Teaching Pynchon not PoMo

[David Morris]

The quote below frames "coherent" PoMo as responses to economic forces.  That
is not how most architects would see it.  PoMo in architecture was a reaction
against the doctinairism and asceticism of a canonized modernism.  It's rules
were just begging to be broken and ridiculed.

Having overindulged in flights of PoMo fancy, a neo-modernist mood is now
seeping back into the movements of architecture.

David Morris

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i37/37b00401.htm

"Postmodernity is extraordinarily diffuse, ranging from A.T.M.'s to MTV.
Nevertheless, in retrospect, it is no surprise that the most coherent
manifestoes of postmodernism in the 1970's and early 80's concentrated on
architecture, the art form most sensitive to large-scale economic
transformations. A distinct postmodern style can be seen in architecture,
derived from a turning away from uniform urban planning and those rectangular
steel-and-glass skyscrapers in the style of Le Corbusier. 

There's a similarly distinct postmodernism in the visual arts, not only in the
break between the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism and the fun and
games of Pop Art, but also in the wider sense of what happened to modernism
once its favorite myth of the lone avant-garde artist ran up against the
phenomenon of corporate trustees who liked having de Koonings and Rothkos in
the company boardroom. When abstract artists like Robert Motherwell are feted
in major museum shows underwritten by I.B.M. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, surely
something has happened to modernist art that modernism itself can't quite
account for. If postmodernism is widely considered to be the order of the day
in architecture and the fine arts, it's precisely because we can clearly see
the imprint of contemporary economics on contemporary practices."

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