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29


THE SHADOW OF PM


As a major exhibition on post modernism opens at the V&A Paul Greenhalgh asks whether it was the last style while overleaf Terry Farrell writes about the continuing importance of its ideas to him


POST MODERNISM HAS BEEN over for some time now, although unlike Charles Jencks’ famous pinpointing of the exact moment of the death of modernism, it seems to have no exact moment of demise. It wasn’t blown up: it just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. The sense of revolt, I think,


came from the destabilisation of the established idea of style. Post modernism was a grand debate about the role of style in the world. Style had been the glue that held the Western visual tradition together, that gave substance and direction to the Western continuum. We had carved our history


into styles; it was our signifier of civilisation, and here we were, opposing the latest legitimacy, the International Style, with stacks of tartan and Formica. The hegemonic logic that tied the Parthenon to the Villa Savoye was being challenged, and suddenly it looked less logical. The International Style


had blanketed the planet, presenting a Western vision of life to millions. Post modernism challenged it, and its intellectual ethos, aiming for variegation, complexity, difference and resistance to the reductive, specialised logic of the age of progress. It was a debate about the social, economic, political and aesthetic role of style in modern society. As such post modernism was not ‘post’ at all, but part of the struggle inside the parameters of modernism. The question now is: was


the post modern debate the last possible one within the modernist canon to be able to deal with style, and did it


RIBA JOURNAL : SEPTEMBER 2011


bring a phase of modernity to an end? I think the answer to both is yes. The post modern debate was the last grand style debate, and perhaps it was the last possible historical moment at which style could command such scale of meaning and significance. Style concerns


communication. It unites a community and differentiates it from others; it divides us into periods; separates young and old, formal and informal. Style is the means by which a culture recognises itself. The duration and spread


of a style relates directly to the speed of communication at the time. The modern age


saw radical developments in communication; and so styles emerged, succeeded, disseminated and disappeared more quickly. Critics saw the speedy spread of Art Nouveau – whose proponents used advertising, mass-marketing and mass-retail outlets – as antithetical to the notion of style. It lasted a mere 17 years. Styles either come into


existence organically or are consciously invented. This duality across the visual arts was pronounced through the modern period, from the early Enlightenment onward, and has been characterised by a number of oppositions: anthropological /ideological,


Part of the last great style debate? Charles Moore & Urban Innovations Group (with Perez Associates), Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans from 1976-9.


authentic/inauthentic, vernacular/cosmopolitan. The quintessentially invented and ideological International Style lasted longer than any other in the modern age, and almost made the utopian shift from an artificial to a natural style. But ubiquity is not enough


to naturalise a style: it needs also to be routinely embraced by the masses, and it never was. But it was embedded so powerfully in the cultural and economic power structure of the Western world that it proliferated via ever- developing communications systems, rather than falling victim to them. It staved off the inevitable cycle of decline. In fact, the very idea of


natural and artificial styles has ceased to exist: we live in a world in which a homogenous but spectacularly fragmented idiom dominates all our production, a universal, disparate vernacular in which imagery flashes up and vanishes increasingly quickly. Style is dislocated from the social, economic and political power that gave it meaning through the modern age. Perhaps post modernism


will prove to be the last great intellectual struggle committed to the idea of style as a vehicle for modernity, and a signifier of civilisation. The next phase of modernity has begun, and it has nothing to do with style. n


Paul Greenhalgh is director of the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia Edited extract from Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, V&A Publishing, Edited by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt


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