FROM: Jere Paul Surber. 1998.

Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical

Modernism and postmodernism are terms that usually refer to large-scale historical and
cultural trends, including various theoretical or philosophical views as well as developments
in the visual arts, architecture, literature, politics, the media, technology, and so forth. More
specifically, modernism has often been employed both in a historical sense, to indicate the
period commencing with the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century and continuing into
our own time, and in an aesthetic sense, to refer to a particular movement in the arts beginning
in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and continuing at least through World War II.
Correspondingly, postmodernism has been used to signify both an alleged set of large-scale
historical and cultural transformations thought to characterize the period beginning sometime
after World War II as well as a more specific aesthetic reaction, especially in the visual arts,
architecture, and literature, against the modernist aesthetic, which dominated much cultural
production of the first half of the twentieth century.

FROM: Chilvers, Ian. 1999. A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford: Oxford

Postmodernism. A term that has been used in a broad and diffuse way, with reference to a
wide range of cultural phenomena, to characterize a move away--beginning in about 1960--
from the highbrow seriousness of *modernism in favour of a more eclectic and populist
approach to creativity; according to one of the leading writers on the subject, 'Post-
Modernism is fundamentally the eclectic mixture of any tradition with that of its immediate
past: it is both the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence' ( Charles Jencks , What
is Post-Modernism?, 1986). The word came into common use in the 1970s and has featured
prominently in discussions of contemporary art, on both an academic and a journalistic level,
since about 1980. It has been employed both as a stylistic term (one can speak of Postmodern
paintings or films) and as a period designation (the Postmodern age), but there has been much
disagreement about how it should be used and even about whether it is worth using at all (as
modernism is in itself a difficult concept, is it hard to be clear about the ways in which
Postmodernism can be regarded as a development from it, and some writers even choose to
refer to Postmodernisms). The diversity that is inherent to the concept of Postmodernism
makes it particularly resistant to definition or summary, but Chris Baldick makes a brilliant
attempt in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms ( 1990): 'it is applied to a cultural
condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a
superabundance of disconnected images and styles--most noticeably in television, advertising,
commercial design, and pop video. In this sense . . . postmodernity is said to be a culture of
fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous
superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning,
originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty
signals . . . in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a
meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist
greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed
or flippant indifference, favouring self-consciously "depthless" works . . . those who most
often use it [the term] tend to welcome "the postmodern" as a liberation from the hierarchy of
"high" and "low" cultures; while sceptics

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(sometimes dismissively referring to the postmodern enthusiasts as "posties") regard the term
as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism
and its moral vacuity.'

The term was evidently first used by the Spanish literary critic Federico de Onís in his
Antología de la poesía española e hispano- americana, 1882-1932 ( 1934) and soon
afterwards by the British historian Arnold Toynbee in his multi-volume work A Study of
History (the part in which it appears was written in 1938 but not published until 1947).
Toynbee used the word in a largely negative sense. He thought the Postmodern age began in
about 1875 and was characterized by the decline in Christianity, capitalism, individualism,
and the influence of the West. After Toynbee, the word appeared sporadically for the next two
decades, mainly in literary contexts, and it was introduced to serious discussion of the visual
arts by Nikolaus Pevsner ( 1902-83) during the 1960s. Pevsner used it in connection with
architecture, and the writer chiefly responsible for popularizing it in English is the Anglo-
American architectural historian Charles Jencks ( 1939- ), author of The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture ( 1975) and other books on the subject. Jencks used the term to describe
a reaction against the austere, rational, clean-cut International Modern Style (see MODERN
MOVEMENT) in favour of brash eclecticism, and it is in this sense that Postmodernism as a
style has its clearest meaning. Postmodern architects returned to regional and traditional
sources, introducing colour and ornament, often in, a 'jokey' manner. One of the best known
among them, the American Robert Venturi ( 1925- ), wrote that he liked 'elements which are
hybrid rather than pure' and preferred 'messy vitality' to 'obvious unity'.

Outside architecture it is usually less easy to categorize works as Postmodernist, but the word
is often applied to paintings and sculpture that similarly blend disparate styles and make
knowing cultural references, often in an ironic way. *Pop art, for example, has been
retrospectively labelled Postmodernist, and there is indeed a kinship in the way it emphasized
style and surface and blurred the distinction between high art and popular culture. More
recently, the paintings that have been described as Postmodernist include the pseudo-classical
works of the British artist Stephen McKenna ( 1939- ) and of the Italian Carlo Maria Mariani
(see PITTURA COLTA), as well as Peter *Blake The Meeting or Have a Nice Day Mr
Hockney (Tate Gallery, London, 1981-3), a playful reworking of a picture by the 19th-
century French painter Gustave Courbet, showing Blake, David *Hockney, and Howard
*
Hodgkin as the main protagonists. Other works that have been labelled Postmodernist range
from pop songs by Madonna to novels by Salman Rushdie to films such as Jean- Jacques
Beineix's Diva ( 1981), which uses elements of plot, setting, and character from several
different cinematic genres. More broadly, some critics believe that Postmodernism pervades
the whole of contemporary Western society; they argue that in a world dominated by
technology and the mass media, culture inevitably becomes superficial and self-referential.

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FROM: Chilvers, Ian. 1999. A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford.: Oxford