#postermodernism

The Postmodern 'rupture' would provide little cause for objection had the flowering of its ideology into built form not coincided with a moment in which the use of 'history' to mask the imperatives of self-creation has led to such glaringly objectionable consequences in our national life. But we have seen, in the pageantry of the Reagan years, how easily the mask can become a substitute for the self; how readily the myth of a more secure, more meaningful, more coherent past is invoked as an escape from the need to think about the present; how 'history' is the costume that inertia wears when it wants to look respectable. And we have seen, in these same seven years, how flatteringly Postmodernism has camouflaged the mental vacuum of young urban professionalism; how the 'classical tradition' has been called forth to validated regressive notions of social privilege; how all these spotlit Corinthian columns, real and simulated marbles, broken pediments, and assorted country squire paraphernalia have been assembled to lend the illusion of weight and substance to transient, cupidinous lives. "The result has been a cityscape as oppressively cluttered as the Modern panorama was overwhelmingly bare. And even before Black Monday sent its burst of cold air blowing through the grand cafés, the clutter had begun to look like a visual correlative of the Reagan prosperity, opulence adrift on debt. All these comforting images from the past had been financed by mortgaging the future. For a while, it was such a pretty show that it didn't seem to matter much that no one was running it, that we had been looking at nothing but a collage of memories projected into places where minds are supposed to be at work. Only as the collage grew denser did it become increasingly apparent that 'history' was being exploited as an elaborate strategy for avoiding the message history was actually trying to tell us: that if we didn't wake up soon, we were likely to find our future behind us.

pomo