When Was Postmodernism?

Abstract

gathered at the International Center for Contemporary Art for the Bucharest meeting of Cafe Europa were supposed to discuss The Flavor of Postmodernism, and as one might expect from a highly diverse and polyglot group, postmodernism seemed to have almost as many flavors as Baskin-Robbins. But the speakers and respondents spent far less time discussing what postmodernism was than when it happened. In fact, no one seriously disagreed with the notion that postmodernism is a thing of the past. Chris Keulemans, the youngest participant, said that the topic made him nostalgic for the bookstore discussions he remembered from the Amsterdam of the 1980s. (And on the flight back to the U.S., the thirtyish woman seated next to me, director of adult education at the Chicago Art Institute, asked, Are people still talking about that?) Several Romanians agreed that the term described for them a state of mind and a kind of writing that subverted official communist esthetics by avoiding politics, overt commitment, and formal closure. Antonje Zalica, a Bosnian emigre novelist and filmmaker, dismissed the term by contrasting post with ex and remarked that concentrating on the first was like climbing a mountain backward in order to see where you'd been rather than where you were going. People from the Balkans tended to be impatient with too much emphasis on undecidability and detachment.