What does the term ‘postmodernism’ mean, and where did it come from? On the one hand, it is a mode of experience, a broken mirror held up to the utopian visions of modernism. On the other, it is a visual style, characterised by heightened historicism and self-awareness. At the V&A postmodernism begins and ends with design, not theory.

The exhibition argues that postmodernism began in resistance to authority, but became enmeshed in the very circuits that it had wanted to dismantle. This narrative arc is the backbone of the exhibition, and is eerily similar to that of modernism itself; when avant-garde and kitsch become indistinguishable, how do you know what is art and what is not?

When viewing the exhibition, one senses that the same argument could have been made with far fewer objects. However, perhaps it is fitting that the exhibition is so encompassing, and at times overwhelming? This is an exhibition trying to make sense of something that denounces the formal hierarchy of knowledge in the first place.

In the late 1960s Italy becomes a centre for critical practice, exemplified by designers Alessandro Mendini and Ettore Sottsass. Here is purposeful impurity, not purity. Monolithic modernism is replaced by plurality. The exhibition emphasises the significance of design, rather than theory, for the foundation of postmodernism. Hans Hollein’s submission to the 1980 Venice Biennale of Architecture, The Presence of the Past, is a particularly impressive installation of a facade of columns that quote from the entire history of architecture. Hollein’s facade exemplifies the ‘elegiac sense of the past’ that modernism itself lacked.

Modernism, from this point of view, was intent on eliding the trauma of the twentieth century. Modernity too quickly proclaimed itself the apotheosis of progress, and with it promised faster cars, more efficient appliances, and beautiful living. One need only think of the Bauhaus ‘workshops for modernity’ in post-World War I Germany, where technology and the arts could finally be unified in a harmonious whole. But the second half of the twentieth century brought with it its own reckoning: the reality of the Holocaust, the legcy of European colonialism, and the inequalities that persisted in modern societies everywhere.

Postmodernism at the V&A does not tackle modernity on its own terms. Instead, it is content to leave it as an ahistorical monolith, erected only to be torn down. For postmodernism, the exhibition argues, its own turning point is the founding of design collectives Studio Alchyme in 1978 and Memphis in 1981. What began as a ‘conceptual indifference’, then became pop culture and luxury marketing. We come full circle with modernism; style becomes cultural battleground. Yet the exhibition itself seems content to dwell purely on style and not nearly as much on subversion – absent is the actual history that gives postmodern culture its context.

The exhibition ends by asking whether we still live in a postmodern era. This, we sense, is the ultimate point; like it or not, we are all postmodern now.

Until Jan 15

JENNY KWAN TANG