anguish bleeding from its very heart in this show.3 Rooms were stuffed full of furniture, clothes, film clips, pop videos, and everything else in an effort to convey the notion of a populist, exuberant, diverse, ironically low-art approach rooted in a feeling of super-abundance. The problem, of course, is that the period being covered by the V&A show, from 1970 to 1990, felt nothing like that back then. Indeed, it now appears in retrospect to have been a relatively homogenous era in terms of urban culture in Western capitalist countries, certainly when compared to globalized conditions today. It was also notable that the architectural exhibits in the V&A exhibition—including the classic …