A Student's Introduction to Geographical Thought: Theories, Philosophies, Methodologies

Abstract

You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? 1 -Talking HeadsIn 1985, art critic Hal Foster wrote: 'Postmodernism: does it exist at all, and if so, what does it mean?Is it a concept or a practice, a matter of local style or a whole new period or economic phase?What are its forms, effects, place?' 2 By the time Foster posed these questions, there was no shortage of evidence of the forms, effects and place of postmodernism.Luxury tableware carried kitsch or historical motifs; TV advertisements were laden with ironic pastiche; public spaces bore the signs of 'Disneynification' or heritage styling; fashion had raided the dressing-up box to produce a mix of decadent looks.Nor was there a shortage of column inches devoted to postmodernism.Academics and journalists argued vociferously over its meaning.But what did this all add up to?If postmodernism was a territory, then it was contested.If it was a style, then that style was an agglomeration of all other styles.And by the time most people had heard of it, its demise had already been declared.Foster might have added another item to his list of questions about postmodernism: 'And what is it called?'Postmodernism acquired an exhausting range of noms de plume and sub-genres: radical design, adhocism, counter-design, transavantgardism, neo-expressionism, radical eclecticism, critical regionalism.Similarly, the prefix 'post' was affixed to an assortment of social and theoretical constructs: one heard of post-industrialization, post-fordism, post-colonialism, post-disciplinarity, post-gender, even post-human.The arrival of the 'post' signalled not only the end of grand narratives, but also the removal of certainty itself as a base of operations.Even at its peak in the mid-1980s postmodernism was hard to locate.Modernism had its manifestos and its schools, its camps and champions, and had been authoritatively claimed as a movement.Postmodernism, by contrast, was a collection of wry looks and ironic gestures.Modernists devised new windows on the world; postmodernists offered a shattered mirror.Modernism dreamt of utopian visions, which would transform society; postmodernism threw together a new look for a night on the town.Modernism declared itself to be beyond style (style was mutable, but Modernism was 'universal').For postmodernism, style was everything.Instead of authenticity, postmodernism celebrated hybridity.In place of truth, postmodernism had attitude (pl.4).But if postmodernism was just a pose, it could nonetheless be found in almost every genre of creative and philosophical practice.During the 1970s, various fields claimed their own 'postmodern turn' -in film, dance and literature, for example -which marked either the crisis or the exhaustion of the avant-garde, as well as a renewed interest in sampling or quoting from the past.Nor did postmodernism occupy a series of niches.Its nearinstantaneous spread meant that by the 1980s, postmodern style could be discerned not only in a building, a teapot or a poster, but also in a haircut, a poem, a music video or a dance step.Despite its disciplinary diversity, postmodernism achieved its greatest visibility in architecture. 3 As Reinhold Martin has recently put it, architecture was postmodernism's 'avatar' -the form in which it was most frequently encountered. 4 As theory followed practice, early and influential formulations used architecture as a rubric to define postmodernism's terms of engagement. 5Graphic design, the applied arts, fashion and styling, film: all were discussed in parallel to buildings as a way of understanding their own postmodern tropes.Architecture's 'postmodern turn' became the blueprint for other disciplinary histories: Rejection of high Modernism?Embrace of the popular, the 'low' and the kitsch?A prioritization of surface over depth, style over structure?Use of quotation, metaphor, plurality, parody?Check your work against Michael Graves' 1982 Portland Building and see (see pl. 208, p. 230).Postmodernism also inhabited the peripheries of practice, often finding its most effective projections through the lenses of gender, race or identity politics.Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is one aspect of postmodern practice that did not take its lead from architecture.The postmodern reassertion of certain genres was a political act: the reclaiming of sewing and china-painting, for example, in the feminist artist Judy Chicago's landmark installation The Dinner Party of 1974-7; or quilt-making in David McDiarmid's Disco Kwilts, c.1980, ecstatic, sensual works celebrating the multi-ethnic club culture of 1970s Manhattan.Alongside such unique, one-off projects, postmodernism was favoured

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