What Is Postmodern Design - Essay Example

A piece of “postmodern” jewelry may be both postmodern in nature, and, perhaps modern.

     One manner in which postmodern jewelry may differ from that which came before is the use to which it is put and its place within the wardrobe of the person who wears it. Thus Virpilatis, the Lithuanian jewelry designer, consciously creates jewelry suitable for everyday use:

I like it when a piece of jewelry is worn

     along with a pair of jeans and becomes scratched

     while used. Then it lives. (Virpilatis, 1999)

This is essentially the opposite of the traditional view of jewelry, in which it is characterized as a precious, fragile and thoroughly “dead” object that must be preserved from use. In Virpilatis’s view, the jewelry becomes part of the wearer and thus, like the rest of his/her clothes, and the person himself, subject to everyday use.

     The postmodern attitude towards jewelry counters the hierarchy of materials that exists within traditional jewelry. Thus diamonds and platinum are valorized over simple stones and steel. Within postmodern design all materials are of equal value, and the finished work does not depend upon any aesthetic sense of “beauty”, but rather function or intellectual ideas. Thus Virpilatis uses raw amber, plastic and pieces of metal that he picks up off the street.

     The postmodern piece of jewelry may seem raw and crude:

(Tangoland, 2006)

When brand-new, such a piece seems rather “unfinished” – it must be used, scratched, made “alive” in order to fulfill its truest purpose.

     Simplicity of design is another feature of postmodern jewelry that enables the wearer and the observer to inculcate their own meaning into the piece without influence from the outside. Consider the following:

(Chateau, 2006)

It is a bangle and yet it appears to have a ring of some kind attached to it. Both bangle and ring are very simple, almost primitive in nature. One without the other would perhaps be of litter interest, but together they form a whole that is beyond their individual elements.  The wearer/observer is able to attach their own meaning to the piece without being forced into an interpretation by the designer. Another piece, that combines elements of many different cultural forms, is called, oddly enough Vegan Erotica:

(Vegan Erotica, 2006)

A sense of humor is perhaps seldom associated with jewelry, let alone the often earnest intellectual origins of postmodernism, but here an element of humor most definitely exists.

     The name of the piece, which is actually too small to be a traditional punk dog-collar piece (and too large to be a bangle/bracelet) juxtaposes the pure, almost sterile images of “vegan” with the entirely opposite images raised by “erotica”. In a sense, in contrast to the other pieces already discussed, there is an overload of information and interpretations possible for the piece of jewelry.

     Juxtaposition of images occurs in the following piece of jewelry:

(Dark Poison Victorian Cross)

The mixture of crucifix and leather design makes a startling combination. Again, the two parts of the piece make a whole more than the two would possess if separate. But there is no seamless combination of the elements but rather harsh, apparently unconsidered joining that accentuates the fact that the two pieces were not designed together.

This is perhaps the most pristine definition of postmodernism. It is deliberately unaesthetic, and yet powerful at the same time. The deliberate rejection of ideas such as “beauty” and “elegance”, paradigms that are almost indelibly related to jewelry, makes postmodern jewelry challenging.

So postmodern design, in relation to jewelry, implies a variety of different types of form and function. An exact definition is impossible and counterproductive, for the essence of postmodernism is an all-inclusiveness that essentially defies the limiting boundaries of Cartesian opposites. Look again at the Dark Poison Victorian Cross, it is both a traditional cross and a piece of postmodern design. The two are not necessarily contradictory within the postmodern paradigm, as contradiction is the essence of the form.