A struggled tour through the history, theory and ideas of postmodernism Dawn Houser
But I got four walls around m
Thegoing locked To keep me from astrae
the And a honky tonkDim angel, tolih
To keep me from slipping aw
this course was the hardest theory class that i have taken, yet i walked away with a brainful of ideas. while listening to some grace jones one night after studying jacques derrida, i decided to base this book off of a fairytale night of barhopping and discussion with derrida. since i don’t barhop and derrida is dead, it was easy to agree on a new derridean opposition – george jones grace jones.
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me, to hold my life Lumber up, limbo down, embrace, the stumble round, ay I say go, he say yes, ights, can guess the rest, hold meyou tight
way
t need your rockin’
Geritol or your Me Part
I still got neon in Part gray hair don’tPart mea four essays bring in da postmodernism tree of codes love you versus love you a tribe called a subculture of consumption
n’ chairJust partyi Havin edicare ty girl, energy is Party girl, lies my vein Havin ty girl, energy is an thing ty agirl, energy is
Party girl,
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I’d ju If yo Hon I’d ju Righ Yes, i Nerderlandsche Kabelfabriek (NKF) catalogue Piet Zwart 1926, Holland
The line between one design theory and the next can be a fine one. A hip hop rebel on his way out the door can nod gentlemanly with respect to his grandfather tapping his foot while on the porchswing. This nod can initiate the first word of the conversation between postmodernism and modernism and the “Let’s agree to disagree” respect between two schools of thought and image. Defining postmodern theory can be tricky business. According to Harland Bloland, postmodernism’s primary significance is its power to account for and reflect vast changes in our society, cultures, polity, and economy as we move from a production to a consumption society, shift from national to local and international politics, commingle high and low culture, and generate new social movements. Postmodernism has captured our interest because it involves a stunning critique of modernism, the foundation upon which our thinking and our institutions have rested. (Bloland, p. 521) Postmodernism gives weight to the individual and not the masses. It puts more value on what the reader and viewer interprets than what the author and artist create. Nods are nods and respect is respect. Because of this, we can listen to the tapdance between two pieces and study the designs by Dutch modernist Piet Zwart and postmodernist Paula Scher. In the evaluation of the design of the Dutch modernist Piet Zwart for the Nerderlandsche Kabelfabriek (NKF) catalogue (Spencer, p.115), his De Stijl roots show with his choice of primary colors, consistent point size in typography and jumble of slab serif and serif type. In this 1926 design, Zwart rotates the typography on a diagonal axis and some of the imagery while anchoring some of the graphic information on a vertical axis. He starts an interchange between a photograph of a cable and images of men in duotones. Typography overlaps
the duotones and photograph. The order and balance of modernism is there, albeit shaken, not stirred. In the postmodern designer Paula Scher’s essay Back in the U.S.S.R. (Scher, p.257), she talks about her latent appreciation for the work of the Russian Construc tivists, El Lissitzky and Rodchenko. This appreciation didn’t surface until around 1979 when she stopped overlooking their work in her poster design books. Scher explores her crush of the Russian Constructivists with her poster designs for the 1995 musical Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk for the Public Theater in New York City. Within her poster design, she has kept the central duotoned figure of Savion Glover in an upright position, yet with his right leg mid-stomp at an angle. Scher’s use of typography stays within a sans serif perimeter, yet explores different weights and point sizes within words themselves. The type is nestled within the negative spaces between Glover’s right leg and right arm, as well as between his right arm and the right side of the poster. Scher sticks with a postmodernist approach to color palette with muted primary colors. As in Piet Zwart’s design, Paula Scher weights the bottom right corner with the Public Theater information as Zwart did with color bars and imagery in his example. Paula Scher’s design passes the litmus test of the postmodern theory by encouraging the viewer’s interpretation of what the musical is about. She gives the visual clues, yet lets the viewer see the stomp of the noise and the melodic funk within her use of typography. If the viewer doesn’t get the power and choice of Savion Glover’s body in mid-tap, it is quite possible that the musical’s visual and musical celebration of the American Civil Rights movement might swoosh over their head. Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk::Public Theater Paula Scher 1995, New York
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gh it, nice.
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer had to actually diecut open spaces in his book Tree of Codes to tutor the reader through the thought process of open work. Tree of Codes was based on Foer’s favorite book The Street of Crocodiles which was written by Polish writer Bruno Schulz and translated in English in 1963. With the physical absence of written words from the English translation of Bruno Schulz’s book coupled with Foer’s imagination steeped in his own Polish-Jewish American familial heritage, Tree of Codes could be considered a literary monument of the past. It is important to put the words back into the text and understand the importance of the writings of Bruno Schulz. The Street of Crocodiles was originally published in Poland with the title Cinnamon Shops in 1934. Schulz had been a malcontent drawing teacher in high school with the crippling burden of shyness in his desk’s top drawer. He found his freedom in writing letters and taught himself to write for the reader. The Street of Crocodiles began as a series of letters to a poet and doctor of philosophy Deborah Vogel (Ficowski, p. 16) who encouraged him to continue the rich writing and future making of his book. Bruno Schulz’s writing is laden with vivid and detailed descriptions of his daily life in prewar Poland and in order for Foer to tell his story in Tree of Codes, he had no other option but to remove some of Schulz’s words. The visual palette of Schulz’s book is still intact with Foer’s new story fashioned from the leftovers of cutouts.
er baby, limosine, er baby, between.
According to Umberto Eco, every creative work is open. We bring our own life’s experiences into play when we individually intepret poetry, books, movies, food, tactile creations, scents, music and art. Eco shows us that the window can be open fully or just an inch. Our past imprints us with our own individualized “memory DNA” which becomes our own stylized language by which we interpret everything that we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. In a sense, our five senses are governed by our past.
Jonathan Safran Foer chose to author as designer instead of design as author. By deconstructing Schulz’s original book, he wrote his story while he removed words from Schulz’s original text. The visual and tactile quality of this book can not be denied. Visually, there is an overload of graphic data on each page. Since you can see through to the next page and pages after that, the pieces of words and lack of order seen through the diecuts. As a reader, the visual data is overwhelming. The order of words shifts from page to page. The only way to read Foer’s book with clarity is to put a sheet of white paper behind each page to isolate it from the page behind it. This likens the relationship of seeing and reading to a child’s seesaw. It seems more successful to see the book and once you have your feet back on the ground, you can change to the mode of reading it. As a designer, the thought process of the Tree of Codes is brilliant. Yes, it may take more time to read the new story but the process of reading the book makes you aware of the words that were stripped from it. By cutting out words of the past, Foer builds another layer of story based on the past words. Hopefully, this is something we all do as cognitive thinkers. If a habit or event was not fulfilling in our upbringing, we can cut it out and bring in new traditions into our own adult lives. Yesterday is still there and in plain sight, but the order of today and tomorrow is in the process of being rewritten.
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ause I never did fit in
Pull up to my ow look at everybody tryi In your long was Country, when Pull up toCoun my Driv References
Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Foer, J. (2010) Tree of Codes (2nd ed). Belgium: Visual Editions
Schulz, B. Foreword by Jerzy Ficowski (1977) The Street of Crocodiles. Hoboken, New Jersey: Penguin Books Inc.
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an’t stop loving you e made up my mind live in memories of old esome times
versus
lov ing my yo mi u rie nd so fo ld
My seventeen-year old daughter handed me a handwritten letter at the same time that her email of the same letter popped up on my computer screen. The choice of which one to read first was a no-brainer. I would take a handwritten letter on spiral bound notebook paper over an email any day. Her elongated handwriting in school pencil shows me that she thought of me during her school day and that thought will carry me through a month of Sundays. When was the last time that you received a handwritten letter? To take the time to handwrite a letter means so much. The emotion of this handwritten letter stirs some tough questions to the surface. Does effort still matter? Does creating by hand still matter? To put other things aside and clear an agenda to handwrite a letter is quintessential and effortful sentiment. Marshall McLuhan (1967, p.68) states that “print technology created the public and electric technology created the mass.” According to McLuhan, all media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. If a handwritten letter is physical and an email is psychic, one could ask if the emotional response to tangible communication measure the same as the exact letter sent digitally via electronic mail? My own emotional response to the handwritten letter answers that question. Electronic communication has not been crafted by hand, except for the fingers that typed it. In the comparison to the handwritten letter, it is computer-generated which dangerously and easily takes the human element out of the equation. A.N. Whitehead warns it is the business of the future to be dangerous (1967, p.160) and the craft of effortful communication is dangerously getting lost by the wayside on the information highway. The email that my daughter sent me draws me in at “Momma”, yet it could have been typed by anyone. It is instant communication which does have a time and place for it and yet I would rather have an email letter from my daughter than nothing at all.
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Although the delivery is different, an email can become a tangible product once you print it out. This would dismiss the theory that the intangible is less emotional which would leave the emotion in the handwriting and the effort spent in crafting it.
The United States Postal Service has seen a sharp decline of handwritten letters and postcards in the past five years. At one time, the handwritten note had been the main form of communication. If one would take out the elements of handwriting and delivery by mail, are you left with unemotional communication? Were we more emotional creatures five years ago or did we simply have more time? According to a study by branding agency Millward Brown, Roger Dooley states that paper ads caused more emotional processing. (2010, October 4) The agency also claims that physical media left a “deeper footprint” in the brain. (2009) McLuhan (1967, p. 8) reiterates that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. My personal struggle is against the nature of the media. As much as we Luddites struggle against technology, we are inevitably shaped by it. Without technology, I wouldn’t have been raised on Sanford & Son and madcrushed on Don Cornelius and his dancers on Soul Train every Saturday morning. That tryst with a technology that McLuhan warned us about became a childhood religion. In Emotional Branding, John McNeil claims that “If you say it with a degree of sincerity and honesty and with a great love of the craft, it will come through.” (2009, p. 223) The emotional response to the handwritten letter proves that the craft of tangible effort and emotion used in handwriting a letter still matters. I might just go update my Twitter to “Luddite in halter top and platform shoes looking for a penpal. Please do the electric slide and hustle back, if interested.”
I can’t stop loving Work to th I’ve made up my To Live live in to memor th lonesome times Love to th
Slave to th References Millward Brown (2009). Using neuroscience to understand the role of direct mail. Retrieved from http://www.millwardbrown.com Dooley, R. (2010, October 4). Paper beats digital for emotion. Retrieved from http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/paper-vsdigital.htm Dooley, R. (2011, February 18). Does paper outweigh digital? Retrieved from http://www. neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/paperweight-digital.htm Gobé, M. (2009). Emotional branding. Allworth Press: New York, NY McLuhan, M. (1967). The medium is the massage. Gingko Press: Corte Madera, CA
g you hemind rhythm, riesrhythm, of old he
he rhythm, he rhythm. Letter Writers Alliance Mission Statement
In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission. As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters! Join the Letter Writers Alliance. http://16sparrows.com/LWA/index.html
My Jamaican guy.
Dat way him naw go plop plop,
Cool. It changes constantly and most definitely shares the eye of the beholder with beauty. Not only do we quest for cool, we quest for others who share our idea of cool. In The Time of The Tribes (1996), sociologist Michel Maffesoli puts away the idea of tribes in an anthropological sense and introduces a new idea of ‘postmodern tribes’, which are a cohesive fragmentation of what is deemed as style. John O’Shaughnessy and Nick O’Shaughnessy states that as a brand image is socially constructed, advertising tries to influence that social construction to bring about a convergence of meaning between seller and buyer. (2003, p. 213) This convergence of meaning ushered in the need for “consumer tribes” and the self-identifiers for each specific tribe. We learn to understand who belongs to what tribe and to which tribe we want to belong.
According to O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, fantasies (consumer or nonconsumer) qualify as unconscious beliefs because they are what the unconscious has instead of beliefs. (2003, p.78) Fantasies and wishes act as motivators. Couple this with social media and there became a need for graphic identifiers. Before Facebook and Twitter, MySpace was the first social media and encouraged its users to customize the layout of their profiles. This brought a sense of what designs expressed who the user was. Sister sites offered users coding and graphic elements to show others “who” they were which furthered the need of finding what tribe you belonged to. Social media helped those who weren’t graphic designers to find the graphic data that helped them with self-expression. Social media has brought a new appreciation for graphic design to society and has given graphic design a more approachable definition to those who are not designers. A new site, http://polyvore.com, puts the ability to
use existing images or import a user’s own images into their workspace and use imaging tools which are similar to Adobe® Photoshop and Adobe® Illustrator to create designs. Polyvore is consumer based, yet can be used to create non-consumer original imagery and design with the use of typography, images and design elements. The user doesn’t have to be on a Mac computer or have imaging programs to be able to identify themselves. Andrea Gardner reminds us that a brand reminds consumers what its identity is and how it differs from competitors through advertising. (2008, p. 37) According to Gardner, we encounter thousands of marketing messages from the time we wake up in the morning until we return to sleep at night. Those messages are what shapes our idea of what we like and what makes us who we are. Back to the placement of tribes, we can now choose the tribe to which we belong. According to Kozinets, the material culture
Take my life for a drive, Never need to change his tools,
grows, expands, mimetically transcribes, reproduces. (2007, p. 206) He furthers this idea with comparison to the ‘archive fever’ tendency noted by Jacques Derrida (1995): as the archive intertextually incorporates references to itself, the archive grows and expands. According to Derrida, the archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed.’ (1995, p. 68) The consumer tribes continue to share information about their similar consumer ‘likes’ and it strengthens the tribe and the products it supports. Along with social media, blogging has helped promote the need of graphic design and brought a regenerative sense of design itself. The insular and fragmented blogger can design and promote his/her own likes and experiences, yet still belong to the tribe that he/she belongs. This is an example of Derrida’s ‘archive fever’ at its very best. Marshall McLuhan reminds us (or was it a warning?) that all media work us over com-
pletely and that all media are extensions are some human faculty–psychic or physical. (1967, p. 26) Blogging and social media play an emotional part of how brands and products are embraced and will continue to shape graphic design for the girl/guy next door and the tribe to which is specifically full of the girls/guys next door. Branding becomes the tribe’s individualistic decorative details. In competition, it can prove itself to be warpaint. Online sites and tools, i.e. Polyvore, will prove to shape a broader sense of graphic design and deliver it in layman’s terms. Polyvore could be the beloved greatgranddaughter of Grandpapa Postmodernism who could help run the company when
Cool?
back,
she gets older.
References
‘Cause he
Cova, B., Kozinets, R., and Shankar, A. (2007). Consumer tribes. Elsevier: Oxford, UK
Derrida, J. (1995). Archive fever: a freudian impression, trans. Prenowitz, E. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. Gardner, A. (2008). The 30 second seduction: how advertisers lure women through flattery, flirtation, and manipulation. Seal Press: Berkeley, CA Maffesoli, M. (1996). The time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society, trans. Smith, D. Sage: London, UK McLuhan, M. (1967). The medium is the massage. Gingko Press: Corte Madera, CA O’Shaughnessy, J., O’Shaughnessy, N. (2003). The marketing power of emotion. Oxford University Press: New York, NY
Images All images included in this essay were created by Dawn Houser with the tools at polyvore.com.
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postmodernism wouldn’t be postmodern without modernism to help define it. hopefully, i can apply what i have learned this semester and live my life as open work. when we started this exploration into postmodernism, i was adamant that i was a modernist since i prefer handwork and would marry my sewing machine, if i could. if i were to sum up postmodernism in human form, it would be grace jones. she is without definition, much like my thoughts on postmodernism. so now if you were to say that i was postmodern, i would smile and thank you kindly.
keeping up with the joneses one song at a time
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dawn@dawnhouser.com