Mamta Kalia

Modern Architecture’, 1977), implying
post-modern pluralism. His perspective
is ‘committed to engaging current issues
to changing the present’ but he has no
interest in Avant- gardist principle of
‘continual innovation or incessant
revolution’. He is inclined to metaphysical
buildings, ‘ the vernacular’, ‘ historical
memory’ and ‘local context’ though
indulging in modernist strategies like
irony and parody. Jenks tries to get
over the modernist elitism not by
dropping it but ‘by extending the language
of architecture in many different ways
into the vernacular, towards tradition
and the commercial slangs of the street’thus
his double-coded architecture speaks
both to the elites and the ordinary people
by ‘extending’ modernism.
Subsequently Robert Stern (‘The
Doubles of Post Modern’, 1980) talked
of ‘traditional’ post-modernism and
‘deconstructionist’ or ‘schismatic’ postmodernism.
Traditional post-modernism
depends on representational as opposed
to ‘abstract or conceptual modes’ and
it ‘opens up artistic production to a
public role which modernism, by virtue
of its self-referential formal strategies,
had denied itself’- here he finds a ‘genuine
and unsentimental humanism’ that
expresses itself in a deeply felt sense
of ‘social and cultural responsibility’.
Thus, to him, post-modernism implies
humanism in art–an act of
communication, rather than of
production or revelation, Similarly
Heinrich Klotz’s post-modernism
(‘History of Post-modern Architecture’,
1988) is more humane with ‘fictional
representation’, ‘ poetry, ‘improvisation
and spontaneity, ‘history and irony’, and
‘contextualism’.
From above it may be inferred
(Bertens) that there have been, at least,
three types of post –modernism:
a) a return of representation and
narrative-especially in painting;
b) an attack on representation and
narrative (Barthes, Derrida)denial
of presence, origins and
coherent subject;
c) a non–discursive immediacy, a
sacred fullness- artist and his art
is seen in shamanistic terms, a
dialogic space is preferred to a
monolithic mode.
F.J. Schuurman, in his book, ‘Beyond
the Impasse’ (1993), talks of
heterogeneity of post-modernism due to
its three sub-routes:
a) Neo-conservative communitarianism-
here social anomie is
opposed by a return to tradition
and history- some kind of
romanticism.
b) Progressive communitarianism-
In lieu of socialism, search for
other types of local sources of
resistance against governing
power and knowledge system- new
social movements. Foucault wants
to involve there even the hospital
patients, prisoners and gypsies.
April-June 2010 :: 73