The origins of Post

The naming and classification of periods is a fiction. There are no adequate people to explain an epoch or a movement. It is just typyfing things according to their motivations and bringing them into a single stream. Artistic movements are often compared to religions. They do not have any creeds or rituals but they may posit a future society free from conflict and difference, a type of a physical utiopia. It began when artistic avant-gardes turned out to have a priestly roles as well as spiritual and cultural, which were similar to revolutionaries. Artists often had a role to lead society into a positive future because they were the only ones who had access to public feelings and could sway sentiments.

In the architectural world, movements do not usually last long and they are often not presented as the dominant culture. However, Modernism was the first movement which became the establishment and the worldwide taste.

It was not only easier to teach but also to understand with its simplifications and abstraction rather than movements with their complex iconography. Modernism was also the first ideological response to a social crisis. It protested against ruling class state, different styles and ornament. Adolf Loos formulated such words: 'ornament is a crime' and believed that cultural evolution should end in abstraction. In those days, artists aimed for a radical aesthetic purism. Le Corbusier, one of the main representatives of this movement, called the new age 'the vacuum cleaning period' which painted everything white, stripped architecture of its corrupt decor and cleansed the ancient regimes of ethnicity. He was not only an architect but he also had a missionary role. He had a hope and belief for a world being tranformed. There were many writers who criticized his philosophy. Like religions under attack, he ignored the critiique. He was so convinced of all the benefits that come with a well-designed environment that he ended his book with words: 'Towards a New Architecture'. There was another architect, saint of the Design Reformation, named Gropius, who said that society could be transformed through culture and that art and technology are a new unity. Mies van der Rohe was even more naive having said that: 'If we succeed in carrying out this industrialisation then the social, economic, technical and also artistic problems will be readily solved'.

Colin Rowe termed it 'the architecture of good intentions'.

But this golden age must have finally come to an end. The first visual critique was called 'The Death of Modernism' and it was the blowing up of Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks. It was done on purpose and repeated in many cities. It actually liberated people from the notion that modern would be everlasting. World wished this housing to die. The main idea of modernism was about mass production so its destructiveness was unexpected.

The other convincing argument was that it was the First World War which was the true end of modernism, with producing killing at rate never seen before. Second world war gathered even more deaths and each number became the foundation stone for the death of ideology and the birth of Post - Modernism. Changing a way of thinking not only takes a long time but also a lot of blood.

The modern world was pushed forward by the continous growth and had no reverse gear. It caused first signs of global warming but nobody really seemed to care. It was all about the money. Grenland glaciers - virgin territory full of minerals was only waiting to be exploited and fullfilled with tourists. The source to make a fortune! Post - Modernism, with its desire for money, however made the global economy much more bigger, the rich so much richer and it lifted many people out of poverty.

Post - Modernism decided to come to us in the 1980s, aware of the port we left and knew where we were heading and although for some it was only a condition rather than movement, it started to infect people with a slightly different meaning, positive and negative because language is a social contract that no one writes and has no control. 'We did not choose 'post-modern', it chose us'. (.... p. 25). This term became both omnipresent and misunderstood. It was recommended to use it to mean anything you care to think about the present.

Modern comes from the Latin modo and means 'just now', so post-modern trumps it by meaning 'just after' just now. It has this superiority of being 'beyond, above, ultra, meta' the present. This paradox of being more modern than modern makes it even more desirable. It also an overthrow of nostalgia as while mentioning past, it does so in a very ironical way. 'The 'post' sees both past and modern in its rear-view mirror. it is the transitio from a known present to an unknown but suggestive future.

There are three postmodernisms:

1. Post - Modernism which is a movement in the arts,

2. post-modernity - a dominant, current social condition. Omnipresent reality, of globalisation, multiculturalism, media and networking.

3. post-modernisation - backround to post-modernity

There were much criticism that Post - Modernism had to meet with. Critics were accusing them of kitch and borrowing and the movement got a new phrase - 'PoMo' which refered to unconscious parody and unknowing pastiche. But Post - Modernism aimed to defend the small, the local and the plural against the large and the hegemonic. In literature, parody and metafiction are its most important characteristics. It also saw an importance of irony and language games. Both continuation of modernity and its transcedence and this positive hybralisation is called 'double coding'. Its intention is also to be pluralist and cut across the antinomies. Post-Modernists simply enjoyes variety and mixture of cultures.They looked for orientation that was richer. The more, the better. Not 'less is more' but, as Philip Anderson said: 'more is different'. The only real question was: how to achieve the richness of the past and mention present pluralism without turning it into a kitsch? The answer was to use strategy of double coding, irony, parody and the heavy use of quotation marks which came to the fore.