Modernist and Postmodernist Design Theory Lectures

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  Helvetica (2007) dir Gary Hustwit.

Modernist Animation Example

This is a great example of a modernist animation, where Chuck Jones manages to strip his characters down to a straight line and a dot. It uses careful colours and looks very stylish throughout, capturing the modernism approach to art.

The Postmodern

Form (female) follows function (male)

1960s - beginnings

1970s - established as term

1980s - recognisable style

1980s & 90s - dominant theoretical discourse

Today - tired & simmering

There are certain things we are taught through socialisation.

This isn't just modernism, is is society and there is a bias in the way we describe the world and ourselves.

• The history of art and everything really is very very male, they are almost all built with this patriarchal bias.
• Post modern theory and philosophy tries to unpick these biases before it starts to see anything as a truth.

Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology

• All of western thinking/philosophy has been flawed and all has been based on setting up very simple opposites between things.
• There is always one superior side and one inferior, it's about implicitly judging.

Eg- MAN/WOMAN, WHITE/BLACK, CULTURE/NATURE.

Logocentrism - it's a biased reading used in debating.

Helene Cixous - The Laugh of the Medusa

• All the things we privilege in life, are actually masculine in themselves.

Phallogocentrism - similar to Logocentrism, instead by hidden masculine biases.

Edward Said - Orieltalism

• All the privileged things aren't just masculine they are in fact western and white

Hegemony - We’re all forced to think in the same way subtly.

Patriarchy relies on people recognising themselves in their own oppression.

This is an animation that I found which basically outlines the feeling of living in a postmodern world, the character seems to be doubtful of the world that surrounds him and the animation relates to culture, literature, fashion and uses metaphors throughout to show it's meaning. I thought it was a good example to show the frustration that people may have felt around this time of a lost world with seemingly no real meaning to it.