POST-MODERNIST OBJECTS: A RELATION BETWEEN THE PAST AND PRESENT

By Marilyn Zurmuehlen

Possibly, the public is most conscious of Post-Modernism in the visual arts as it is manifested in architecture. The ubiquitous gable that seems mandatory whether in new shopping center constructions or in renovations of campus and commercial buildings may be the most readily identifiable characteristic of this current style for many people. A gable, in the form of a 26-story central pyramid, is the commanding presence for viewers of the Dolphin Hotel which opened at Disney World last year. However, architect Michael Graves also engages visitors with less familiar Post-Modernist qualities. The 55 feet dolphins balanced at the ends of each wing, along with a pair of 28 ton turquoise swans atop the Swan - the Dolphin's companion hotel - are classical references to water. A tented walkway, connecting the two hotels across a lagoon, culminates in a series of columns conceived as palm trees; these forms are both emblems of contemporary Florida fantasy and appropriations from ancient Egyptian columns. Such relations between the past and present are a valued subject of Post-Modernists, as is the irony of additional double coding from juxtaposing living palm trees with their contemporary/historical embodiments. This is one instance of what an architectural critic admiringly described as Graves' "toyings with our perceptions of fantasy and reality..." (Branch, 1990, p. 87).

Nearby, Robert A.M. Stern's Yacht Club Hotel - also opened in 1990 - is a more restrained Post-Modernist appropriation of past architecture. His reinterpretation of a New England seaside resort is a veneration of earlier traditions, including rocking chairs on the veranda, and simultaneously ironical as it is incarnated in this setting. Penny McGuire (1990) suggested, "The confluence of Post-Modernism and the Walt Disney World was inevitable" (p. 4). In her view, their commonality is a "perception of architecture as a marketing tool" (p.5). Clearly, by seeking Post-Modernist architects for these hotels, the Disney corporation recognized public awareness and acceptance of this aesthetic. In turn, their presence, and associated publicity, in a popular entertainment center seems certain to enhance general awareness and likely to increase acceptance of this approach to art.

Art educators and their students are an especially interested segment of that public, and during the 1980s, they, too, increasingly were surrounded physically or indirectly immersed through TV and film images in an urban landscape of ornamentation, pastel colors, barrel-vaulted glass atriums, and classical facades with pitched roofs, as well as the familiar gables. They quickly learned to identify these characteristics as "new", and for many the label Post-Modernism was assimilated readily into their vocabularies; however, in most art education curricula this movement's origin and meanings remain obscure or unexamined.

Charles Jencks, a U.S. writer with degrees in English literature, architecture, and architectural history, has extensively defined Post-Modernism in relationship to the visual arts, especially architecture. He (1986) traced the term to Frederico De Onis' use of it in 1934 to convey a reaction to Modernism from within. Jencks noted that Amold Toynbee, in a 1947 publication, attached the label post-modern to a new historical cycle he delineated as a declining emphasis on values of individualism, capitalism, and Christianity - prevailing canons of Western cultures. Additional connotations of pluralism and world culture that were associated with Toynbee's label continue to accrue to Jenck's current definition. The term next was taken up in literary criticism, where conventionally it is not hyphenated, lhab Hassan applied it to experimentalism in the arts and avant-garde technology in architecture, trends that Jencks described not as Post-Modernist but as Late-Modern, "the continuation of Modernism in its ultra or exaggerated form" (1986, p. 10). For Jencks, Post-Modernism is "that paradoxical dualism, or double coding, which its hybrid name entails: the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence" (1986, p. 10). This double coding uses irony, ambiguity, and contradiction to allow us "to read the present in the past as much as the past in the present" (Jencks, 1987, p. 340).

Although, for Jencks, double coding is the most prevalent aspect of Post-Modernism, he distinguishes several other qualities that characterize it. Dissonant beauty or disharmonious harmony are concepts expressed in disjunctions and collision. "Oxymoron, or quick paradox, is itself a typical Post-Modern trope, and 'disharmonious harmony' recurs as often in its poetics as 'organic whole' recurs in the aesthetics of classicism and Modernism" (Jencks, 1987, p. 332). Cultural and political pluralism are manifested in radical eclecticism in architecture, and in enigmatic allegory and suggestive narrative, genres that emphasize ambiguity. Anthropomorphism and contextualism are favored tropes of Post-Modernists. The relations between the past and present is a valued subject: it risks deteriorating into mere parody, nostalgia or pastiche, but, ideally, results in anamnesis, suggested recollection, often producing a juxtaposition of related and opposed fragments. A will to meaning results in diverse and divergent content, appropriate in a pluralistic society, and in multiple meanings. Multivalence is a quality sought by Post-Modernists; Jencks (1987) explained, "If a work is resonant enough it continues to inspire unlimited readings" (p. 345). Such resonance depends on a complex relation to the past, either through anamnesis or through the displacement of conventions - tradition reinterpreted.. Consciously elaborated new rhetorical figures are employed to renew past conventions: ambiguity, double-coding, paradox, oxymoron, amplification, complexity and contradiction, irony, eclectic quotation, anamnesis, anastrophe, chiamus, ellipsis, elision, and erosion. A "return to the absent center" is one of the most recurring figures of Post-Modernism" (Jencks, 1987, p. 346). The viewer is the presence at this absent center, supplying possible interpretations that lead back to herself or himself. Readers undoubtedly will have noticed the interdependence among Jencks' defining qualities, each delineation evoking other aspects, but from a slightly different perspective, so that Jencks engages in a kind of Post-Modernist intertextuality in this writing about Post-Modernism.

A characteristic shared by quite a number of Post-Modernist architects is their enthusiasm for designing art objects that traditionally either most architects have commissioned by artists working in those media or they have delegated such choices to interior designers or their clients. Both Robert Stern and Michael Graves use symbolic motifs in their carpet designs (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 56), sometimes calling attention to the visual content in these by giving titles to them, such as Robert Stern's "Dinner at Eight." Robert Venturi is one of the architects whose dinnerware designs are reproduced by the Swid Powell ceramics company. His "Grandmother" series has graphic marks superimposed over a conventional plate motif of flowers, reinterpreting this traditional imagery (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 54). In his "Notebook" service the trope of oxymoron, or quick paradox, is evident in the visual pattern we associate with cardboard covers of school composition books; here it covers the surface of dinnerware, an unexpected context for this image. Clearly, both series may evoke anamnesis, or suggested recollection, as well. A stainless steel kettle with bird-shaped whistle, designed by Michael Graves in 1985, has been widely reproduced and marketed (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 30). He employed a whimsical irony in its multiple meanings, reinterpreting two traditions -the functional "whistling" sound used to attract our attention to boiling water in a closed kettle and the "whistling" call we associate with some birds. Here the bird "calls" with a specific message, our water is ready. Charles Jencks, in a tea and coffee service he designed, directly quotes from architectural fragments to produce individual serving pieces that embody salient aspects of columns that are a traditional feature of western architecture (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 26). Forms that we are accustomed to thinking of as supports become containers, an intentional paradox, a displacement that does not merely revive these conventional building images but reinterprets and modifies them in a new medium and function.

Certain pieces of furniture, although more often displayed than actually produced in quantity for the commercial market, have been widely reproduced photographically and have become Post-Modernist icons. Hans Hollein, who is a performance artist as well as an architect, designed the "Marilyn" sofa for Poltronova, an Italian furniture company, in 1981 (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 34). It is a prime example of multiple meanings and cultural pluralism with its references to Art Deco and to another icon of popular culture - Marilyn Monroe. By his choice of title Hollein apparently intends a double coding, inviting views to associate possible sexual fantasies about sofas with those that continue to emanate from this now nearly mythical personality, while evoking two historical periods to create a contemporary icon. Michael Graves, in the "Plaza" dressing table he designed for Memphis, also references Hollywood fantasies and Art Deco, combining subtly anthropomorphic elements that echo his architectural concerns (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 33). A series of nine machine-molded plywood chairs, designed by Robert Venturi, in 1984, are Post-Modernist icons that are readily available on the market through Knoll International (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 45). The chairs are named for the furniture styles they reference: Chippendale, Empire, Queen Anne, Art Deco, Sheraton, Art Nouveau, Biedermeier, Gothic Revival, and Hepplewaite. The ninth, titled "Black Chair," may be interpreted as signifying Modern. The surface imagery of the "Queen Anne" chair appears to be the same as that which embellishes Venturi's "Grandmother" dinnerware series, an instance of quoting himself, and perhaps, enjoying the irony while eating of sitting on images that also encircle and underlay the food being eaten.

Although it is not a piece of furniture, Robert Venturi's "Mirror in the Greek Revival Manner" is another Post-Modernist icon (see Papadakis, 1987, p. 57). In 1982, the Formica Company invited architects and designers to participate in a "Surface and Ornament" competition intended to promote a new version of its plastic laminate, Colorcore. In response Venturi designed this frame that, indeed, quotes motifs from Greek Revival. No conventional mirror, however, is enclosed by his frame. In its expected place is a smooth plane, with traditional bevelled edges, composed of Colorcore layered in multicolors so as to recall our experiences with reflective surfaces. Again, paradox is a paramount feature of this object. Its physical oxymoron is immediately apparent, but to apprehend the double coding of historical motifs with contemporary materials viewers are engaged in anamnesis, suggested recollection, and invited to reflect on the relation between past and present.

Colorfully patterned plastic laminates are much-favored by and nearly emblematic of designers for Memphis, a force at the forefront of conceiving and exhibiting Post-Modernist objects. An Italian architect and designer, Ettore Sottsass, formed the Memphis group whose name is reputed to derive from repeated playings of Bob Dylan's record, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blue's Again," during a first meeting in 1981 of seven individuals - Ettore Sottsass, Barbara Radice, Marco Zanini, Aldo Cibic, Matteo Thun, Michel De Lucchi, and Martine Bedin, all architects with the exception of Barbara Radice who became the group's chronicler (1984) and cultural art director. By 1983 a photograph documents eleven men and eleven women assembled for one of their meetings. (Radice, 1984, p. 208). The name Memphis, of course, has multiple meanings; Radice suggested, "Blues, Tennessee, rock' n' roll, American suburbs, and then Egypt, the Pharaoh's capital, the holy city of the god Ptah" (1984, p. 26). George Sowden's "Savoy" cabinet of print laminate, wood and glass (see Radice, 1984, p. 95) is an instance of the Memphis penchant for combining this previously banal surface with more traditionally valued materials. Banalty accrued to print laminates partially because of their association with furnishings in fast food chains. In private dwellings these surfaces were reserved for functional counters in kitchens, bathrooms, and utility rooms, those areas less accessible to visitors. Sowden's cabinet, however, is intended for prominent display in rooms of the home where guests are entertained. Such objects exhibit irony, by contradicting our conventional notions about "high" and "low" status, as well as a cultural pluralism. In his "Park Lane" coffee table of marble and fiberglass Ettore Sottsass also invites viewers to reflect on the cultural pluralism, often politically and economically based, that he evokes by juxtaposing an expensive material with an inexpensive one, violating conventions about combinations of materials: we expect either that all will signify exclusiveness and costliness, or that they will be much cheaper imitations of such materials. Typically, the discontinuity between materials is sharpened by the title, "Park Lane," with its allusions to luxurious living places (see Horn, 1986, p. 15).

One of the salient characteristics of all Post-Modernist art is that the medium is not transparent; those aspects once taken for granted as axioms, such as 'truth to materials,' are lifted from everydayness, made problematic, intended to be a major facet of what viewers apprehend. Such an approach to art clearly is grounded in the phenomenological, existential, and hermeneutic readings that have been integral to the undergraduate and graduate studies of artists for more than a decade, and these questioning philosophical views of the world continue to be a vital quality of the Zeitgeist in which they live and work after leaving universities and art schools. Young children do not participate in the conscious Post-Modernist contradictions and commentaries on aesthetic and cultural conventions to which adolescents and adults are responsive because for very young children context, or meaning, is diffused and quite fluid-they are learning these conventions (Zurmuehlen, 1986). A Post-Modernist stance toward art is not one of innocence, and part of Post-Modernism's appeal surely is that it allows us to display, if only to ourselves, our knowledge of prior aesthetic and cultural conventions, our openness to cultural pluralism, our astute awareness of ironies and paradoxes - all relatively innocuous vanities, but when so many layers of mediation intervene between our experiences and our attempts to interpret and express those experiences we risk the dilemma of a Post-Modernist couple, portrayed by Umberto Eco, who wish to speak of their love for one another. Constrained from a straightforward declaration by the awareness that Barbara Cartland has written such words to the point of banality, Eco suggested the man can say, "'As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly'" (Jencks, 1986, p. 16). Whether or not such a statement will be satisfying to a Post-Modernist woman, only she can know, but the situation suggests that emptiness at the center which preoccupies the Post-Modernist attitude.

Calvin Tornkins articulated a significant doubt about Post-Modernism's capacity for satisfying and sustaining artists and viewers: "What postmodern [sic] art lacks, it seems to me, is precisely de Kooning's sense of painting as a way of living, as something that matters absolutely - more than recognition, or career or life itself" (1988, pp. 140-141). He also regretted that we seem to value art "more highly as a commodity than as a guide-post" (1988, p. 242), although this condition does not apply only to Post-Modernist art. Clearly, Post-Modernist appropriations of historical images risk dissipating into orthodoxy "so art becomes artifice, the endless recycling of the styles of the past" (Cooke, 1990, p. 23). In these circumstances knowledge about historical art works also can become a commodity, valued only as a kind of culturalor aesthetic loot. Students who experience art history as a series of fragmented images, devoid of individual life stories and connected only by abstract categories, seem most vulnerable to such cultural alienation. Paradoxically, it is a Post-Modernist attitude-the viewer, supplying interpretations that lead back to herself or himself as the presence at the absent center of an art work - that may rescue art from its possible deterioration into a mere commodity. Such a viewer may well discover guideposts in her or his personal interpretations of art works.

The long-established rhetorical trope of anamnesis, or suggested recollection, is a possible key to constructing such interpretations. Memory, of course, exists in interpretive acts, Eudora Welty (1984) described it as "a living thing," always "in transit." It is the vital force in what she considers one of the chief patterns of human experience: confluence. "As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover: and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge" (p. 102), she wrote. Such confluence may be a shared subjectivity, a condition that Bachelard depicted where a reader of the poetic description of a room "leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past" (1964, p. 14).

Recollection as subject is clearly evident in autobiographical works and, through the confluence of shared subjectivity, these works are likely to evoke recollections in viewers or readers. The power and appeal of suggested recollection as trope and as subject matter is grounded in Stone's observation: "Even as the autobiographer reconstructs the 'circumstances ' of his or her existence, this awareness becomes the new experience which places the self at the center of its world" (1982, p. 10). Since one of the concerns of Post-Modernist artists is searching for a means of returning to what is perceived as an absent center in contemporary life, anamnesis is a potent and fecund medium for situating the self - whether viewer or artists -at this once absent center. The Lowenfeld (1957) tradition of asking students to narrate stories from their lives in order to re-enact them in their art work may be re-interpreted in our Post-Modern times into a newly evolving tradition I described in Studio Art: Praxis, Symbol, Presence where adolescents portrayed, in their artists' books, "the praxis of their daily lives, their occasions and situations, the substance of future recollections" (1990, p. 57). Here is an instance in which anamnesis invokes the present in the past and the past in the present - another Post-Modernist pre-occupation.

The early art experiences I (1987) ask undergraduates and graduate students to write about are pedagogical applications of the anamnesis trope and subject matter. When students tell about fort and tent building, constructing sand castles, or building cities inside their school desks, they are not merely chronicling events, but like all historians, as White (1978) pointed out, they are giving form to "what the past might consist of" (p. 60). Choosing from the vantage of the present, a particular view of a personal aesthetic past, these writers, in rendering that past, shape and define their images, their sense of themselves as artists and teachers; in doing this they construct armatures, they begin to form what the future might consist of - they find a center from which to teach art.

Marilyn Zurmuehlen was Professor and Head of Art Education at The University of Iowa, Iowa City.

References

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White. H. (1978). Historical text as literary event. In R.H. Canary & H. Kozicki (Eds.). The writing of history: Literary form and historical understanding (pp. 41-62). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Zurmuehlen, M. J. (1986). Reflecting on the ordinary: Interpretation as transformation of experience. Art Education, 39 (6), 33-36.

Zurmuehlen, M.J. (1987). Context in art: Meaning recovered and discovered. Journal of Multicultural and Cross Cultural Research in Art Education, 5 (1), 131-143.

Zurmuehlen, M.J. (1990). Studio art: Praxis, symbol, presence. Reston VA: National Art Educaton Association.

I cited author and page references in the text for each object discussed so that readers may refer to illustrations of them.

Published: Zurmuehlen, M. (1992). Art Education, 45 (5), 10-16. Reproduced with permission of publisher.

Next Background Article: REFLECTING ON THE ORDINARY: INTERPRETATION AS TRANSFORMATION OF EXPERIENCES