The Present started with Postmodernism, says Kolja Reichert and Eva Kraus, curators of the current exhibition Everything at Once Postmodernity 1967-1992 running until January 28th at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (Germany).
Unfortunately, I could not get there to see the show, but I did watch the 13 hours of incredibly interesting symposium they organized in parallel (you can watch it on youtube) and which title was: Post Postmodernism: a Map for the present. I enjoyed it so much that I am making a little opinion piece – not on the show for obvious reasons – but on the symposium, encouraging everybody to go watch it, if you are tired of how boring and dumb movie streaming platforms are getting. Here you have 13 hours of intelligent fun (or 12h… you´ll understand why later 😊)
There are two ways of interpreting the title of this symposium. First, interpreting POST POST as a repetition, seen as the legacy of Postmodernism today, and we can see this in all the young artists that were invited here, whose work takes on previous themes of the first generation postmoderns. In these young artists´ work, such as Studio Yukiko (graphic design collective who designed the catalogue), Henrike Naumann (1984), Simon Denny (1982) or Noah Barker (1991), we find a very well understood rebellious ethos and the spirit of the first generation, as well as some formal similarities.
A second approach, taken by, for example Naumann in her lecture, is to posit POST as AFTER, hence implying “After Postmodernism”, as the title of her talk reads:
What comes after Postmodernism?
Postmodernism, for some reason, is still controversial. As political science professor Nikita Dhawan, quoting Foucault, says: “What are we calling Postmodernism? I am not up to speed” (very ironically implying already back then, that what some are calling postmodern, it is just not so what the originators of these new ideas meant with their work). A great example of this is the very shameful talk of Columbia professor Martin Reinhold. But I will come back to him later.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had the same negative reactions towards what they saw coming in the 80s in architecture, after almost two decades developing their pioneering work. Bob even started to say ironcally, quoting the Mc Carthy witch hunt trials, “I am not now, and never have been a postmodernist, and I unequivocally disavow fatherhood of this architectural movement.”
And even star-graphic designer Neville Brody (1957), who designed this exhibition and the Postmodern 80s iconic magazine The Face (among so many other things), feels uncomfortable with it! As he said during the panel where he was invited...
Why do the pioneers of this movement feel so upset about being called Postmodernists, unlike the younger generations who have no problem with the term? It is because something very traumatic happened to that first generation back then, where their work was misinterpreted and misused by the wrong actors.
For the past decade or so, there has been a reassessment of Postmodernism with several exhibitions, starting with the V&A Museum one in 2011, Style and Subversion: 1970-1990 curated by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, Sylvia Lavin´s show at the Canadian Center for Architecture in 2018 Architecture itself and other Postmodern Myths, several monographic exhibitions on Memphis (2016-17 Less is a Bore at KAI10 Dusseldorf in 2016-17), Sottsass at the MET in 2017 curated by Christian Larsen and at the Triennale in Milan in 2018 curated by Barbara Radice, Hans Hollein shows in 2016 and recently again Hollein Calling curated by Lorenzo De Chiffre, Benni Eder, Theresa Krenn in 2023 in Architekturzentrum Wien (Austria), etc etc
But it is maybe this one on Postmodernism at the Bundeskunsthalle, curated by Kolja Reichert and Eva Kraus, that seems to aim better at the heart of the matter and the polemics -- stablishing a bridge with the present -- by putting forward the real influence that it is having among younger generations. What and who is influencing the present is absolulutey revealing. And let me tell you already, it is not Philip Johnson 😊.
If the other shows were more like an archive of themes and styles, the show at Bonn, amplified with this symposium, has a radical, yet very pertinent main thesis: THE PRESENT STARTED WITH POSTMODERNISM. And we can see this reality in the young people invited here, who are totally embracing it and living it. None of the other shows included the present generation (only the recent 2023 Hollein exhibition did, which was also so revealing).
This exhibition and the symposium are very important precisely for that, they help us understand, postmodernism first, and then our current strange times – moving away from only a historical survey. And the presentation that was for me the most relevant in doing so was precisely Nikita Dhawan´s lecture called EXISTENTIAL HICCUPS: AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND TRUTH.
Dhawan (1972), whose work analyses the ambivalent legacy of the European Enlightenment for the post-colonial world, seeking to pursue an alternative postcolonial-queer-feminist history of ideas, clearly understands that it is the Postmodern era which gives rise to the arena where these ideas appear and develop.
There is a tendency of certain people, I have myself observed and written about, which I call Postmodernism deniers. One of them was invited to lecture here, and it was phenomenal to actually see him in action. It was much worse than I had imagined 😊. This is of course scholar Martin Reinhold from Columbia University – the temple of Modernism. I wrote a whole article for DAMn magazine on the occasion of Sylvia Lavin´s Postmodern show at the CCA in 2018, where I also reviewed his book (which I found in the CCA´s bookstore after the show) “The Ghost of Modernism” which if you want, you can read in this link:
But since, I have found many other characters invested in this same project. They claim modernism runs throughout the XXth century, and postmodernism is a side note or worse, the return of fascism from which modernism is going to save us all.
It is a funny idea, since postmodernism was born as a reaction to the barbarisms of the modern era, which culminated in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings.
As Nikita (much better than I can ever do) well explained, it is in fact just the opposite. And some slides shown by Kolja in the symposium reflected exactly this. They read: “Postmodernism as scapegoat” and “Postmodernism as scarecrow.”
The return of fascism we are witnessing in this beginning of the XXIst century backs itself in a modernist agenda, whose actors are not nations but global corporate monopolies and communication technologies´ giants as Google and Facebook (to name the worse), who are consistently and consciously stripping us all of our democratic rights to privacy and self-determination.
The Golden era of corporate power was indeed the modern era, brought about by the Industrial Revolution – that can be paralleled to the Digital Revolution of the Information age.
That is not to say that, at first, the modern movement was a totalitarian enterprise. Quite the contrary. Ford wanted to bring to the masses the comfort and privilege only the wealthy classes enjoyed until then. Le Corbusier and the likes, wanted to use industry to better the life of people, by changing the terrible conditions of housing of the working classes in cities, almost slums, which had no running water in many cases or the minimum hygiene principles we now take for granted.
Industrial innovation was seen as capable to bring all that change by lowering the costs of production and manufacture, and by the inventions of products and systems that this new revolution made possible.
But maybe it´s because humans are greedy by nature, and power and accumulation of wealth corrupts so much, but instead of bettering the lives of people, massive fortunes were made by relocating and segregating people, and building cheaper and uglier, which then made the lives of people actually worse. What Thomas Heatherwick calls in his 2023 book HUMANISE “The hundred-year catastrophe.” Inadvertently, Thomas has written a postmodern manifesto 😊
This book is interesting, because he is just rehashing early Postmodern ideas, without confessing it. I think he is also a Postmodern Denier 😊 But he can´t help himself but to use those ideas, because they are the key to the present, as this symposium says, and to the future he believes 😊.
He thinks he has discovered the wheel! 😊 His whole thesis is that architecture of the XXth century is boring “How the cult of boring took over the world” he says… Which is a take on Robert Venturi´s boutade : LESS IS A BORE. (I´ll come to this book in another post, because I have a lot to say).
So, what happened to the Modern Movement´s first generation was that their social ideas to better the world and society – what has been called time and again a Utopian period – got swept away by a second generation of business people, who used the style without the substance, to herald a new corporate power born out of the War Industry, especially after WWII, and to make fortunes in real estate development – the most profitable enterprise there is, as Thomas says.
WWII, also called the War at an industrial scale, was fought by Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, England and the USA – the biggest fascists dictators and empires of the late XIXth and XXth century.
When that war ended, all the dreams to better the world and the lives of people via industrialization, seemed naïve and cynical.
Communication technologies, such as the computer, developed with the war. This, coupled with post war social upheavals and the end of the British empire and decolonization movements worldwide, generated a new way of thinking that crystalized in what we call Postmodernism. Equal rights for everybody and democracy were at the forefront of this new mentality. The Civil Rights movement, feminism, queer and gender theories, post-colonialism theories, all are children of postmodernism, and we can see this in this exhibition (that I haven´t seen 😊).
In the early phase of Postmodernity – 60s and 70s – it was all about freedom and emancipation from modernist and imperialistic male-centered and white-centered narratives. And this new way of thinking saw in architecture also its representation. As James Wines showed in his lecture, Robert Venturi´s book Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture, and Venturi and Denise Scott Brown´s Learning from Las Vegas, were the first manifestos in architecture for this new era of the Information Age.
They, precisely, recognized the social concerns and virtues of the early modern period and went on to update those early ideas by giving them more maturity and depth – early modernists were sometimes quite naïve, or enamored with the novelty, indeed, as to what the machine alone could bring to humanity – and adapting them to the current times. Society had changed a lot during the first half of the XXth century, and so, updating the social contract that architecture lost during the second phase of the modern period was a necessity. It needed a more inclusive one.
This is what the early phase of postmodernism brought about.
But as the Information Age and its digital revolution took speed and strength, a new world order started to reconfigure itself, and new forms of power started to develop. Maybe it is just that economic power is alwasy right wing and conservative by nature. But a new neo-conservatism and the privatization of the common good started to create pockets of wealth around a new kind of corporate power.
It is my believe, that they are seeing themselves as a reflection of their past counterparts of the second phase of the modern movement (or even as the industrialists of the Gilded Age and their Robber Barons), who amassed enormous fortunes profiting of the new discoveries that cater to the needs of a society in transformation; but dismissing that same society altogether to maximize their profits. WWI and WWII are products of this, as well as all the XXth century fascisms. The War Industry Complex was born then, and in times of peace it went on to mutate into a civil business industry (i.e. GM built combat vehicles and Hugo Boss made the Nazi Uniforms, before being celebrated at the Guggenheim each year with a prize for young artists).
This current nostalgia for the Modern style (neo-modern, as Denise Scott Brown calls it), responds to the hidden pride of that era, and thus is trying to erase, or get revenge, from the early rebellious postmodernists who obliged them to accept a new mentality and behavior of respect of the other, that they silently despise. (My opinion of course).
As Nikita says: “Postmodernism is accused of various sins by modernists.” The postmodern project, with its pluralistic nature, is under attack precisely for its more democratic, post-colonial, gender and race equal rights´ ethos and inclusiveness. After all, the majority of owners and CEO´s of major corporations today, are still white dudes.
It is no surprise to read in Shoshanna Zuboff´s scary 2019 book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” that the new corporate order of the Information Age is also mega fascist. And curiously enough it doesn´t like Postmodernism either 😊 This is maybe why Google is hiring Postmodern denier Thomas Heatherwick (who writes a book using all early Postmodern ideas, but is faking to invent a new movement of Humanization, poor thing). While at the same time, having Google as a client, who is dehumanizing us all with its surveillance Big Brother Project. It is all very Complex and Contradictory indeed dear Bob 😊
In Architecture it gets even more messy than this, because it is true that some fascists in the XXth century loved neoclassicism (not Mussolini though, Mussolini was a visionary fascist who loved Modernists buildings already 😊). Check Martin Reinhold´s lecture to understand why old school fascists love neoclassic architecture. The more open and typical out of the book fascists today, like Trump or Putin, really embrace this classic imperial style.
But the more contemporary and newer forms of fascism, born as well with the Information Age and information technologies, and enacted by a corporate globalism, are embracing their previous Industrial golden era. Even Mies and Corbu slightly flirted with their right-wing politics (before it became too obnoxious. Both were actually rejected by them 😊).
So, if fascisms of the Modern Era looked back to an imperial splendor in the forms of neoclassicism, fascism is the Postmodern Era also looks back to their imperial splendor, which was XXth century modernism. My thesis.
So as Henrike Naumann declares in her title, what comes after postmodernism, is death, war and FASCISM.
And even if I disagree with Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, who says that Putin and Trump are postmodern fascists (sounds as an oxymoron), I would, say they are fascists of the Postmodern era (which is what he probably means anyway). But they are definitely not postmoderns 😊
In fact, Peter´s lecture is most interesting and useful. He gives a clue on how to maybe counteract and dismantle populists´ syren songs that fascism inevitably needs to arrive to power. He gives us a path to wake up the masses of zombies out of their hypnotism. And he found a technique from a British-German guy in WWII, who devised already this system to wake up Nazi followers.
Hitler gave people free radios to spread his propaganda. I was reading in Shoshana´s book why the Android phone is so much cheaper than the Iphone (same shit). While Apple earns a living selling us goods (so far), Google (who developed the Android smart phone) does it by stealing your personal information and selling it to everybody. Same reason why all the apps are free, they are built to steal as much behavioral surplus as they can. Who knew!?
The work of young artist Simon Denny deals with all this metaverse, cryptobullshit, Artificial Intelligence and digital stravangaza dystopia… Henrike Naumann in her lecture was talking about the war in Ukraine and how the contemporary art center Izolyatsia was transformed into a Russian prison where they torture people.
There was a poignant interview with a soldier from the prison talking about art. Fascists like realist painting and little landscapes. He was appalled by the “sick art” he found there! OMG poor macho man! (while sickly torturing human beings...). In another clip you see them bombing a feminist public art installation. Little macho man G.I. Joe doesn´t like or understands contemporary art, poor thing. How surprising… Violence is way too low of a frequency to be able to understand artistic expression. You need a minimum of sensibility. Violence and aggression are for the worse kind of brutes. JUST LIKE WAR IS.
And now on a funier note: the medals for the worse presentations were for the American team of Sylvia Lavin and Martin Reynhold (it´s getting scary fascist in the USA as well, and they sent them as a representation). Martin got the gold medal with Lavin coming right after.
And then there is:
As I said before, Reinhold´s whole presentation was an intentional vilification of Postmodernism (Postmodernism as Scapegoat and Scarecrow indeed) where he centered his lecture on this fascist guy, I had never heard of, called Roger Scruton (not scrotum, if you were thinking what I was thinking 😊) who wrote a book called FOOLS referring to the thinkers of the new left, such a Michel Foucault or Louis Althusser, “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands” to be precise. Maybe it is Scrotum after all.
Then he went on to show us images of some Reagan era architecture renovations in some modernist government building, who was a ridiculous neoclassical pastiche, and he called THAT Postmodern, when it was just Neoclassical (or Neo Neoclassical to stay on theme 😊).
Or Reinhold is too stupid to be in Columbia University, or Academia is taken over by corporate fascism as well. The answer may lay somewhere in between the two… It was embarrassing.
My favorite and only moment of truth in his lecture (and I will always be grateful to him for this) was when he showed us a book on Albert Speer – the Nazi architect for Hitler – with a foreword by Robert A.M. Stern. Thank you Martin 😊 I knew it!
This sums up why Robert Stern is not Postmodern. Neoclassicism is Neoclassicism. It is just not Postmodernism. And as Thomas Heatherwick says in his book, it is OK the build in a neoclassical style if you wish, it can be pretty too (he says). It is just not Postmodernism.
Philip Johnson, Stern´s mentor, was a Nazi lover as well... So, it is not surprising, his untalented pupil would embrace such ignominy as well.
(It is funny how Thomas Heatherwick only cites Philip Johnson as the only Postmodern of his book, in the only page of the 494! where he writes the term. Bofill´s WALDEN, an early postmodern example is not called postmoderm, but GREAT ARCHITECTURE! Only the AT&T building is Postmodern for him! See who sponsors these books!)
Reinhold and Heatherwich are the two sides of the Postmodern deniers coin. And I kind of prefer Reinhold... More honest. Heatherwick is fascist Google.
The silver medal for the worse lecture was for Sylvia Lavin, who is a great scholar, but who was given an assignment for the spread of Postmodern bashing propaganda. It is sad, after seeing in Montreal the great show she put together (maybe it was because it was in Canada and not in the US 😊). As I said, it is getting very fascist in the North American Academia.
(I wonder if they sent those two as a revenge for my article on Lavin´s show and Reinhold´s book !!) I have another article I wrote for DAMn magazine together with that one, which I uploaded yesterday on my website called "I am a postmodern baby." I thought to share it with this post as well:
Onto Lavin now...
Her talk was about the hammer helicopter – showing us the example the Museum of MODERN art has hanging from its ceiling. While the helicopter is a modern invention she says – from the war industry complex – this precise model and the way it is used, and specially displayed at MoMA, is a postmodern strategy, partaking in the postmodern simulacrum and spectacle theories. OK.
(Of course, using the great Museum of MODERN art as the basis of her POSTMODERN lecture, is all but a coincidence).
Then she went on to explain how artists and architects of the Postmodern era were using very cynically this war instrument. “How could they!” This included Denise Scott Brown (whom she only mentioned to trash her, criticizing her photography, her derivative Ed Ruscha´s approach and even her academic syllabus for her students! and how evil it was this urban planner who used a helicopter to look at the city from above. She had nothing good to say about her!)
Ed Rusha, whom Denise really admired indeed and took her students from UCLA (where she was hired as a teacher at the start of that university) to see him at his studio when Ed was only on his 20s probably, and even hired him I think for some of the Las Vegas stuff, was accused of a real state developer 😊 and Richard Serra and Robert Smithson were also suspicious in her talk… For Lavin, it is cynical to use a helicopter since it is a war vehicle, and of course the Vietnam war couldn´t falter… Just to tell us that the Postmodern era had also their wars! And these postmodern artists are not that pure as they think 😊
It was so grim and uncomfortable. And most of all, not that relevant… This conquest of the air she claims the helicopter brought about, isn´t ground-breaking in the least. It was completely revolutionary for the modern movement to conquer the air with the zeppelin and the airplane (who really revolutionized wars at a massive scale), and there´s a lot been written on the subject already. Modern Architecture and Urban planning is born out of this conquest of the air she claims for the helicopter.
It was a pity she failed to mention this. Le Corbusier´s scary Ville Radieuse is a product of that (and he was also on his 20s, you have to forgive him a little...) Even axonometric drawing, she claims for the helicopter period, is really a child of modernity. Think of Bauhaus and you think of axonometric drawing.
Her whole lecture was a gimmick. Denise Scott Brown did take a couple of helicopters, but she mainly travelled by bus 😊 I archived her whole 12.000 photography collection and helicopter pictures must amount to a 0.2%. And when we went to Mexico together, she insisted on having the window seat to take pictures with her iPhone.
The funniest part is when they sat young artist Noah Barker (1991), between Lavin and Reinhold, for a discussion after both their lectures, and poor guy didn´t know what to say to them 😊 He understood nothing to the arguments they were making. With reason!
😊 He had a good point, that if Lavin really wanted to talk about a war industry machine turned into a civilian commodity in the postmodern era, wouldn´t it be better to talk about the personal computer: INTERNET hello ?!? Or the smart phone I would add...
Noah´s work relates to the work of Michael Asher, artist of the postmodern period, who instead of producing objects or commodities, deals with the space of the gallery as the work of art.
I like this project where he paints the conduits of the gallery spaces in the colors of the Centre Pompidou´s expressive and visible technical conduits that come out in the street. He is another young artist, who totally understood postmodernist humor and creative strategies. Poor thing didn´t know what to do between these two simulacra people.
I am sad to write this about Lavin because she is a great scholar and thinker on her own. But it looks like she got some strange pressure (and sponsorship) to go to Germany with a Modernist agenda. Noah asked twice if the time was up already and was the only guest who ask the public if they wanted to ask something to the people on stage 😊
Luckily for the USA team, they had James Wines to restore some dignity, and his talk “ECONOMY OF MEANS” was superb, telling the truth about Postmodern ideas´inception in the US – its place of birth! As I said before, he did start showing Bob & Denise´s books and then went on to deploy postmodern strategies throughout an array of artists-architects practitioners like him, to end up illustrating those ideas in his own work with the collective SITE architecture.
The title of his lecture points out to a very important part of the Postmodern agenda: It is not about expensive things and corporate power, but about IDEAS. Something with which Thomas Heatherwick agrees with once more in his book!! He doesn´t know it, but he is such a postmodern 😊
The ensuing dialogue between Simon Denny and James was so interesting and engaging! Simon was very sweet and smart, and they both agreed they liked to make people think, more than build beautiful objects.
After the US medalists, this was such a turn and relief. Postmodern youth was incredibly rebellious! And it is so nice to see the Post Postmodern ones, just the same, and so humble and appreciative of someone like James. You could feel real generational energy passing between both and a recognition. Simon got really emotional towards the end! It was so cute 😊
A young collective from Berlin this time, also working on the new frontiere, whose lecture was fantastic as well was NEW MODELS, a media platform and community addressing the emergent effects of networked technology on culture. It is some sort of a POST POST semiotics, little children of Marshall McLuhan´s Understanding Media going darky. Cause it is going googly bligly darkly 😊
I have trouble following them, which gives me an incredible curiosity to know more about it... But it gives me a head ache every time I log into their Instagram account 😊 This lecture was so mind opening. (I am Spanish...) I need to get to their podcasts!
They shurely know what´s going on...
I don´t dare explain much more 😊 You´ll need to watch the symposium!
The panel with the Blitz Kids – in the style section – was also phenomenal (and easier... the past is easier). Very queer and, as they would say today, gender fluid. You could see Kolja Reichert, the curator (another Post Postmodern) as enchanted with them as Simon was with James. Another exchange that was moving and real.
Another great guest, who gave a lecture and appeared in several panels (with NEW MODELS among them) was the German author, music journalist and cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen, who even sang a very cool song on stage! I love his story on how he saw for the first time the postmodern style coming. It was through the local drug dealer of the club he was going to. He was the most avant-garde in terms of style he told us.
Diedrich was great everywhere... The real deal; smart, cute and humble, while mega knowledgeable and mega intelligent.
This was (and is, cause it lives online) such a great coming together of great creative people... To end, cause 13 hours is very long to comment on, the talk with the graphic designers of the show and the catalogue, young and less young to be consistent with the whole approach.
I need now to buy this catalogue, designed by another Post Postmodern young graphic design office: STUDIO YUKIKO. Such great, smart and fun work!
Two of its members were invited to a panel as well, with graphic design star from the Postmodern Era (he hated that term) Neville Brody, who designed the show´s graphics and whom I found a bit arrogant -- calling himself a modernist (modernists are actually usually more arrogant indeed) -- and sadly rejecting to be a postmodern (as I explained at the beginning), thus throwing a glass of cold water on the rest of the excited Post Postmoderns seating next to him, Kolja included, and to the event he was invited to do in the institution he was hired to work for. Not too polite I would say, given the theme of the show he worked for, but the early postmoderns like him are trauma survivors. He was cordial and intelligent, but the theme was obviously making him uncomfortable. God knows why...
The two guys of studio Yukiko (a majority female based collective) were very smart as well and their work very compelling and fun.
I have to say when English people of that generation, like Brody, reject being a Postmodern, I can understand why… After all, the beginning of the end of Postmodernism was born there with Margareth Thatcher, and thanks to Charles Jencks, who coined the term, but misunderstood everything about it. So as Foucaut was asking: “What do you call Postmodernism exactly?”
I could go on and on, but I am in page 10 already and you get picture. This was a phenomenal 13-hour symposium that I recommend to anyone interested in contemporary culture and Postmodernism. Super smart and super fun. A great array of guests young and older young (but for Martin Reinhold who is and seems to have always been so old – God knows why they keep including him in Postmodern events) and such great energy. Truth, freedom, and rebelliousness have so much energy, always, at any age.
And as the curators say and we can see in the work of the younger generation, Our Present started with Postmodernism.
So thank you for the courage of organizing such rebellious and correct assessment of what Postmodernism was and how it is the legacy of the best part of our current era, that the neofascists want so hard to obliterate.
The fight goes on !! 😊 (Suddenly some police cars with their syren blasting are driving in front of my home as I write this last sentence... See how google fascists don´t respect privacy and self determination! Go watch television instead of my computer... I don´t understand how I have become such a danger 😊 Seriously. I think intelligence threatens these sad bully antidemocratic people. IT WAS JOKE !!! No sense of fun or irony indeed Bob).
And here as the desert few images from the exhibition I sadly missed....
Yorumlar