Week NIne

Introduction

The following chapter was simply about post modernism. It signaled drastic changes in how the average American saw the society around him or her. This was an approach that was very different as compared to earlier movements such as the Renaissance or the Pop, Protest Era. Most scholars would agree that modernism began as early as in the late 19th century and continued to be a dominant cultural force all the way up until the 20^th century. Like all movements, modernism comprised and was composed of many competing individual directions and is impossible to define as a discrete unity or totality. It was recognized by its lively pastiche sensibility, its absorption of retro and techno motifs. Retro is a term that is used to describe, denote or classify culturally outdated or aged trends, modes, or fashions, from the overall postmodern past. But as time moved on have become functionally or superficially the norm once again. The use of "retro" style iconography and imagery interjected into American postmodern art, advertising, mass media, etc. has occurred from around the time of the U.S. Industrial Revolution to present day. It was also at this time that subcultures such as punk, beach culture, heavy metal and also grunge groups began to form and develop. They sought to disregard historical conditions and defined they ways of life in a different manner and tone.

It was during the late 1970’s and the 1980’s However, its chief general characteristics are often thought to include an emphasis on "radical aesthetics, technical experimentation, spatial or rhythmic, rather than chronological form, [and] self-conscious reflexiveness" as well as the search for authenticity in human relations, abstraction in art, and utopian striving. These characteristics are normally lacking in postmodernism or are treated as objects of irony. New Designers sought to disregard historical conditions and defined they ways of life in a different manner and tone, especially that of the International Style. Individuals that played a major role in this movement included April Greiman, Paula Scher, Wolfgany Weigngart, Rosmarie Tissi and Neville Brody.

Brief Boigraphy

April Greiman was a contemporary designer. She is recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool starting in the late 1970’s, for introducing the new wave. Her work evolved from her graduate education at Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland. As a student of Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart in the early 1970s, Greiman was not only influenced by the International Style, but also by Weingart’s introduction to the style later to become known as New Wave, an aesthetic less reliant on the Modernist heritage. Greiman is credited with establishing the New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers.

Reflection

The International style was a major architectural style of the 1920s and 1930s. The term usually refers to the buildings and architects of the formative decades of Modernism, before World War II. The term had its origin from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson written to record the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1932 which identified, categorized and expanded upon characteristics common to Modernism across the world. As a result, the focus was more on the stylistic aspects of Modernism. Hitchcock's and Johnson's aims were to define a style of the time, which would encapsulate this modern architecture. They identified three different principles: the expression of volume rather than mass, balance rather than preconceived symmetry and the expulsion of applied ornament. Everything seemed to be pushed to the extreme.All the works which were displayed as part of the exhibition were carefully selected, as only works which strictly followed the set of rules were displayed. Previous uses of the term in the same context can be attributed to Walter Gropes in Internationale Architektur, and Ludwig Hilberseimer in Internationale neue Baukunst

Postmodernism literally means the period after the modernist movement. While "modern" mean the present or futuristic. The movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, and design, as well as in marketing and business and the interpretation of history, law and culture in the late 20th century. Postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, which was the basis of the attempt to describe a condition, or a state of being, or something concerned with changes to institutions and conditions as postmodernity. In other words, postmodernism is the "cultural and intellectual phenomenon", especially since the 1920s' new movements in the arts, while post modernity focuses on social and political outworking and innovations globally, especially since the 1960s in the West.

Summary

Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been assimilated into mainstream culture. The basic features of what we now call postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of Jorge Luis Borges However, most scholars today would agree that postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s. Since then, postmodernism has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture and philosophy. Salient features of postmodernism are normally thought to include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards the grand narratives of Western culture, a preference for the virtual at the expense of the real, and a “waning of affect” on the part of the subject, who is caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia.

Since the late 1990s there has been a widespread feeling both in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism has gone out of fashion. However, there have been few formal attempts to define and name the epoch succeeding postmodernism, and none of the proposed designations has yet become part of mainstream usage.