Postmodern Art
Basically postmodern thinking started in the Arts and Architecture.
Not quite I think, though it depends on how you use the term I guess. Postmodern
thinking definitely starts with philosophy and theology, and can be traced back to its roots in the Christian subjectivism of Kierkegaard and the atheistic nihilism of German philosophers, and the pessimistic humanism of the early 20th century in the wake of World War 1, all of which challenged some of the basic assumptions and aspirations of Modernism. Postmodern architecture and Art are symptoms, not the cause. The term itself may only have been popularly applied to philosophy recently, but the concepts and schools of thought were there long before we called it Post Modernism.
In the forties Architecture was still straightforward, lines and windows straight and harmonious. From within the arts a contra movement came up. Borrowing from all sorts of styles from the past these elements could be brought together in a yet functional way of building.
Not all architecture was like that. The Art Deco movement began earlier than the forties, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) had very few straight lines and was as weird as anything built before or since. Postmodern architecture was not the first that borrowed and blended all sorts of styles either. That has happened throughout architectural history, creating some hideous chimeras.
One of the confusing things is that Modern Art (the art movement that grew out of post-Impressionism, into Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, etc and occupied much of the 20th Century) has
post-modern philosophical underpinnings and is not a product of philosophical Modernism.
Still I am of opinion that the real roots ly in the Dada movement of the interbellum period.This is rehashed art.
Dada was not art at all. That was the point of Dada. It was self-consciously anti-Art. It was an attempt at setting up a kind of paradox - its point was that it was pointless, its art was in its non-art. It was a kind of artistic feedback process that in the end I think proved the rule by being the exception and made you able to recognise what Art is by comparing it with Dada. It was like the negative space around an object that enables you to identify it. It was the art world equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.
