Gary has been thinking about Federation Square in connection with his long running concerns about the modern and postmodern in visual and urban cultures. I posted a pretty long comment to his post, and thought I’d repeat it here as it is very much my kind of discussion.
[Federation Square] is monumental and spectacular – when I visited it was still being completed and I was at the opening of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image – which is mysterious, beautiful, sexy, and hip. I think that rather than thinking in binary terms (modern:postmodern) we might need to think about the avant-garde in postmodernity – it shares some of modernism’s desire for change and also the postmodern’s celebration of difference, while on the other hand rejecting the brutal disengagement of modernism and embracing play instead. And all these logics of value come together in exactly this kind of architecture (and in a different way, the Brisbane Powerhouse). I posted some thoughts on this last week. I lie, I have been thinking throughout the entire progress of my masters about this.
At least, the avant-garde lives on, not as a self-conscious “movement”, but as a way of structuring aesthetic value that appears to be politically motivated and yet manages to be devastatingly fashionable at the same time.
2 responses to “Architecture, Modernism, and Postmodernism”
Jean, I’ve had some bits and sips and drinks at the Powerhouse some time ago. It was one Xmas– nothing was happening artistically. I remember lots of space on the outside of the building great river views, and spacious interiors.
Cannot comment on the avant garde in postmodernity nature at the Brisbane Powerhouse. What I gleaned from speaking to various artists was how tame and professional it all was. I admired the extensive support for the arts and the commitment to public art.
Queensland had picked up where Don Dunstan in SA had left off in the 1970s.
Yeah, the PH is kind of a fringe enclosure, if I can put it that way – all these groups and artists and artforms that used to perform or exhibit in the cracks in the 80s and 90s now have an official home…I have to say I love the place, particularly the fact that all that industrial “evidence” (the steel walkways, the bare walls, the graffiti) have been left behind.