Modernism & Postmodernism

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Documentary my Andrew marr - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9BdVHCuNPs

The industrial revolution brought engines, the locomotive and thus tramlines all over England, social transformation as those living outside the cities moved in, production on mass scale, change of hierarchy, protests due to decrease in available jobs, etc.

MODERNITY

The Shock of the New - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ne7Udaetg

The industrial revolution developed into the age of Modernity. 18th & 19th century, but mostly 20th in all areas of life; Industry, mass manufacture, concentrated populations, development of trade and capitalism, colonisation, science and technology, urbanisation, secularisation, mass media, division of labour, mass consumption, culture reinvention, etc. Immediacy. Progress away from the burden of tradition.

Modernism - cultural output of modernity.

Movements: cubism, surrealism, futurism, de stijl, art deco, interactional type, bauhaus, Russian constructivism, etc.

As a project it is embracing science. Rationality and progress.

Progression of art:

Impressionism (e.g. Degas)

Post-Impressionism (e.g. Cezanne)

Cubism (e.g Picasso)

Futurism (e.g. Boccioni)

Futurists experimental type was important as it pushed type forward.

Marinetti's Depeo uses screws to bind the book - functional.

Futurist architecture envisioned cities of the future, creating utopian designs, e.g. Antonio Sant'Elias.

Premodern art is decorative, beautiful and ornate, whereas modernist commercial art is very rational, functional and has rules in order for it to communicate.

Premodern commercial art:

Modern commercial art:

'High' modernism came after war, looking for change, renew, progress, cemented principles. Swiss graphic design (Switzerland weren't in the war). 

Examples include  Hoffman, Vignelli, Muller-Brockman.

Premodern architecture - Neoclassical, gothic, e.g. Well's Cathedral

Modernist architecture - rational, functional, e.g. Rietveld De Stijl's Schroder House

Modern art - experimental, abstract, new, expressive, progressive.

Modern design - functional, use of rules and principles, rational, universal, new, progressive.

People became cynical to the universalising claim of modernism, leading to postmodernism

Postmodernity

Uncertainty, pluralism, reworking, movements, no absolutes, collage of ideas, irrationality, pastiche, expressionism, choice.

https://youtu.be/5x4ntciHTXU

Industrialisation → commercialisation

consumerism & commodification of lifestyle

decolonisation

globalisation

mass communication

transportation

eclecticism/pluralism/multiculturalism

digital age

Pluralism - taking different ideas and mashing them together.

Postmodernism is hard to define because the thinking tends to abandon any notion of 'concrete definition' - what can art be?

Conceptual art, e.g. Duchamp, Hirst, etc.

Graphics, e.g. Wolfgang Weingart, Paula Scher, April Greiman

Architecture, e.g. Reno Piano, Frank Gehry

Opinions on postmodernism:

- engaging yet ironic. Styles are adopted, juxtaposed, misused and reconstructed.

- e.g. Charles Moore, Piaza D'Italia

- e.g. Jonathan Burnbrook, Bastard typeface

- can be seen to celebrate diversity, but can also be appropriation

- cultural and capital exchange

- consumption and consumerism

- Jean Baudrillard 'images don't represent anything real anymore. They are everywhere, We reference images with other images, other things we've seen, not within the context. World of media with no real meaning or substance.