Making Book on the Now-Familiar Post-Mod

Post-Modernism is for real. Even people who considered it another passing fad have found that the revisionist style now saturates every aspect of visible life. It has caused a virtual renaissance in architecture.

It sprouted major corporate monuments beginning almost a decade ago with AT&T;’s corporate headquarters in New York designed by the fallen-away modernist doyen Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee. The tower soars above Madison Avenue with its “Chippendale Highboy” pediment and its kitschy gilded lobby statue “The Genius of Electricity.” The place somehow looks like a set for one of the camp-revivalist Superman movies.

Museum architecture has been virtually taken over by Post-Mod buildings--some of them works of genius--ranging from James Stirling’s brilliant Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart to Gae Aulenti’s recycled Musee d’Orsay in Paris to our own Museum of Contemporary Art by Arata Isozaki and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer’s addition to the County Museum of Art.

The existence of such stylish institutional structures might be explained away as a refined oddity but there is no escaping the pervasive influence of the style when it shows up in the dingbat apartment-house being built down the block, the vest-pocket shopping center on the corner or a ghastly marble mall in Beverly Hills. It is one thing for Robert Venturi to design an eccentric house for his mother in the exclusive confines of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill, another for a sharp-eyed commercial developer to decide that the witty style will help sell a building produced on spec.

Such projects--and they are everywhere--mean that Post-Modernism has entered the vernacular. Vulgarization of a style may be the ultimate proof of its success. Remember how Mies Van Der Rohe’s elegant Minimalism was debased into thousands of ugly glass boxes, or for that matter, David Hockney’s vision of lean pastel interiors was cycled back into the real world as decor for smart young entry-level yuppies? Purists may hate the cheapening and popularization but it is the sincerest form of larceny.

Now Post-Modernism even has a bible in the form of a big slickly handsome Rizzoli cocktail book by Charles Jencks. Called “Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture,” the book may be among the few omens that the movement has peaked and could be waning. One artist whose work is included groaned at its mention, saying: “I hate it. It is like a mausoleum. It makes it feel like Post-Modernism is a fixed thing when I have hardly started to work out my ideas.”

Presumably he was operating on the same logic that caused George Bernard Shaw to say that once an idea can be defined it is necessarily no longer new but in the mainstream and on the fade.

Whatever the symbolic significance of the book, it is an important and definitive text. Jencks, an architect and critic who has become known as a leading spokesman, is a formulator and interpreter of Post-Modernist theory. L.A. people can find comforting conformation of the state of our cultural flowering in the knowledge that, for once, a key critic is more closely associated with L.A. than New York. Jencks is a visiting professor at UCLA and finds grist for his mill not only in our new museums but in the Roman-revivalist style of the Getty Museum which he identifies as a notable Post-Mod precursor.

Up to now Jencks has confined his writing to architecture but half of the present text is devoted to art. The author is not always modest but when it comes to painting and sculpture he graciously accords himself only amateur expertise. Actually he does a very credible job of writing about art. He is sensitive to its vectors, well-informed, and often describes it with vivid insight. He functions less as a critic than identifier of painting and sculpture that helps him fulfill his definition of Post-Modernism. The definition sometimes seems overly inclusive. At the book’s end he lists 11 laws of the faith when God himself managed with 10.

There seem to be too many artists. Definitely too many second-raters dredged up because they serve the point or appeal to the private sensibility of an architectural expert idiosyncratically drawn to the late kitsch works of Giorgio di Chirico, the refined perversity of Balthus’ catatonic Lolitas or Rene Magritte’s graspable graphic wit.

Jencks likes pigeonhole categories and complicated chronological graphs that make them look like scientific and historical truths rather than the aesthetic formulations they are. Well, Claude Levi-Strauss said any system was better than no system--and he was right.

Jencks’ “Five Traditions of Post-Modern Classical Art” sounds like a parody of Renaissance theory and includes a dizzying slew of artists and styles not always thought of as Post-Modern. Under “Narrative Classical” we find, for example, Pop art, Hockney and Ron Kitaj leading up to such chaps as Robert Longo and Hans Haacke, who could be considered opposites under some other system of pigeonholing.

We wonder what the dickens he is up to making Post-Moderns out of people like Robert Graham, Richard Estes and John de Andrea. We puzzle at what he could be thinking of when he seriously includes clowns like Social Realist satirists Komar and Melamid or the repellent classical camp of Carlo Maria Mariani. We think we know what he’s doing when he shows a marked predilection for British art.

Jencks sparks some pretty sharp disagreement but that is not the point. A righteous critic is not some style salesman disguised as a detached intellectual. He has his views and presents them with vigor and clarity. He helps us understand his logic but more importantly he is interesting enough to challenge us to stir our own torpid mental juices.

Something tolerant and humorous in this writing gives you the feeling Jencks would respond to disagreement the same way an English auctioneer did when an aesthete said he vigorously disapproved of auctions.

“Oh lovely,” said the Brit, “We can have a fine old row over that.”

Jencks overtly trumpets the virtues of Post-Modernism and covertly reveals the profile of its downside, supplying us with the tools to structure an independent definition.

Post-Modernism is an inclusive style, a sprawling net that wants to scoop up every fish in past oceans and present streams. In that way it is welcoming, populist and frankly entertaining. The only flounder it does not want on its line is the austere exclusivity of modernist Minimalism. In that sense Post-Modernism is an anti-style. It exists in opposition to an enemy. For all of its catholic ecumenicalism it begins with a slight air of hostility. Post-Modernism is inclined to bitchiness.

It exists on the horns of a paradox, a paradox that brought it into being. It was born of a growing realization that Modernism was a brilliant and original concept that had been mined out over time. Even its most stalwart admirers had the ominous suspicion that its fields of arid buildings, blank canvases and scholastic entrenchment meant that a great era was over. Modernism had done it all so a new idea was needed. But what can be new when all has been done?

If you decide that the only tactic left is a revival of everything from reviled phony Greek bank facades to slick erotic salon art as well as the more stylish aspects of modernism itself you begin in an embarrassed position. Mannerism all over again. You are open to charges that your art is everything from a reflection of a Reagan/Thatcher conservative backlash to a revival of Albert Speer’s Nazi Neo-Classicism to a closet return of art to its function as a glittering power and status symbol serving the rich and trashing the bohemian traditions of Modernism. Post-Mod inclusiveness also has a gluttonous edge of imperialism.

If saddled with such encumbering baggage, a perfectly predictable defensive posture is that of the aristocratic dandy, the mannerist conscious of his own purposeful artificiality who does everything with a cocked eyebrow that suggests he is only kidding. But kidding whom? A wise man has suggested that all irony is self-directed inward at one’s own shortcomings. That feels right but the average sensitive citizen faced with irony feels he is being mocked. Post-Modernism often leaves the saccharine taste of an entertainer who holds his audience in contempt. It turns classical gravitas into the blank stare of a deadpan comedian.

But Jencks insists the discovery of the style is akin to the re-born experience of persons newly converted. It has released an astonishing amount of energy. If one begins by thinking Jencks’ book includes too much, one ends wondering if it enfolds too little.

After reading it, one’s mind can run over a random catalogue of apparently unrelated recent arts experiences and finds them revealingly Post-Mod in personality. Vikram Seth’s novel “The Golden Gate” revives classical iambic pentameter to sing the yuppie life in contemporary San Francisco. Its perfumed miniaturization is perfect for the subject and exists on the outer borders of Francesco Clemente’s exotic perversity. Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Aunt Julia and the Script Writer” mixes popular kitsch and narrative devices so classic as to be archaic into a melange-tale with multiple points of view and no particular structural center.

The other night the opera “Nixon in China” turned up on the tube and turned out to be an extraordinary Post-Modernist trope. It made a hero of a disgraced President using the form of Communist Agitprop Social Realist theater. One of its most effective devices was the use of imagery already pre-existent in our minds--overstuffed chairs with their weird dust-covers we all recall from pictures of Nixon’s meeting with Mao, Pat in her red coat visiting a pig farm, a close-up of glasses raised in a toast by Nixon and Chou En-lai.

The opera was stylistically brilliant but the device of using remembered imagery seemed familiar. Did it begin with the image of a dictator’s wife standing at a podium in “Evita”? The cult film classic “Pennies From Heaven” cloaked itself in remembered imagery from Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” to old songs lip-synched by the actors. Lip-sync is a good metaphor for Post-Modernism.

Once the flood gates of association swing open there is a veritable deluge of linkage between all kinds of recent art and Post-Modernism. Forget for the moment about the films of Spielberg and Lucas with their endless amusing reworking of old movie forms and their crooked-smile ironies. The Post-Mod use of recycled imagery even extends to art-gallery forms not usually associated with Post-Modernism. The recent fad for “appropriation” is a more sophisticated (and boring) form of the same thing.

It may be that the main tool of Post-Modernism is the quotation mark. It stakes out its “territory” by surrounding the existing past with “punctuation” that annexes it to the present and gives it a certain sarcastic “originality.”

What it doesn’t do with quotation marks it does with italics .