Post-Modernism: Lecture

Rejection of rules - modernism ended up being blind obedience to rules, although this was not its intention.

Modernism is associated with: experimentation, innovation, individualism
Post-Modernism is the opposite

Some overlap - both concerned with modern life/technology/ new materials/communication

Questions conventions, space for 'new voices', no rules, starts as a critique of the International style

UN PROJECT - UK Living Wage Advert Example - OUCA401

Ogilvy & Mather: Living Wage Foundation 'Living Wage'

UN PROJECT - New York income disparity - OUCA401

Statistics

• In 2012, 10.6 million people in America were considered the ‘working poor’, by living in poverty.
• 1% of NYC residents earned nearly 45% of the city’s income in 2007. The 1%, which is about 90,000 households, had an average income of $3.7 million, equivalent to $10,000 a day. This is what the city’s poorest 1 million households earn in a year.
• The top 5 per cent of households earned $864,394, or 88 times as much as the poorest 20 per cent,

Minimum Wage Facts

• Currently, city public workers earn $11.79 an hour, but City Mayor Bill de Blasio has plans to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, by 2018. The increase is expected to cost $238 million over the next five years, and there are some experts who worry that higher wages for public workers could cause high unemployment.

Facts

• Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography at MIT, developed the Living Wage Calculator to compare the cost of living with the minimum wage across the U.S. Glasmeier says that firms can use it to estimate how to pay their employees fairly, while workers can use it to see how high the cost of living is when considering moving to take a new job, or just as information about their home area. 

• Income disparity can cause changes in life expectancy. In Brooklyn's poorest neighbourhood of Brownsville, the average life expectancy is 74.1 years, whilst in Wall Street, the life expectancy is 11 years longer.

• Luxury apartments which the rich live in, such as the West Side Trump development, tower over nearby housing projects that the poor live in.

Context of Practice 1 Lecture: Modernity and Modernism

Trottoir Roullant - Paris - electric moving walkaway - urbanisation - great cities spring up - work shifts from land to factories - work time + leisure time. Telephone invented - more communication. Transport - railways developed. Because of railways, world time becomes standardised (universally agreed time).

Enlightenment period in 18th Century when scientific/philosophical thinking emerged - new forms of thinking.

Umbrellas - thought of as technology/modernity.

1850s Paris = New Paris. Old Paris = narrow streets, run down Housing. Haussman (architect) redesigned Paris - large Boulevards - easier to get the army in to control civil unrest, cleaner, working class move outside city centre.

Modernity shown in literature - James Joyce - wrote 'Ulysses'- and photography (cinema).

Modernism in Design:
-Form follows function
-Anti-historicism - no need to look backwards to older styles
-Truth to materials - simple geometric forms appropriate to the materials being used
-Technology
-Internationalism - language of design that could be understood on an international basis

How Laundrette can be described as a piece of postmodern advertising - OUCA401

Postmodernism was a direct response to modernism, which aimed to create a modern form of art that would be different from the mainstream. Postmodernism was created due to people believing that modernism was not different enough. Leading post modernist artists include Andy Warhol, with his pop art.

The Levi’s Laundrette advert, for the 501 range of jeans, can be seen as a piece of postmodern advertising. It featured people in a Laundrette, with Nick Kamen undressing and putting those clothes in the washing machines, whilst the women admired him. A year before the advert was created, MTV music videos was launched, which the Levi’s advert was clearly influenced by, as it plays the Marvin Gaye song ‘through the grapevine’. This advert therefore fits with post-modernism due to its sexual nature, and because adverts tended to sexualise women, whilst this advert made the man the sexual object. This move away from the norm can be seen as postmodern advertising.

This advert was very successful, with the sales of 501’s increasing by 800%.

References

'Marketing - The Retro Revolution' - by Stephen Brown

'Advertising Menswear: Masculinity and Fashion in the British Media since 1945' -by Paul Jobling