“Postmodernism: Style and
Subversion, 1970-1990”
Paul Atkinson

This is a daunting prospect: to review an exhibition on what might
be considered the most slippery, indefinable “movement”—one
that crosses not only design’s disciplinary boundaries, but also all
aspects of creative endeavor. It is an “ism” which manifests itself
differently in every field of practice, and as soon as it looks as if it
has final y been tied down, wriggles free once more.

But if writing a review is daunting, how must it have felt to
curate this major exhibition? The opening of “Postmodernism:
Style and Subversion, 1970-1990” at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London (September 24, 2011-January 15, 2012) attracted
a lot of media attention, at least in the UK—certainly more than
was written for previous V&A shows covering major art and
design movements. And this question of curating dominated the
majority of articles. One reviewer thought it “a risky curatorial
undertaking,”1 and even the curators themselves admit it could be
seen as “a fool’s errand.”2

The covering of Postmodernism fol ows a logical trajectory
of movements that the V&A has addressed in recent years: Art
Nouveau: 1890-1914 (2000), Art Deco: 1910-1939 (2003), Modernism:
Designing a New World (2006), Cold War Modern: Design 1945-
1970 (2008). However, each of these movements is perhaps more
definable with respect to its origins, scope, and intentions than
postmodernism. Where to start? Where to end? The show is delib-
erately framed within a tightly defined 20-year period, even
though its starting point is still hugely debated (despite Charles
Jencks’s desperate attempts to define a single point), and its end—
even to the point of asking if it ever will end—is equal y ques-
tioned. We can no longer go back to the grand narrative of a
single style, not after Postmodernism has sucked the ideology out
of modernism and spat it back out as just one more stylistic possi-
bility in a world where anything now goes. Hence, the clarity of
1 Adrian Searle, “Postmodernism as More
hindsight needed to accurately critique postmodernism is perhaps
Than Ironic Teapots,” The Guardian,
not yet available.
September 21, 2011, 15.

Spread throughout three large rooms and split into
2 Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt (Eds,),
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion,
discrete sections, the show begins, as might be expected, with an
1970-1990 (London: V&A Publishing,
attempt to explore the roots of and background to postmodernism,
2011), 9.
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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singling out 1960s Italy, and the Janus references by Ettore Sottsass
and Alessandro Mendini to ancient and popular culture. The
accompanying col ection of artifacts includes teapots that resem-
ble Aztec temples and 1950s jel y-molds. These are immediately
juxtaposed with Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Stephen
Izenour’s 1972 take on the ultimate postmodern city in their book
Learning from Las Vegas, where they reveled in the “messy vitality
over obvious unity” seen in a crowded city of semiotic signs
designed to be read at 35mph.

Throughout the exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subver-
sion tries to define its subject to the viewer through such diverse
comparisons, but it also delights in providing numerous, some-
times opaque and often conflicting explanatory statements at
different stages. The opening gambit, that postmodernism is “a
broken mirror, a reflecting surface made of many fragments” is
possibly the most eloquent. Another states that postmodernism’s
central aim was “to replace a monolithic idiom with a plurality of
competing ideas and styles.” The exhibition certainly reflects this
attitude, making it a disjointed experience. But trying to make
sense of so many disparate pieces is to miss the point: Postmod-
ernism is an attitude more than an easily definable style.

Certain elements of the exhibition could have been readily
predicted. Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian vision of future society,
Blade Runner, takes center stage of the section “Apocalypse Then,”
looping the opening scene of a slow aerial cruise over a cramped
and shambolic Los Angeles of 2019. These images are screened
over pieces that include Danny Lane’s glass chair (1988) and Ron
Arad’s concrete stereo (1983), both looking as if they were created
from post-holocaust rubble.

Emblematic Formica furniture by Sottsass and geometric
teapots by Peter Shire front the section cal ed “New Wave,” repre-
senting the point at which “What had begun as a radical fringe
movement became the dominant look of the “designer decade.”
Here, Memphis, the radical Italian design and architecture col ec-
tive conceived by Ettore Sottsass in the early 1980s, moved from
the use of everyday modern materials to luxury materials. The
turning point is presented as an anti-establishment sell out—
“subversion with commercial appeal.” But how can one “sell
out” when anything goes? In a suitably anarchic way, Michele
De Lucchi’s pastel-painted prototype appliances still maintain
an air of simplistic, stubborn defiance against the realities of
mass production.

In comparison, elements also appear that are perhaps not as
wel -known but that nevertheless say much about the tenets of
postmodernism. Californian furniture maker Gary Knox Bennet’s
1990 “Little Aluminium Desk, Blue” is a beautiful Art Nouveau-
styled piece in ColorCore, aluminum, and wood. Pieter de
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Figure 1
Bruyne’s “Chantil y Chest” is a 1975 piece by “an early Belgian
View of the “Strike a Pose” section
innovator of pop and postmodern furniture;” the black lacquered
of the exhibition Postmodernism:
chipboard cupboard includes brightly colored diagonal decoration
Style and Subversion 1970-1990,
that “violently appropriates” a section of a nineteenth century cab-
2011 © V&A Images.
inet, creating “a layering of present and past, deepened by the fact
that the violated cabinet was already a historicist copy of a piece
of French Baroque court furniture.” In the words of Ecclesiastes,
“There is nothing new under the sun.”

In the section titled “Strike a Pose,” the exhibition moves
from design per se into popular culture—music, dance, Blade
Runner fashion—qualified with the explanation that “post-
modern performance strategies resembled those being explored
elsewhere in design. Performers deconstructed and reassembled
themselves.” Highlighting the lack or at least blurring of fixed
identity central to postmodernism, here Annie Lennox questions
gender stereotyping, David Byrne twitches inside his big suit, and
reality is stretched in the cut, pasted, and retouched images of
Grace Jones on the cover of her Island Life LP. A video plays of a
dance choreographed by Karole Armitage, which recalled ele-
ments of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Bal et. Is anything truly new?

The celebrity status of postmodern pop stars like Jones,
Lennox, and Byrne showcased here highlights the fundamental
paradox at play. The exhibition reminds us that followers like
Lady Gaga are mere shadows of leaders like Grace Jones; Devo
will only ever be a devolved Kraftwerk. In a world where standing
out from the crowd is essential, such is the fate of all who are not
outrageously original. As The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia once
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Figure 2
Consumer’s Rest chair by Frank Schreiner
(for Stiletto Studios), 1990. © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.
said “You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the
best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you
do.” But in a postmodern world, where we final y are aware that
so much has already been done before and that it lies around just
waiting to be picked up, repackaged, and re-presented, being truly
unique is now more difficult than ever.

Arriving at the section titled “Style Wars,” postmodernism
is no longer anti-establishment but as commodified as it can be, as
the graphics of I.D. and Face magazines vie with fine art photogra-
phy and Peter Saville’s record sleeves. And by the section,
“Money,” filthy lucre has tainted everything. Jeff Koon’s 1986 silver
bust of Louis XIV “perfectly captured the decade’s fascination
with consumer desire, wealth, and power.” Remember Wal Street?

The exhibition certainly reflects the zeitgeist of the period.
As the show draws to a close, we see further demonstrations of
such commodification. Frank Schreiner’s “Consumer’s Rest”
chair—original y formed from real salvaged shopping trol eys—
becomes a factory-produced piece. Michael Graves parodies
his own earlier “high design” work for Alessi with a Mickey
Mouse version of his Tea Kettle for the mass-market store Target,
which got to capitalize on the designer’s name. Like Pop Design,
which ran out of new references as it moved from grass roots to
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haute couture, postmodernism was no longer radical or subcul-
tural but predictably mainstream. I was struck by the similarity of
Alessandro Mendini and Kean Etro’s “Designer’s Suit,” covered in
client’s logos, to the corporate-sponsored one worn by Morgan
Spurlock when promoting his anti-branding film, The Greatest
Movie Ever Sold. In the end, it seems, such commodification is
what killed postmodernism, turning political statements into
profit. The “Architect’s Collection” of high-design table pieces
for Swid Powell was a financial disaster, and in response, designer
and critic Stanley Tigerman cal ed its failure a signal of “the end
of the whole goddamn thing, the end of Swid Powell, the end
of Postmodernism.”

The book accompanying the exhibition is, as usual with
publications from the V&A, a thing of beauty. Edited by the
curators, Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, it provides the much-
needed, in-depth contextual critique that would be too much to
take in at the exhibition itself. Their major introductory text
covers and justifies in detail the main arguments underpinning
the exhibition, and fol owing it are 40 insightful essays by some
of today’s best writers on design, including scholars, designers,
and celebrities. These essays cover every aspect of postmodernism
that emerges in the exhibition, including architecture, furniture
and product design, fashion, film and performance, and graphic
design, among others, and they place the movement in a far wider
global perspective.

If the role of an exhibition such as this is to excite, question,
and inspire, then Postmodernism: Style and Subversion achieves its
purpose exceedingly wel . If, on the other hand, the goal is to edu-
cate a public unaware of the intricacies of this “most elusive of
genres,”3 then I’m not convinced that a visitor would be much the
wiser after seeing this show. But then, rather than blaming any
shortcomings of the exhibition, this can be put down to the very
nature of postmodernism itself. As one critic put it, the exhibition
covers a “recent cultural past that has, almost without us noticing,
gone from cutting edge to museum.”4 (Of course, one could argue
that most of the pieces were perhaps designed as museum pieces
in the first place, rather than as serious consumer goods.) When I
asked Glenn Adamson at a conference a few years ago how he
intended to end the exhibition, given its subject, he was evasive:
“You’l have to come and see it,” he said. The end of the exhibition,
3 Tim Adams, “It was a late-20th-century
as it turns out, is marked with the question, “Why can’t we be our-
buzzword. But what was postmodernism
selves like we were yesterday?” as a New Order video for Bizarre
really all about?” The Observer,
Love Triangle plays along—supposedly reflecting the “permissive,
September 25, 2011, 11.
fluid, and hyper-commodified situation of design today.” Final y,
4 Hari Kunzru, “Signs of the Times,” The
Saturday Guardian, September 17, 2011,
we are presented with the truism: “Like it or not, we are all post-
Review sec., 18.
modern now.”
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