Lecture six

Postmodern space and time: Retro and vintage or unorginal and old?

- We live in a "postmodern" society
- "Postmodernity" a key concept within contemporary art and design
- 'Postmodernism' cant be understod in isolation from 'modernism'

- Some theorists argue that postmodernism is merely an extension of modernism
- Zygmunt Bauman has called it "Liquid Modernism" because it is so hard to pin down

Modernism

- Was no a "period"
- Describes a wide range of texts that influence how we now think and experience the world
- Co-exsisted with other styles and concerns
- Concerned with other styles and concerns

- Concerned with "meta-narratives" ; unified explanations
- Was a direct extension of Enlightenmen thinking/philospohy

The key concept behind Enlightenment thoughts are:

- Universe is rational and can be understoof through the use of reason alone
- Truth is arrived at through empirical observation, the application of reason, and systematic doubt
- Mans experience is key to mans understanding of truth
- All life, both social and individual, can be understood and humans are no exception
- Therefore, mankind can be "engineered" in the same way as the natural world
-Mankind is progressing
- Education and the development of their rational facilities can improve a person
- Religion has no place in a rational understanding of the physical and human world

- Modernism is a cultural movement which rebelled against Victorian mores
- Modernists presented the Victorian "civilized" as greedy and warmongering (instead of being industrialized rations and cash - based economies as hypocrites (rather than christians) and as enemies of freedom and self- realisations
- Initially modernism was concerned with evidencing progression
- World war 1 had a massive impact on modernists and hence, modernism.
-Nationalism was seen to be a source of conflict

- Fine art became increasingly apolitical, avant garde and abstract art for arts sake
- Design was driven by "reason" ; radical break with preceding forms
- Was "international" or "transitiona style
- Le corbusier referred to buildings as "machines for living"
- Driven by the bauhaus - "forms follow function"


- Clothing, cloth and footwear began to be rationed in the Uk in 1941, june.
- Rationing wasnt lifted until 1949, 2 years after the end of hostilities
- 1942 - the incorporated society of London fashion designers
- Included Hardy Amies, Digby Morton, Victor Shebel, Angele Delange, Peter Norman Hartnell
- Manafacturers using the CC41 label were forbidden from using any unnecessary trimmings, extra pockets ect.
- Created 34 utility clothing designs
- The British government introduced laws designed to give weight to the utility scheme
- Made it illegal and unpatriotic to use excess material


- "The Mao Suit"
- Argueably the epitome of modernist, "form follows function"
-Modernism struggled to survive world war 2
- Its utilitarian principles were employed in the rebuilding of Western society
- Seen as unhuman and restrictive

- Term "Postmodernism" orginally used to describe an architectual style
-Reaction to the "International Style" of high modernism
- Concerned with decoration; playful
- "style over content"
- Frequent references the past, other disciplines popular culture, ect.

- Identity as "text" to be "written"
- Roland Barthes' the language of fashion
- Identity is not fixed it can be 'rewritten'
- "Intertextual"
Music Video- Christina Agularia - Aint no other man

- 50's style
- Old fashion clothes, instruements, mise en scene

- Taste is not "neutral" or natural"
- "denaturalising" material culture
- Tase is an ideological construct
- Ideology= Body of ideas or beliefs"
- Notion of 'good' and 'bad' taste linked to class system and morality
- Taste of the "masses" was of concern to social engineers and philanthropists
- Public art galleries and museums intended to "educate" the masses
- Not neutral spaces; invariably presented an ethnocentric vision of the world.
- Taste in not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first and last, and the closest trial questions to any living creature is ' What do you like?' Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are"
- John Ruskin, English critic and reformer (1819-1900

-Taste and fashion are most definatley linked
-Changes in what is considered fashionable determines ht is considered good and bad taste
- The consumption of prestige items helps establish an individuals society identity
- Consumer culture; you are what you consume
- Still very much in evidence today


-Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the lesuire class (1899) coioned the phrases:
- "conspicious consumption"
- "conspicious leisure"
-"things" have meaning beyond their function or "use" value (Marx, Capital)
-Focus of the post - Industrial, postmodern individuals excistence is the acqusition of "things" whose "symbolic exchange" values form and specific social identities (Baudrillard symbolic exchange and death) increased controversies sales
-Young black consumers now account for approx 60- 85% of Hennessy's US sales.

Taste no longer simply "trickles down"
- Styles also "trickle- up"
- Style spotters actively seek out the nex underground, "authentic" look
- Evidence of this can be found in the speed with which subcultural identifiers are turned into styles
-Disconnection of subcultural styles form their originary contexts
- eg. Punk 

- e.g hip hop
- he music industry has typically been a white dominanted one despite black subcultures being the source of many popular and powerful genre
- While there have long been black performer in the industry, black ownership of record labels started relatively recently

N.W.A- ' Fuck tha police' - FBI contacted the record label- song should not be allowed to be listened to.