ABSTRACT
My focus in this chapter will be on what I think offers the best model for a poetics of postmodernism: postmodern architecture, the one art form in which the label seems to refer, uncontested, to a generally agreed upon corpus of works. Throughout, my (non-specialist) discussion will be clearly indebted to the work of architect/theorists like Charles Jencks and Paolo Portoghesi, the major voices in the postmodern debates. This will be my model, because the characteristics of this architecture are also those of postmodernism at large-from historiographic metafictions like Christa Wolf’s Cassandra or
E.L.Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel to metafilmic historical movies like Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, from the video art of Douglas Da vis to the photography of Vincent Leo. And all of these art works share one major contradictory characteristic: they are all overtly historical and unavoidably political, precisely because they are formally parodic. I will argue throughout this study that postmodernism is a fundamentally contradictory enterprise: its art forms (and its theory) at once use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and provisionally and, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past. In implicitly contesting in this way such concepts as aesthetic originality and textual closure, postmodernist art offers a new model for mapping the borderland between art and the world, a model that works from a position within both and yet not totally within either, a model that is profoundly implicated in, yet still capable of criticizing, that which it seeks to describe.
