Postmodernism... wait, don’t run away!

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s an exhibition on at the V&A at the moment. You know, that nice building on the other side of Exhibition Road – the one that has “art” and “design” in it. If you’re a fresher, and you haven’t paid it a visit yet, that’s fair enough. I do suggest you go at some point in your next three (or four) years – it’s just across the street, and you’d be surprised at how refreshing a bit of “something that isn’t science” can be. If you’re not a fresher, and you haven’t been yet, go – if only to ogle at/try and chat up one of the fit art students taking notes at the latest exhibition (also it’s a refreshing change from Imperial).

I was at the V&A at the weekend – not for the above reasons – for their new exhibition on postmodernism. Before you stop reading this in disgust, let me just say two things: this is not a review of the exhibition, because I know next to nothing about art, and what the fuck is postmodernism? Your guess is as good as mine, mate.

Everything that modernism stands for, postmodernism wants to subvert, destroy, and turn on its head.

Maybe the exhibition could provide an answer? The main thing I got out of wandering through weirdly lit, high-ceilinged rooms for an hour and a half was this: No-one effing knows what postmodernism is.

Apparently, you can ask fifty different people who are knowledgeable about this kind of thing and you’ll get fifty different answers. Fifty different “valid” answers. It makes my physicist brain start twitching nervously; which is, apparently, the whole point. So, there’s a word describing something that everyone (read: art boffins) can relate to but that no-one can really define. Honestly, as far as intellectual abstraction and weird concepts go, quantum mechanics has nothing on postmodernism.

One way of approaching it, I’m told, is by using modernism as a starting point. Everything that modernism stands for, postmodernism wants to subvert, destroy, and turn on its head.

This was pretty evident at the exhibition, with posters, paintings, clothes and various household items that most people would call ‘weird’ but are apparently just ‘postmodern’. You can make a prefab garage with elements of classical Greek architecture, encase a turntable and some speakers in industrial concrete, or make a chair that only a one-legged dwarf would be able to fit into and call all of it postmodern.

You can also make Blade Runner, or form Kraftwerk: yep, that’s postmodern too. All the weird fashion trends in the eighties? Bizarre buildings? About five hundred weird teapots? The word you’re looking for starts with a ‘p’ and ends with an ‘n’.

I’m going to attract the ire of many artistically-inclined people here but to be honest, it seems to me that while there may be some justification for it, most artists and designers just ran out of conventional ideas, took a lot of drugs and made a bunch of weird “subversive” shit and sold it for a lot of money. Fair play to them – even though the whole thing collapsed under its own weight when people realised they were paying $50,000 for a weirdly-shaped coffee maker.

I do think some postmodernist concepts are relevant to today’s society, though. Modernism is definitely dead; there are no more ideals of machine-like perfection, no more utopias, and fast-paced art (and society) isn’t based on reason and scientific thought any more. Now, superficial style is everything, art is more about meaning than artistic skill and the things you see in galleries, like everything else, are all meant to be “consumed”.

In conclusi- wait a minute. It makes sense now: postmodernism is basically The X Factor.