Ron Burgundy, Jencks

This piece by Jencks was extremely confusing to me. The preface of it didn't seem to lead into the main points of the article well enough so I was terribly confused on what the author's intent was in the article. It seemed that Jencks was writing on some aspects of the postmodern era that characterize it, specifically looking at art and architecture. Although much of the article was extremely hard to grasp I tried to make sense of a particular section in which Jencks wrote about the tendency of the postmodern architechture to be a play between the old style and the new technology. Jencks talks about the ironic "cardboard architecture" that is meant to resemble the classical style of historical architectural pieces but is made up of new innovative, and more affordable materials such as cardboard (291). He explains how in the postmodern era artists often show reverence and make reference to the past but to reform it in a new way that makes it postmodern. This way of explaining the concept of postmodern makes me connect it closely with the avant-garde, which is against the traditional. In particular it makes me think of an episode of project runway in which the designers were meant to create avant-garde pieces to display on the runway. What the different designers came up with were extremely interesting and reflect the idea of being inspired by the past but recreating it in a new way. All of their garments resembled a certain era of fashion and history but had been recreated with new twists of modernity which in essence made them very postmodern pieces. They were pieces that we would associate with certain periods of history but also recognize that they were a new innovative take on an old traditional thing. As I read ideas about the concept of postmodernism such as this one, it leads me to believe that much of what can be considered "postmodern", specifically speaking in the realm of art, consists of aspects of the old traditional works that are reformed with a more modern perspective.