The Victoria and Albert Museum’s show Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 is an attempt to survey postmodernism as a design strategy rather than an epoch or paradigm of contemporary culture. Of course these elements prove difficult to separate, especially with regard to such a loaded term, employed by so many with intentions vast and diverse. The subtitle of the exhibition, Style and Subversion, is therefore important in its signal toward artistic innovation as a platform from which to think through poignant social and cultural transitions undertaken at the hands of architects, artists, and designers in a move away from a didactic modernism. Artistic modernity, at least for critics such as Clement Greenberg, championed art in the conquest of its own medium attempting a break with mimetic constraints. As it turned out, this view also led to saboteurs set on distracting attention from form and function in order to revivify the cosmetic and reimagine the importance of the symbolic.

Following the sheer dominance of high art after 1945 in Europe and the United States, designers were among those to most enjoy these new discursive possibilities. In fact the idea of the “Death of Modernism,” as the first text panel triumphantly states, could not be insisted upon anymore than it is in the initial few rooms of the exhibition. The first installation viewers encounter is a replica of Alessandro Medini’s Lassú chair. Described here as, “Destruction of the Monumento da Casa (‘Household Monument’) Chair” (1974), it is accompanied by four archival photographs projected on the wall behind, chronologically documenting the dramatic burning of the piece located in what appears to be an abandoned quarry.

An attempt to survey a subject with such indeterminable boundaries is no easy task, and curators Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt deserve praise for their admirable efforts in this regard. There have been various attempts to move beyond more prevalent theories of postmodernism: Nicolas Bourriaud’s 2009 Tate Triennial Altermodern springs to mind. However, a retrospective of the kind and size of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion is a first. By focusing on the years 1970–1990, the curators allow themselves an examination of a period when postmodernism would seem to manifest itself almost exclusively as a Western development. At the same time, acknowledging the limitations of periodization based exclusively on chronology, works are included that reach both before and beyond these dates. Examples include Robert Rauschenberg’s Estate (1968), a work that in its Neo-Dada appropriation of cultural and urban imagery recalls Craig Owens’s memorable effort at a theory of postmodernism as an “allegorical impulse” (Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 [Spring 1980]: 67–86; and “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part 2," October 13 [Summer 1980]: 59–80). Also worth mentioning is Ai Weiwei’s Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1994), which is exhibited in the penultimate room and signals toward the capacity of postmodernism to project itself on a global scale in subsequent years. This last example might provide some clues as to the exhibition’s twenty-year period as its primary focus. The time bracket is in some ways optimal, as it tracks postmodernism’s most significant developments as a creative category. Moreover, 1970–1990 simultaneously avoids polemical positions of the previous decade as well as—and significantly, I think—the birth of general public access to the internet (as stated in the catalogue foreword) and the advent of globalization, both of which usher in a new set of radical theoretical complications.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s seminal project and book publication, Learning from Las Vegas (rev. ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), introduces the subject of architecture into the exhibition. Architecture, often thought of as epitomizing postmodernism, makes repeat appearances throughout, acting as a narrative guide to developments in style and design theory. Most prevalent as far as this particular project is concerned is an extract of research footage from Venturi and Brown’s 1968 visit to Las Vegas in the form of a film shot from a car as it traveled along the Las Vegas strip during both day and night. Projected large against the back wall of a gallery, the footage appears slightly distorted, affording the project and its now anachronistic research methods a sense of the nostalgic. First published in 1972, Venturi, Brown, and Izenour’s text has become almost canonical in its effort to establish a postmodern identity in contemporary architecture. If modernist architectural design rejected ornamentation in its campaign for structural autonomy, their “Las Vegas” represented an embodiment of iconography that reestablished and reimagined the importance of signs in the contemporary world. That is, not just in the literal topography of Vegas, but also the wider context of semiotics that was urgently reawakened by figures such as Umberto Eco soon after, and which would become crucial to artistic production and cultural debates during the 1980s.

What else becomes apparent during the short film extract is the emphasis on Las Vegas as a city built for the automobile—an essential issue throughout Venturi, Brown, and Izenour’s book. This aspect, however, was not addressed by the exhibition, leaving the episodic Learning from Las Vegas as one of various moments where I found myself falsely anticipating a J. G. Ballard reference. But Ballard is a literary reference, a point of departure that is understandably avoided considering the already ambitious scale of the survey. The move into an aesthetic of and for the future is dealt with in other ways. One path is through the inclusion of the introductory sequence of Ridley Scott’s 1982 feature film Blade Runner, which is projected large above a cacophony of innovative design items, including Bill Woodrow’s adapted washing machine, Twin-Tub with Guitar (1981), and a Vivian Westwood outfit featuring a cut-and-paste Blade Runner image from 1983. Based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Scott’s science-fiction film represents a certain postmodernist position that is as important in its conception as it is in its execution. One useful interpretation might be the film’s reimagining of already existing film conventions—film noir (here perhaps neo-noir) or the femme fatale—recast or rehashed for the future. Further, it is worth bearing in mind the overarching inevitability of the science-fiction genre: that is, the disjunction between a projection of the future and its immediate outdatedness upon completion. This idea is a powerful way in which to think through the rapid progress of design and creative art forms documented in this exhibition. Much of its material seems to be caught awkwardly between the futuristic ambitions of the artist and the ironic idiom of the now-dated novelty and occasionally shabby appearance.

Postmodernism as bright, loud, and egregious takes something of a profound turn toward the latter half of the show, most forcefully captured in Oliviero Toscani’s United Colors of Benetton’s advertising campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s, in which the use of Third-World refugees, AIDS victims, and subjects of racial discrimination touched antagonistically upon contemporary issues of social and geopolitical unrest. As the curators pointedly ask in their catalogue essay, “Was this a progressive use of media power to engage mass activism? Or was it rather a case of unprecedented cynicism, in which any content, no matter how upsetting, could be made to serve the interests of a middle-market clothing company?” (84) Subversion here is intended to remain ambiguous, while exemplifying a dissensus in corporate domination and continuing to speak loudly of an ongoing crisis in neoliberal capitalism.

But the Victoria and Albert Museum is very much a public institution, and while it is important that aspects such as these should be dealt with in a show of this kind, viewers are quickly swept off to a rather more anodyne, though still fierce, phenomenon of the 1980s. This section is a kind of pop and performance house of horrors, where figures including Boy George, Leigh Bowery, Grace Jones, and Kraftwerk appear as replicant-type humanoids. Large screens disseminating garishly choreographed music videos with outlandish costumes to match affixed high on the gallery walls perpetuate the Blade Runner aesthetic dominant throughout the show. In the next section, “Style Wars,” where much of the material included comprises trendy magazine covers and high-value music memorabilia, all of it appropriating postmodernist design iconography, controversy of a slightly different kind begins to rear its ugly head. It seems that by the late 1980s, the once trendy and progressive subculture had been commercialized. And of course where commercialism squirms its way to prominence, so does its closest ally: money.

Before marveling at beautifully crafted luxury items (such as Gabriele Devecchi’s pastiche Equilpiemonte coffee pot (1983) or Jeff Koons’s magnificently vulgar Michael Jackson and Bubbles ceramic (1988)), Andy Warhol’s caustic 1981 Dollar Sign affords viewers a derivative and surprisingly sobering effect. Accompanied by a quote—“They [Warhol’s appropriated images of Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans] ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why.”—from Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson’s famous 1984 essay and later book-length publication, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, 9; emphasis in original), viewers are invited to contemplate the dramatic collision between art, design, and big money that simultaneously characterizes the period. The superficial was consumed by superabundance. Postmodernism was no longer the corrosive critical outsider probing the dogma of modernism, but instead had become the commodity of economic tyranny.

Postmodernism, in terms of its objects and realization as a social-theoretical praxis (here I have in mind the work of Jean Baudrillard), necessarily exists in fragments. An exhibition that challenges itself to synthesize various materials, therefore, could only perform as its counterpart. The years and decades after 1990 not only saw a significant reduction in the banding around of the term, but also represented a shift in focus of analyses to a global level. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union; the proliferation of the internet and mass distribution of cell phones; as well as the devastating events of September 11, 2001, in New York City followed by the war on terror have all had seismic impact on the ways in which the world is viewed and lived in. Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 ends with a small box-like cinema space displaying the music and video of New Order’s 1987 release “Bizarre Love Triangle.” The first lyrics of the track are as follows: “Every time I think of you I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue / It’s no problem of mine, but it’s a problem I find, living a life I can’t leave behind.” For sure, postmodernism was not over in 1990, but neither did it mean quite the same thing. Indeed, did it ever? Radical ideas and subversive artistic innovations continue to find currency with what has come before. After all, the term is almost fifty years old, but remains more a problematic than a terminal one. As Umberto Eco once famously suggested, perhaps every age has its postmodern (my emphasis). Our current climax may be coming to an end, and thus New Order’s provocation of nostalgia seems an apt way to close, albeit before exiting through the gift shop to reassure the visitor that consumerism is at least one part of a bizarre tripartite that has certainly not come to an end.