Mamta Kalia

Discourse
POST MODERNISM: A CRITICAL
APPRAISAL
Subhash Sharma
Obviously post-modernism refers to something of a process ‘after’
modernism. But unfortunately it is a highly contested conception,
often meaning contradictory things to different scholars and
practioners, like a Hindu mythological story of seven blind persons
who described different things by touching different parts of an
elephant, but could not recognise as an elephant. The term ‘postmodernism’
was first used by John Watkins Chapman in 1870’s
to mean post-impressionism. Later, in 1934, it was used to refer
to a reaction against the difficulty and experimentalism of modernism.
In 1939, Arnold J Toybee used it to mean the end of the ‘modern’
western bourgeois order dating back seventeenth century. Further
in 1945, Bernard Smith used it to mean the movement of socialist
realism in painting. Later, in 1959, Irving Howe and in 1960
Harry Levin used it to mean a decline in high modernism. Further
in different disciplines and genres of art the term was used to
mean varyingly. For instance, in the arena of architecture, the
post-modern architecture turned to the vernacular and history
re-introducing ‘a humanising narrative’. However, as points out
Hans Bertens (‘The Idea of the Postmodern’, 1995), for most of
American cities, post-modernism is a move away from the narrative
and representation – a move towards a radical aesthetic autonomy,
towards pure formalism. Actually the functional and formalized
shapes and spaces of the modernist movement were replaced by
the diverse aesthetics; styles collide, form is adopted for its own
sake, and so on. Philip Johnson, John Burgee, Robert Venturi,
Frank Gehry etc. are post-modern architects.
April-June 2010 :: 67