Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a design movement that was first introduced in the 1970’s where they aimed to reject and depart from the principles and philosophies of the Modernist design movement in the mid 1900’s. Where artists and creators the Modernist movement focused on idealism, artists from the Postmodernist placed their emphasis on scepticism and rejecting the societal norms. The 1970’s overall was an extremely rebellious period in history with everything going on in society as there was a lot of rejection and rebellious actions at the time.[1]
The movement was primarily thought to be first introduced in the 1970’s through architecture and how new building complex’s were being built and put in place where the old ones once stood. The movement then start to gain influence in the graphic design industry throughout the 1970’s going into the 1980’s where we began to see postmodernist art take the world by storm with artists and designers like Wolfgang Weingart, Jamie Ried, Peter Saville, David Carson and Neville Brody. Its thought to be believed that the postmodernist movement had a huge influence from pop-art and pop culture throughout the 1960’s as there is a heavy resemblance between the work of the two movements.[2]
While the movement aimed to reject the principles and philosophies of the Modernist design movement throughout the mid 1900’s, they still shared some of the same ideas and continued to follow the principles of alignment, spacing and grid systems throughout their work. The use of emerging technologies was heavily used throughout the postmodernist design movement and featured a lot of photography and photomontage within postmodernist art, this was influenced by previous Modernist design movements throughout the mid 1900’s.
I have included some examples of graphic design from the Postmodernism design period to illustrate their approach to design and their rejection to modern design techniques and philosophies.
Postmodernism in Great Britain
Great Britain played a major role in the Postmodernist movement with the emergence of the punk scene that gained popularity throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, the punk scene shared many of the same ideas and thoughts to that of the Postmodernist movement, where the punks ideas were directed towards society the postmodernist movement took the same principles and ideas and applied them to graphic design and visual arts.
The constant strikes to employment and corporate companies in addition to the mass amount of redundancies across the UK at the time led to the people of Great Britain becoming tired so they decided to rebel and take a stand against “the man” as Jack Black would say in the film The School of Rock. This rebellious attitude was carried into design where they purposely ignored and rejected the ideas from the Modernist movement and wanted to rebel against society and normality. The Postmodernist movement has had a huge impact on graphic design and visual arts over the past half a decade and you can still see the ideology behind the movement in advertisements, graphic design and video production today.
Postmodernism & Music
Postmodernism and the music industry at the time went hand in hand, with the Punk, Punk-Rock and Glam-Rock genres of music becoming more and more popular by the day the ideas behind the Postmodernist movement were gaining popularity across the nation, with artists like the Sex Pistols being a forefront of the Punk movement the movement was at its prime. Designers like Jamie Ried who had previously worked with the Sex Pistols on album covers and art work along with many other designers who pioneered the Postmodernist design movement.
I have included some of Jamie Ried’s work below to give you an idea on how he created his designs following the philosophies and ideas of the Postmodernist design movement.
References & Sources
- Tate. 2021. Postmodernism – Art Term | Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism.
- Wikipedia. 2021. Postmodernism – Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism.