Post-modernism
fra...@hotmail.com
means. The COD doesn't help me much.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> "Post modernism" Can someone please explain what the hell this
> means. The COD doesn't help me much.
MW says
of, relating to, or being any of several movements (as in art,
architecture, or literature) that are reactions against the
philosophy and practices of modern movements and are typically
marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques
and dates it to 1949, so use that as a gauge of what "modern" would
have meant.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |He who will not reason, is a bigot;
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |he who cannot is a fool; and he who
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |dares not is a slave.
| Sir William Drummond
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
AWILLIS957
>From: fra...@hotmail.co
>
>"Post modernism" Can someone please explain what the hell this
>means. The COD doesn't help me much.
It means what it says. It seemed for a time in the twentieth century as if art
forms had been pushed to the limit of their expressive possibilities: Picasso
was followed by abstraction, the Viennese School by Stockhausen, Ulysses by
Finnegan's Wake, Charlie Parker by Don Cherry, to give a few examples. But art
went on, and it still found ways opf breaking new ground, often by sampling
traditional forms and making a virtue of eclecticism. Examples might be Pop
Art, minimalism, New Puritanism, electronic fusion.
"Post Modernism" is no more useful as a term than any other "ism" made up by
critics, but that is what it refers to. A translation might be: "Surprise,
surprise. There's life in the old dog yet."
Albert Peasemarch.
jan_...@hotmail.com
>"Post modernism" Can someone please explain what the hell this
>means. The COD doesn't help me much.
I am rather vague on the term myself but I assume that modern referred
to the type of architecture which emerged from the Bauhous movement in
Germany before Hitler stepped on it. Mies Van de Rohe, Walter Gropius,
Le Corbusier and company. Perhaps Frank Loyd Wright in the States.
Their general philosophy had as one of its main tenets that form
followed function and also that materials should be used structurally
rather than decoratively. This did not exclude decoration altogether
as many of Wrights building's demonstrate, but naked structure
supposedly made the largest statement of form. Since the ideas started
about three quarters of a century ago, the term "modern" is not
particularly appropriate.
I. M.Pei, Minora Yamasaki, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen all designed
in this manner through the latter part of the 20th century in the
States and Nervi in Italy and many others in Spain and Mexico. This
type of design is still going on, but the post modern type of
architecture which more or less ignores structure as a main element of
exterior appearance seems to be becomig more popular. Frank Ghery who
designed the Bilbao art museum is an architect who displays forms
which are almost irrelevant to the basic structures of the building
and look almost like a random pile of rolled sheets of metal. Although
I disagree with his vision as to how a building should look, his sense
of sculpture is strong enough to make the buildings impressive and
pleasing and both artists and visitors seem to enjoy his work. The
newest skyscraper in New York City is, to me, an execrable example of
the genre where three distinct styles in the structure are shmooshed
together to make the building seem to have three different unrelated
faces.
Philip Johnson may have started the trend in his Bell Telephone
building which looks something like an oversized grandfather clock.
Jan Sand
jan_...@hotmail.com
I took a quick google at the term and discovered that, although I was
in the right ball park, I hardly left home plate. I limited my
comment to architecture and it is evidently a far reaching term to
describe the discontent in the coherence of total order put forth by
science, philosophy, and the various esthetic movements in the middle
20th century and an attempt to fragment and recombine the elements
into something more adventurous, even borrowing some of the trappings
of the more classical philosophical outlooks.
Jan Sand
Franklin C. Cacciutto
alt.postmodern
Don Phillipson
news:3d6f1807...@news.webone.com.au...
> "Post modernism" Can someone please explain what the hell this
> means. The COD doesn't help me much.
1. It originates in 20th century aesthetics
(art & architecture) to label trends and styles
of the 1960s and later (e.g. Op Art.)
2. It has been taken up by scholars in selected
humanities subjects, combining in particular:
(a) "post-Freudian" doctrines of meaning, mainly
as articulated by French scholars of linguistics;
(b) moral crusades in society, against racism,
the dominance of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant
prototype, etc.
The wild card is item 2a. Certain of Freud's writings
suggest that when we say "A is not B" what we are
"really" saying is that A is B. Cf. also
(i) Freud's observation that sometimes a cigar
is only a cigar (and not a symbol for something
else.)
(ii) New doctrines of meaning that are so highly
relativist as to suggest truth (in propositions,
science, scholarship etc.) is unreal and
impossible.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada)
dphil...@trytel.com.com.com.less2
doofus
Yes. Ultimately it is predicated on an attitude towards truth and the
independent existence of reality. Modernists of every hue, no matter
what they take to be true, will not doubt that, in principle, a claim
*can* be true. Similarly, they will tend to feel that there exists such
a thing as 'the way things are', even though we may not know exactly
what that is. This ties in with the unity of form and function in
architecture of which Jan spoke. I'm not quite sure how, but it does.
There is a transparency common to both.
Postmodernism, a contradiction in terms, is a reaction against both the
idea that a claim can be true, there are merely truth-claims, and the
idea that there exists such a thing as 'the way things are.' For the
post-modernist, there are merely representations of the way things are.
There is no such thing as acuracy or truth in the sense of
correspondence with an independently existly and truth-conditioning
reality.
In this respect, post-modernism harks back to romanticism which
questioned the classical notion of beauty as someting pure and abstract
and wanted to bring art and music down to earth and back to nature.
In fact, postmodernism is not so modern, and can be traced back to the
scepticism of the pre-socratics, who gave 'rhetoric' such a bad name.
For these people, so far as I know, discourse was not so much about
coming to understand as about persuading or influencing. Since no
understanding is more or less true, no justice absolute, no meaning
fixed, all that remains is success in life, and living with a kind of
self-coherent artistry. Nietszche was very fond of eulogizing this
tendency in Greek tragedy. He used a rejection of Socrates as a thinly
veilled attack on his arch mnemesis, that towering figure of the German
enlightenment, Immanuel Kant. Indeed Nietszche is widely thought to be
the intellectual forbear of, ehem, 'modern' post-modernism.
Of course, none of this is true, if the postmodernists are correct,
which of course they can't be, if they are correct. We need hardly
trouble ourselves if they are not correct, even by their own admission.
:-)
I do like this building in Prague, though.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~cwbosken/images/europe/prague_ghery.jpg
K1912
[...]
>Indeed Nietszche is widely thought to be
>the intellectual forbear of, ehem, 'modern' post-modernism.
Today known as post-modern post-modernism.
GrapeApe
> means. The COD doesn't help me much.
MW says
of, relating to, or being any of several movements (as in art,
architecture, or literature) that are reactions against the
philosophy and practices of modern movements and are typically
marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques >><BR><BR>
..usually in a way that is rehashing elements that may not go well together
anyway. Such as placing a mission belfrey or Doric Columns on a modern
crackerbox skyscraper.
Not that all postmodernism in any artform is bad, it is just that PostModernism
can often have a derogatory connotation due to the most frequent general
examples.
Kater Moggin
>> "Post modernism" Can someone please explain what the hell this
>> means. The COD doesn't help me much.
-- Moggin
to e-mail, remove the thorn
Feckless
> means. The COD doesn't help me much.
It means "we've run out of new ideas, so we're stealing something from the
past." The Victorians were especially adept at it, but they didn't call it
post-anything AFAIK.
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----
jan_...@hotmail.com
wrote:
I doubt that current times are any less inventive about ideas than any
other era and the restrictions on new ideas are probably less in
operation now than at any other time, since there are commercial
advantages for birthing new movements in this time of evanescent
fashions.
Jan Sand
Laura F Spira
I don't think I disagree with your view but...birthing?
--
Laura
(emulate St. George for email)
j...@radidelmex.net
> 1. It originates in 20th century aesthetics
> (art & architecture) to label trends and styles
> of the 1960s and later (e.g. Op Art.)
It seems like 'post-modern' is a fancy way of saying 'post-WWII'.