Post-Modernism exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum

Recently I went to see the Post-Modernism exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum.


It's on until 15th January 2012.

On the whole I was disappointed by the exhibition. Going around the galleries I felt the interpretation was confused, although at the time I couldn't exactly analyse why. Later it occurred to me that the curators didn't have any real sympathy for post-modernism. They seemed to think that post-modernism was everything that wasn't modernism. Post-modernism was examined in a patronising way that assumed it was merely anti-modernism. Above all there was no attempt to capture the romance of the style (post-modernism was a return to the romantic tradition).

Also the exhibition was too ambitious for the space (and presumably money) it had available.

Considering how close in time the 1980s is to us, there should have been no difficulty in obtaining hundreds (perhaps thousands) of exhibits and creating a more densley textured and nuanced show.

I felt the stuff from the 1960s and 1970s didn't really fit.

I liked the quote "After Modernism there will only be a choice between Versailles and Las Vegas" but this wasn't developed in any way or tested for veracity.

Only when I walked through the columns of Strada Novissima and saw the screens showing Blade Runner (the 1980s was the era of video installations!) did I feel that the exhibition had any impact.

Vivienne Westwood cardigan. Alessandro Mondini redesign of Michelangelo's Madonna and Child rondo. Various impractical arty designer gadgets (was this the period when "gadgets" became desirable objects in their own right other than merely utilitarian devices?).

My favourite item was a blue aluminium desk by Garry Knox Bennett.

Costume for the Blade Runner character Rachel by Charles Knade and Michael Kaplan (all black, the shoulders fetishised and exaggerated).

Laurie Anderson.

Louis XIV by Jeff Koons (with a mirror behind it so that I could see myself looking at the exhibit).

Large number of teapots (these teapots had been jeered at on the Review Show). Was there something about the post-modernist style that was connected to tea drinking? In films and books of the period does tea-drinking take place?

Sequence from the film Koyaanisqatsi with music by Philip Glass.

Huge photograph of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (this was the period when Japan nearly overtook the USA as the world's biggest economy.