Postmodernism
marcus • May 28th, 2007
The term Postmodernism was coined in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, founding the postmodern architecture. And later 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. Postmodernity is the derivative to refer to non-art aspects of history that was influenced by the new movement.
When the idea of a reaction, or even rejection, of the movement of modernism (a late 19th, early 20th centuries art movement) was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity, a term for the evolutions in society, economy and culture since the 1960s. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida) and with modernism in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, élitist culture.
Postmodernism is said to be marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the International Style, or an artistic period characterized by the abandonment of strong divisions of genre, “high” and “low” art, and the emergence of the global village.
If used in other contexts, it is a concept without a universally accepted, short and simple definition; in a variety of contexts it is used to describe social conditions, movements in the arts, and scholarship (incl. criticism) in reaction to modernism, not “post” in the purely temporal sense of “after”. Largely influenced by the disillusionment of the First World War, postmodernism’s many manifestations tend to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.
Source: Wikipedia