Patchworks of the Possible

Reinvesting Meaning in 'Postmodern' Art

In contemporary discourse, postmodernism is frequently reduced to a catch-all for fragmented, ironic, or pastiche-driven art, a flattening that obscures how these same techniques can carry radically different aesthetic and political intentions. While irony, eclecticism, and the blurring of high and low culture define much postmodern art, not all works using these devices are cynically detached or nihilistic. 

Thomas Pynchon’s novels are dense, fragmented, and full with intertextual references – all hallmarks of postmodern fiction. Yet his stories are imbued with a deep concern for history, technology and power relations. The paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49 is not merely stylistic; it reflects a sincere critique of systems of control and the erosion of personal agency. In Vineland, this preoccupation takes the form of a meditation on the legacy of 60s counterculture and its suppression by the increasingly ubiquitous state apparatus. The novel's apparent lightness of tone conceals a darker interrogation of how memory, media and surveillance overlap to neutralize dissent. Pynchon describes the transformation of resistance into nostalgia and the commodification of rebellion, while the omnipresent Tube echoes the broader postmodern condition of a reality thoroughly mediated by images. Vineland retains Pynchon's characteristic playfulness and humor, for sure, but it is also critical and profoundly human, revealing the tragic decline of utopian hopes in the context of corporate capitalism.

In films like Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, Kléber Mendonça Filho blends realism with genre tropes – a postmodern trait – yet the result is neither hollow nor purely stylistic. Instead, these formal experiments are deeply rooted in Brazilian urban and social realities. The fragmentation in his storytelling mirrors the fractured nature of class structures and memory in contemporary Recife. His aesthetic is political, and his politics are aesthetic: each cinematic technique reinforces a lived experience of inequality (the tensions and clashes between classes), resistance, and identity.

Musically, Manu Chao is a collage artist par excellence. But while his songs span languages, genres, and geographies, this eclecticism does not amount to a playful anything-goes devoid of meaning; it reflects a politics of internationalism and solidarity (for years it was the main soundtrack of alter-globalism); it uses musical pastiche to elevate scattered voices, to protest borders, and to foreground the experiences of migrants and the marginalized. In contrast to the depoliticized, ironic pastiche often critiqued in postmodernism, his patchwork aesthetic is a joyous call to action.

To this list we might also add the work of Judy Baca and the broader tradition of L.A. muralism. Far from embracing postmodern detachment, Baca’s monumental community murals – such as The Great Wall of Los Angeles – reimagine public space as a canvas for collective memory and historical redress. These visual narratives, built collaboratively with hundreds of young people from marginalized communities, defy commodification through their scale, permanence, and rootedness in place. They turn postmodern plurality into an act of solidarity rather than dispersion, and in doing so, exemplify an aesthetics of resistance grounded in class and grassroots political practice. 

To group all these artists under a monolithic view of postmodernism is to misread their work. Yes, they use techniques usually associated with postmodernism, but with radically different intentions. Their art is not a celebration of surface, but a dive into structure, systemic logic, and soul rebellion. In an era where cultural production is increasingly remix-based, they demonstrate that not all collage is kitsch, not all pastiche is empty; that some patchworks are maps of survival, and some fragments carry the charge of a future still in formation.

Though stylistically diverse, they share a refusal to treat aesthetic form as mere ornament, operating at the crossroads of artistic invention and political intervention. In this, they align more closely with the modernists, resisting accommodation with capitalism, eschewing production tailored simply to the demands of mass media. Style does not dissolve into spectacle; rather, it becomes a way of tracing the fractures of subjectivity under neoliberalism without conceding to fatalism. The subject in their work may be wounded, dispersed, surveilled, but never entirely crushed. Even in fragmentation a voice persists, asking what it means to live, to love, to resist, to remember...  

Through a class-conscious lens, they illuminate rather than obscure the contours of social reality. Aesthetic value arises not in retreat of social struggle, but in its articulation – even when that struggle appears stalled. By reclaiming explicit social themes often dismissed or treated with suspicion in postmodern discourse, they reinvest critique with emotional content and historical force. They gain in acuity: their art does not simply reflect the world as it is; it exposes everything that should not be, and gestures toward what might yet come. It opens space for counter-histories, ways of seeing uncolonized by the dominant imaginaries. Meaning – or its pursuit – endures; and from the cracks, alternative visions of the future may still emerge.