VISUAL CULTURE

trends & styles chapter 6
Postmodernism
after the sixties

'70s: the era of 'radical'

disco & punk

'80s: 'anything goes'
kitsch & street art

'90s: 'it's a rough world out there
grunge & deconstructivism

-> POSTMODERNISM
against strict rules of modernism
(too strict, too minimalistic, too abstract)

SOWETO UPRISING
'June 16, 1976, Soweto, South Africa. The young black man is carrying a mortally wounded fellow student to a waiting car. The victim is Hector Peterson, one of the first fatalities; the girl in the picture is Hector’s sister, her hand raised in shock.'
Watch this video about the iconic value and political relevance of this photo.

'70s

'At the time (1971), there were no other commercial television programs being produced by black people for a black audience (...)' (Wikipedia)

'It's the CNN of the community. It's reporting on all of these things that we've experienced, in poetry form...'

'Early Seventies, Britain was a very depressing place. It was completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment—just about everybody was on strike. Everybody was brought up with an education system that told you point-blank that if you came from the wrong side of the tracks...then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all.'
(John Lydon / Johnny Rotten)

Punk - Sex Pistols, God save The Queen (1977)

1956

1979

Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake (Utah), Robert Smithson, 1970

Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977,
by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers

'80s

I Want My MTV, The Uncensored Story Of The Music Revolution
(Rob Tannenbaum & Craig Marks, 2011)

Keith Haring, Medusa & Man, 1983

J.-A.-D. Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814

'90s

Grunge 

Pop culture

Rave parties

Gangster rap

Deconstructivism

Dirty typeface by Neville Brody

Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin

Sensationalism

Tracey Emin, My Bed (1998)

'Although I was born in Lebanon, my family is Palestinian. And like the majority of Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948, they were never able to obtain Lebanese identity cards. It was one way of discouraging them from integrating into the Lebanese situation. When I went to London in 1975 for what was meant to be a brief visit, I got stranded there because the war broke out in Lebanon, and that created a kind of dislocation, [which] manifests itself in my work…'
Mona Hatoum
 

'Often the work is about conflict and contradiction – and that conflict or contradiction can be within the actual object.'
TateShots, 2011
 

'I’ve always had quite a rebellious and contrary attitude. The more I feel I am being pushed into a mold, the more I feel like going in the opposite direction.'
BOMB Magazine with Janine Antoni, 1998

Mona Hatoum, Keffieh (1993–99)