Discourse: Keedy's Zombie Modernism

Key concepts from Zombie Modernism:

• Design's modernism is an ill-considered version of art modernism, one that is based on an Enlightenment faith in progress and singular answers, reinforced by a rationalist universe.
• The core philosophy of modernist design is in instrumentalist, or pragmatic thought. It is goal-oriented, practical, and distrustful of all things metaphysical.
• Modernism is no longer a style, it's an ideology, and that ideology is conservatism.
• Meaning is arbitrary. Meaning is unstable and has to be made by the reader. Each reader will read differently.
• Art exists outside (above) society and is expected to be critical of it. Design exists inside (below) society and is expected to serve it.
• Postmodernism has been particularly important in acknowledging "the multiple forms of otherness as they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender, and sexuality, race and class, temporal (configurations of sensibility) and spatial geographic locations and dislocations."
  

Here is one of the greatest examples of the rational-minded and pragmatic era of modernism - Paul Rand's IBM poster. There is absolutely nothing ambiguous about what it represents or what it could mean. Rand cleverly replaces letters with their phonographic counterparts - an I to an eye, a B to a bee - with a singular reasoning, making the audience believe they're participating in the design à la the Beggarstaffs. But the truth is that the metaphorical curtain closes on the audience before they can even manage to take their seats. And while it is at the forefront of design in its time, this sort of aged mentality - the modernist zombie - has no place in today's design world. The audience of today requires something immediately "I"-catching, something which will take attention and keep it, even from just a glance; and this Rand masterpiece of modernism, while beautiful in its simplicity, could never hold its own in today's postmodern world.




Another staple of modernist design is Lucien Bernhard, and as seen here, there is no mistaking what his poster (on the right) is about. Using the primary colors and simple geometric shapes to create images, Bernhard delivers to the audience a simple and straight-forward approach to a household item -- matches. Again on a plain black background like Rand, this poster displays all the key characteristics of modernism.




Rauschenberg hits all the postmodernist notes -- meaning within his work is entirely up to the reader, since to impose a single text or image on the reader is authoritarian and oppressive. Rauschenberg makes text visually ambiguous and difficult to fathom, as a way to respect the rights of the reader. It is as if his work is saying what any postmodernist wishes: to not look for a mythical modernist ideal, or pretend that art theory is a viable theoretical model for design; that we don't need to conserve our past and resist change. We need to construct our future theoretical discourse, carefully, around the particular and exciting context of design. We must allow ourselves to look at design in new and challenging ways, we must look for... ourselves.

It is clear that, staring into any of his postmodern collages, the reader will find a different meaning than any other person, and will prescribe their own theories on what it may represent or what it sort of statement it makes, but the underlying idea under all of this is simply that in these days, the only modernists are the living dead -- zombies trying to feed off a postmodern world. Where's Shaun of the Design when you need him?