Theorising the Postmodern

1. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • [Postmodrnism received] a negativised rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring, indeterminacy, and anti-totalisation. 76 • I would like to begin by arguing that, for me, postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts the very concepts it challenges – be it in architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, film, video, dance, TV, music, philosophy, esthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, or historiography. 76

2. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Postmodernism cannot simply be used a synonym for the contemporary. And it does not really describe an international cultural phenomenon, for it is primarily European and American (North and South). 76 • Although the concept of modernism is largely an Anglo-American one. 76 • […] What I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally , resolutely historical, and inescapably political. 76-77

3. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Its contradictions may well be those of late capitalist society, but whatever the cause, these contradictions are certainly manifest in the important postmodern concept of ‘the presence of the past’. 77 • This was given to the 1980 Venice Biennale which marked the institutional recognition of postmodernism in architecture. 77

4. Postmodernity and Architecture • Paolo Potoghesi: La Strada Novissima

5. Postmodernity and Architecture • In July 1980 the Venice Biennale inaugurate its first international architecture show entitled “The Presence of the Past.” • Thanks to the spectacular Strada Novissima realized expressly for that occasion, the exhibition has become almost the symbol of Postmodernism. • With the title of the exhibition “The Presence of the Past,” we hope to take hold of a phenomenon which has its symptoms in the fifties, in the courageous turn of direction in the research of the masters of modern architecture, but has carried on, with a slow and arduous rhythm, transformed only in the past few years into a radical and definite effort.

6. Hans Hollein Façade Strada Novissima Corderie of the Arsenal, Venice, 1980

7. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past The Ideology of modern architecture thought it had rid itself of this whole of languages, human institutions, and conventions with a stroke of the eraser, proclaiming its obsolescence in the new times. But it had actually continued to live in the memory of man, renewing itself constantly since it was fed by the “presence of the past,” by messages that continue to originate from that set of tangible things called historical heritage as a whole, and from a new viewpoint produced by the contents of the “human condition.” The return of architecture to the womb of history and its recycling in new syntactic contexts of traditional forms is one of the systems that has produced a profound “difference” in a series of works and

8. Joseph Paul Kleinhues Façade Strada Novissima Corderie of the Arsenal, Venice, 1980

9. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past projects in the past few years understood by some critics in the ambiguous but efficacious category of Postmodern. The reproposed “presence of the past” is neither simply ironic, nor, least of all, purely unncessary and consumerist. It contains a great deal of truth because it realizes its impotence in elaborating a real psychological conflict. The past whose presence we claim is not a golden age to be recupe- rated. It is not Greece as the “childhood of the world” which Marx talked about, ascertaining the universality, duration and exemplari- ness of certain aspects of European tradition, The past with its “presence,” that can today contribute to making us children of our

10. Robert Venturi Façade Strada Novissima Corderie of the Arsenal, Venice, 1980

11. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past time, is the past of the world. In our field, it is the whole system of architecture with its finite but inexhaustible sum of experiences connected or reconnectable by a society which has refused a monocentric culture, a main tradition with no competition. The architects’ interests in history and in the recycling of forms and traditional compositional systems should also be seen in relation to this self-interrogation, to this census of still valid or confirmable conventions, to the restitution of the role of subject to the community of its users, after the long parenthesis of the claim of this role only by the “technicians of form,” made legitimate by the theory of the Modern Movement.

12. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past The end of prohibition and the recycling of traditional forms marks the definite separation in architecture from the near past, from the inextricable mixture of Illuminism and Romanticism making up the modern tradition

13. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past The Modern Movement originated as a great pluralistic program attempting to reify the spirit of the time, the Zeitgeist, catching it in its initial stages in the different cultural realities of the European and American horizons. After thirty years of free experimentation, (Art Nouveau, Protorationalism, Expressionism, the modern classicism of Behrens, the creative eclcecticism of Sullivan and Wright) the Modern Movement, beginning in the twenties, tended to translate into a set of constraning rules, into a real orthodoxy, three fundamental dogmas: the functionalism analysis as a starting point for architectural research; the annihilation of the traditional grammar of architecture with all its differences corresponding to places and civilizations; the

14. Views of Strada Novissima Corderie of the Arsenal, Venice, 1980

15. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past identification between architectural progress and the use of new technologies understood as potential generators of language. Historical documents demonstrate that at least since the twenties, the Modern Movement has imposed on the entire world an unprecedented levelling of the linguistic means of architecture, imposing the destrcution of archetypes upon which its system of communication was based, along with the annihilation of its local codes which explained, in the differences in cultures, the differences among men and their collective identity.

16. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past The Strada Novissima with its twenty façades presents all the possible degrees of the process of reappropriation of memory and the victory over inhibitions inherited from rebel fathers. In order to focus on the intensity of the relationship with historical memory, it is necessary to show parallel and opposite movements from which the meaning and the value of the relationship arise. These two movements are similar to those of an oscillating pendulum; one turned toward the past, the other toward the “removal” of the past, and therefore to its actualization. The instruments used to realize the first movement are the direct quotation, the abstraction of the model, the individualization of an archetype to be evoked. The instruments

17. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past used for the second movement are simplification, caricatural deformation, the inversion from a positive to a negative form, metaphoric irony, and plastic reinterpretation.

18. Charles Moore and Robert Stern Views of Strada Novissima Corderie of the Arsenal, Venice, 1980

19. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past This program is the hope of giving a lost concreteness back to art, a materialistic and symbolic base through the reemergence of arche- types. Architecture carries the concept of  (arkhè) inseparably immersed in the word designating it. In Greek mythology the Muses\ were born from Mnemosyne, to mean that there is no art except that originating from memory, and in some way a repetition.

20. Charles Moore and Robert Stern Views of Strada Novissima Corderie of the Arsenal, Venice, 1980

21. Christian de Portzampare Façade Strada Novissima Corderie of the Arsenal, Venice, 1980

22. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past Leaving critical consciousness aside, some worry if this indiscrimi- nating use of the historical memory is in itself a backward attitude, and therefore one which intentionally denies “progress.” How can this retrospective attitude escape the risk of relating to and being resonant with reactionary and regressive political attitudes? The answer is simple. Reintegrating historical forms into the repertoire of present architecture, comparing this patrimony to the positive heredity of the Modern Movement, and making these two aspects of the “past” interact is anything but a traditionalist choice. It is related less than ever to regressive political attitudes. As always in history, the new tendencies have aimed at the objective of differentiating

23. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past themselves from what came before, from the attitude of their fathers and older brothers. Totalitarism, the principal feature of 2oth century architecture is not only the result of socio-political systems. Blind faith in progress, the mythology of science and technology, the huge numbers involved in the increasing population, pluralism confused with chaos, all this has created the belief than man himself does not know how he must dwell and live. And that in its place it is up to architecture to know.

24. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past The greatest error of architecture, born from the spirit of the Charter of Athens (1943, Le Corbusier), is the rupture in the continuity of culture. It must not be forgotten that the destruction of the Traditional town was done in the name of sublime ideals: the right of man to a brilliant life, to sun, to contact with nature.

25. Postmodernity and Architecture Paolo Portoghesi and The Presence of the Past The heritage of the past has been put into a kind of museum. The architecture of our century opposes ideology to life, projects to reality. Instead of making our profession a task more and more complicated and further removed from reality, an archi- tectural continuity must be recovered which searches for new fundamental architectural ideas such as style, method and dogma.

26. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi’s analysis of the twenty facades of the ‘Strada Novissima’ – whose very newness lay paradoxically in its historical parody – shows how architecture has been rethinking modernism’s purist break with history. 76-77. • This is not a nostalgic return; it is a critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society, a recalling of a critically shared vocabulary of architectural forms. 77

27. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Its aesthetic forms and social formations are problematised by critical reflection. 77 • The same is true of the postmodernist thinking of figurative painting in art and historical narrative in fiction and poetry: it is always a critical reworking, never a nostalgic ‘return’. 77 • Because it is contradictory and works within the very system it attempts to subvert, postmodernism can probably not be considered a new paradigm. 77

28. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • [Postmodernism privileges] ‘historical metafiction’. By this I mean those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages. 77 • Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains [literature, history, theory]: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographicmetafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past. 77-78

29. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Such labeling is another mark if the inherent contradictions of historiographic metafiction, for it always works within conventions in order to subvert them. 78 • It is not just metafictional; nor is it just another version of the historical novel or the non-fictional novel. 78

30. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Postmodernism works to show that all [discursivity] are human constructs, but that, form that very fact, they derive their value as well as their limitation. 79 • Postmodernist interrogations of humanist certainties live within this kind of contradiction. 79 • Perhaps it is another inheritance from de 1960s to believe that challenging and questioning are positive values […], for the knowledge derived from such inquiry may be the only possible condition of change. 79

31. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • The 1960s were the times of ideological formation for many postmodernist thinkers and artists of the 1980s and it is now that we can see the results of that formation. 79 • The political social, and intellectual experience of the 1960s helped to make it possible for postmodernism to be seen as what Kristeva calls ‘writing-as-experience-of-limits’: limits of language, of subjectivity, of sexual identity, and we might also add: of systematisation and uniformisation. 80

32. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Interrogating […] has certainly meant a rethinking and putting into question the bases of our western modes of thinking that we usually label, perhaps rather too generally, as liberal humanism. 80 • The characteristics of architecture are also those of postmodernism at large – from historiographic metafictions […] to photography. 80

33. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • All of these art works share one major contradictory characteristic: they are all overtly historical and unavoidably political, precisely because they are formally parodic. 80 • In implicitly contesting in this way such concepts as aesthetic originality and textual closure, postmodernist art offers a new model for mapping the borderland between art and the world, a model that works from a position within both and yet not totally within either, a model that is profoundly implicated in, yet still capable of criticising, that which it seeks to describe.

34. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • The theorist/practioners of postmodernism in all the arts – from Umberto Eco to Karlheinz Stockhausen – are emphatic in their commitment to the formation of a more generally shared collective aesthetic code. 81-82 • Even the most self-conscious and parodic of contemporary works do not try to escape, but indeed foreground, the historical, social, ideological contexts in which they have existed and continue to exist. 82 • This is as true of music as of painting, it is as valid for literature as it is for architecture. 82

35. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • In reaction against what modernist ahistoricism then led to, however, postmodern parodic revisitations of the history of architecture interrogate the modernist totalising ideal of progress through rationality and purist forms. 82 • In fact the architecture of the 1970s from the start signaled a conscious move away from the modern movement or the International Style as much as for overtly ideological as for aesthetics reasons. 83

36. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • The social failure of the great modernist housing projects and the inevitable economic association of ‘heroic’ modernism with large corporations combined to create a demand for new architectural forms that would reflect a changed and changing social awareness. 83 • To disregard the collective memory of architecture is to risk making the mistakes of modernism and its ideology of the myth of social reform through purity of structure. 86

37. Theorising the Postmodern • Linda Hutcheon • Parody has certainly become a most popular and effective strategy of the other ex-centrics- of black, ethnic, gay, and feminist artists –trying to come to terms with and to respond, critically and creatively, to the still predominant white, heterosexual, male culture in which they find themselves. 90