Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism. Related terms are modern, modernist, contemporary, and postmodern.
In art, Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism[2][3][4] and makes use of the works of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.[5][6][7] Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator.[8][9]
In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking.[10] A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).[11]
The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term avant-garde, with which the movement was labeled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).[12]
Present-day perspectives
Some commentators define Modernism as a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.[13] From this perspective, Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end. Others focus on Modernism as an aesthetic introspection. This facilitates consideration of specific reactions to the use of technology in the First World War, and anti-technological and nihilistic aspects of the works of diverse thinkers and artists spanning the period from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to Samuel Beckett (1906–1989).[14]
The first half of the 19th century for Europe was marked by a number of wars and revolutions, which contributed to a turning from the realities of the political and social fragmentation that were taking place, and a further trend towards Romanticism.[citation needed] Romanticism had been, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a revolt against the effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values,[2][3][4] while emphasizing individual, subjective experience, the sublime, and the supremacy of "Nature", as subjects for art, and revolutionary, or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty.
By mid-century, however, a synthesis of the ideas of Romanticism with more stable political ideas had emerged,[citation needed] partly in reaction to the failed Romantic and democratic Revolutions of 1848. It was exemplified by Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik and by the "practical" philosophical ideas of Auguste Comte's positivism.[citation needed] This stabilizing synthesis of the Realist political and Romantic aesthetic ideology, was called by various names: in Great Britain it is the Victorian era. Central to this synthesis were common assumptions and institutional frames of reference, including the religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical physics, as well as the idea that the depiction of external reality from an objective standpoint was not only possible but desirable.[citation needed] Cultural critics and historians called this ideology, realism, although this term is not universal. In philosophy, the rationalist, materialist and positivist movements established the primacy of reason.
Against this current, however, ran another series of ideas, some of which were a direct continuation of Romantic schools of thought. Amongst those who followed these ideas were the English poets and painters that constituted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who, from about 1850, opposed the dominant trend of industrial Victorian England, because of their "opposition to technical skill without inspiration"[15] They were influenced by the writings of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who had strong feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working classes, in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Britain.[16] Rationalism has also had other opponents. In particular, reaction to the philosopher Hegel's (1770–1831) ) dialectic view of civilization and history from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. Together these different reactions, challenged the comforting ideas of certainty derived from a belief in civilization, history, or pure reason.[citation needed]
Indeed from the 1870s onward, the idea that history and civilization were inherently progressive, and that progress was always good (and had no sharp breaks), came under increasing attack. The composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) (Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1853–70) and playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) were prominent in their critiques of contemporary civilization and for warnings that accelerating "progress" would lead to the creation of individuals detached from social values and isolated from their fellow men.[citation needed] Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, and could not move forward in its present form. In addition the philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) (The World as Will and Idea, 1819) called into question the previous optimism, and his ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Nietzsche.
Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–82), author of On Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and political scientist Karl Marx (1818–83), author of Capital (1867). Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness. In particular, the notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Karl Marx argued that there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system, and that the workers were anything but free. Both thinkers were major influences on the development of modernism.[citation needed] This is not to say that all modernists, or modernist movements rejected either religion, or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that modernism questioned the axioms of the previous age.[citation needed]
Historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. William Everdell, for example, has argued that modernism began in the 1870s, when metaphorical (or ontological) continuity began to yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind's (1831–1916) Dedekind cut, and Ludwig Boltzmann's (1844–1906) statistical thermodynamics.[17] Everdell also thinks modernism in painting began in 1885-86 with Seurat's Divisionism, the "dots" used to paint "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." On the other hand Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real Modernist",[18] though he also wrote, "What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Flaubert, too, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture)."[19] And cabaret, which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, may be said to have begun in France in 1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre, the beginning of the ironic monologue, and the founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts.[20]
The beginning of the 20th century marked the first time a movement in the arts was described as "avant-garde"—a term previously used in military and political contexts,[12] which remained to describe movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo.[citation needed] Much later Surrealism gained the fame among the public of being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".[21]
Separately, in the arts and letters, two ideas originating in France would have particular impact. The first was impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air). Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon, the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement.
The second French school was Symbolism, which literary historians see beginning with the poet Charles Baudelaire (1861–67) (Fleur du mal, 1857), and including the later poets, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), Paul Verlaine (1844–96), Stephane Mallarme (1842–98), and Paul Valery (1871–1945). The symbolists "stressed the priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and were especially interested in "the musical properties of language."[22]
At the same time social, political, and economic forces were at work that would become the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. Among these was steam-powered industrialization, and especially the development of railways, starting in Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering and architecture associated with this. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron and plate glass exhibition hall built for The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington Station (1854) and King's Cross Station (1852). These technological advances led to the building of later structures like the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889). The latter broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. These engineering marvels[citation needed] radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily lives of people.
The human misery of crowded industrial cities, as well as, on the other hand, the new possibilities created by science, brought changes that would shake European civilization, which had, until then, regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance.[citation needed] Furthermore the human experience of time itself was altered, with the development of electric telegraph from 1837, and the adoption of Standard Time by British railway companies from 1845, and in the rest of the world over the next fifty years.
The changes that took place at the beginning of the 20th-century are emphasized by the fact that many modern disciplines, including sciences such as physics, mathematics, neuroscience and economics, and arts such as ballet and architecture, call their pre-20th century forms classical.
In the 1880s a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of contemporary techniques. The growing movement in art paralleled developments in physics, such as Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905); innovations in industry, such as the development of the internal combustion engine; and the increased role of the social sciences in public policy. Indeed it was argued that, if the nature of reality itself was in question, and if previous restrictions which had been in place around human activity were dissolving, then art, too, would have to radically change. Thus, in the first twenty years of the 20th century many writers, thinkers, and artists broke with the traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music; the results were abstract art, atonal music, and the stream of consciousness technique in the novel.[citation needed]
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), is considered to have re-invented the art of painting. Many of Picasso's friends and colleagues, even fellow painters Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, were upset when they saw this painting.
Influential in the early days of Modernism were the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Mach argued, beginning in the 1880s with The Science of Mechanics (1883), that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of parts of the mind. Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (1895). According to Freud's ideas, all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. As a philosopher of science Ernst Mach was a major influence on logical positivism, and through his criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's theory of relativity. According to these ideas of Mach, the relations of objects in nature were not guaranteed but known only through a sort of mental shorthand.[citation needed] This represented a break with the past, in that previously it was believed that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as it was, on an individual, as, for example, in John Locke's (1632–1704) empiricism, which saw the mind beginning as a tabula rasa (Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1690).[citation needed] Freud's description of subjective states, involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung (1875–1961) with the idea of the collective unconscious, with which the conscious mind fought or embraced. While Charles Darwin's work remade the aristotelian concept of "man, the animal" in the public mind, Jung suggested that human impulses toward breaking social norms were not the product of childishness, or ignorance, but rather derived from the essential nature of the human animal.[citation needed]
Friedrich Nietzsche was another major precursor of modernism[need quotation to verify] with a philosophy in which psychological drives, specifically the 'Will to power', were more important than facts, or things. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of time[23] His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on twentieth-century novelists," especially those modernists who used the stream of consciousness technique, such as Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs, (1915), James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927).[24] Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything"[25] His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect.[25] These various thinkers were united by a distrust of Victorian[citation needed] positivism and certainty.
Out of this collision of ideals derived from Romanticism, and an attempt to find a way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of works, which, while their authors considered them extensions of existing trends in art, broke the implicit contract with the general public that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and others in the years between 1900 and 1910.
Important literary precursors of Modernism were: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) (Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880);[citation needed] Walt Whitman (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–91); Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) (Les Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (1854–91) (Illuminations, 1874); August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including, the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902), The Ghost Sonata (1907).
This modern movement broke with the past in the first three decades of the 20th century, and radically redefined various art forms. The following is list of significant literary figures between 1900-1930 (though it includes a number whose careers extended beyond 1930):
On the eve of the First World War a growing tension and unease with the social order, already seen in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the agitation of "radical" parties, also manifested itself in artistic works in every medium which radically simplified or rejected previous practice. Young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings—a step that none of the impressionists, not even Cézanne, had taken. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Demoiselles d'Avignon, Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F-sharp minor, his first composition "without a tonal center". In 1911, Kandinsky painted Bild mit Kreis (Picture With a Circle) which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1913—the year of Edmund Husserl's Ideas, Niels Bohr's quantized atom, Ezra Pound's founding of imagism, the Armory Show in New York, and, in Saint Petersburg, the "first futurist opera," Victory Over the Sun—another Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, working in Paris for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed The Rite of Spring for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, that depicted human sacrifice.
These developments began to give a new meaning to what was termed "modernism": It embraced discontinuity, rejecting smooth change in everything from biology to fictional character development and filmmaking. It approved disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple realism in literature and art, and rejecting or dramatically altering tonality in music. This set modernists apart from 19th-century artists, who had tended to believe not only in smooth change ("evolutionary" rather than "revolutionary") but also in the progressiveness of such change—"progress". Writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and musicians like Brahms were not radicals or "Bohemians", but were instead valued members of society who produced art that added to society, even when critiquing its less desirable aspects. Modernism, while still "progressive", increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore recast the artist as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening.
Futurism exemplifies this trend. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F.T. Marinetti's first manifesto. Soon afterward a group of painters (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto. Modeled on the famous "Communist Manifesto" of the previous century, such manifestoes put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. Strongly influenced by Bergson and Nietzsche, Futurism was part of the general trend of Modernist rationalization of disruption.
Modernist philosophy and art were still viewed as only a part of the larger social movement. Artists such as Klimt and Cézanne, and composers such as Mahler and Richard Strauss were "the terrible moderns"—those more avant-garde were more heard of than heard. Polemics in favor of geometric or purely abstract painting were largely confined to "little magazines" (like The New Age in the UK) with tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, but were not seen as representative of the Edwardian mainstream, which was more inclined towards a Victorian faith in progress and liberal optimism.
However, the Great War and its subsequent events were the cataclysmic upheavals that late 19th-century artists such as Brahms had worried about, and avant-gardists had embraced. First, the failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earth—prior to the war, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. Second, the birth of a machine age changed the conditions of life—machine warfare became a touchstone of the ultimate reality. Finally, the immensely traumatic nature of the experience dashed basic assumptions: realism seemed bankrupt when faced with the fundamentally fantastic nature of trench warfare, as exemplified by books such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Moreover, the view that mankind was making slow and steady moral progress came to seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter. The First World War fused the harshly mechanical geometric rationality of technology with the nightmarish irrationality of myth.
Thus modernism, which had been a minority taste before the war, came to define the 1920s. It appeared in Europe in such critical movements as Dada and then in constructive movements such as surrealism, as well as in smaller movements such as the Bloomsbury Group. Again, impressionism was a precursor: breaking with the idea of national schools, artists and writers adopted ideas of international movements. Surrealism, cubism, Bauhaus, and Leninism are all examples of movements that rapidly found adopters far beyond their geographic origins.
Each of these "modernisms," as some observers labelled them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new results. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete.[citation needed]
Exhibitions, theatre, cinema, books and buildings all served to cement in the public view the perception that the world was changing. Hostile reaction often followed, as paintings were spat upon, riots organized at the opening of works, and political figures denounced modernism as unwholesome and immoral. At the same time, the 1920s were known as the "Jazz Age", and the public showed considerable enthusiasm for cars, air travel, the telephone and other technological advances.
By 1930, modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 modernism, which emphasized its continuity with a past while rebelling against it, and against the aspects of that period which seemed excessively mannered, irrational, and emotionalistic. The post-World War period, at first, veered either to systematization or nihilism and had, as perhaps its most paradigmatic movement, Dada.
While some writers attacked the madness of the new modernism, others described it as soulless and mechanistic. Among modernists there were disputes about the importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in society. Modernism comprised a series of sometimes contradictory responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it. In the end science and scientific rationality, often taking models from the 18th-century Enlightenment, came to be seen as the source of logic and stability, while the basic primitive sexual and unconscious drives, along with the seemingly counter-intuitive workings of the new machine age, were taken as the basic emotional substance. From these two seemingly incompatible poles, modernists began to fashion a complete weltanschauung that could encompass every aspect of life.
By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture. With the increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the day.[citation needed] As modernism was studied in universities, it was developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. Popular culture, which was not derived from high culture but instead from its own realities (particularly mass production) fueled much modernist innovation. By 1930 The New Yorker magazine began publishing new and modern ideas by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, and James Thurber, amongst others. Modern ideas in art appeared in commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo, designed by Edward Johnston in 1919, being an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.
Another strong influence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-World War I Modernism, which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions, and the neoclassicism of the 1920s, as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky—which rejected popular solutions to modern problems—the rise of Fascism, the Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalise a generation. The Russian Revolution of 1917 catalyzed the fusion of political radicalism and utopianism,[citation needed] with more expressly political stances. Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, André Breton, Louis Aragon and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this modernist form of Marxism. This move to the radical[citation needed] left, however, was neither universal, nor definitional, and there is no particular reason to associate modernism, fundamentally, with 'the left'. Modernists explicitly of 'the right' include Salvador Dalí, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Dutch author Menno ter Braak and others.[citation needed]
One of the most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies into daily life of ordinary people. Electricity, the telephone, the radio, the automobile—and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created social change. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for the stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life, at least in North America. Associated with urbanization and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships between parents and their children.
Though The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees modernism ending by c.1939,[27] with regard to British and American literature, "When (if) modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred".[28] Clement Greenberg sees modernism ending in the 1930s, with the exception of the visual and performing arts,[29] but with regard to music, Paul Griffiths notes that, while modernism "seemed to be a spent force" by the late 1920s, after World War II, "a new generation of composers - Boulez, Barraqué, Babbitt, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis" revived modernism.[30] In fact many literary modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960, though generally speaking they were no longer producing major works. Amongst modernists still publishing were Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy Richardson, John Cowper Powys, and Ezra Pound. However, T. S. Eliot published two plays in the 1950s, while Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published his most important modernist poem Briggflatts in 1965. In addition Herman Broch's The Death of Virgil was published in 1945 and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus in 1947. Then there is Samuel Beckett, born in 1906, a writer with roots in the expressionist tradition of modernism, who produced works from the 1930s until the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), En attendant Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961), Rockaby (1981). There are, however, those who see him as a post-modernist.[31]
The post-war period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris (the former center of European culture and the former capital of the art world) the climate for art was a disaster. Important collectors, dealers, and modernist artists, writers, and poets had fled Europe for New York and America. The surrealists and modern artists from every cultural center of Europe had fled the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who didn't flee perished. A few artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, remained in France and survived.
The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, surrealism, Joan Miró, cubism, Fauvism, and early modernism via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors.
During the late 1940s Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all contemporary art that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture in the early 20th century via cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all who came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—placing unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artistic and industrial materials; dripping and throwing linear skeins of paint; drawing, staining, and brushing; using imagery and non-imagery—essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism generally expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities available to artists for the creation of new works of art.
The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. Rereadings into abstract art by art historians such as Linda Nochlin,[32] Griselda Pollock[33] and Catherine de Zegher[34] critically show, however, that pioneering women artists who produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by official accounts of its history.
In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like hard-edge painting and other forms of geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde circles as a reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism. Clement Greenberg became the voice of post-painterly abstraction when he curated an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. Color field painting, hard-edge painting and lyrical abstraction[35] emerged as radical new directions.
By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera[36] also emerged as revolutionary concepts and movements that encompassed both painting and sculpture, via lyrical abstraction and the postminimalist movement, and in early conceptual art.[36] Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves, Ronald Davis, Howard Hodgkin, Larry Poons, Jannis Kounellis, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Sam Gilliam, Mario Merz and Peter Reginato were some of the younger artists who emerged during the era of late modernism that spawned the heyday of the art of the late 1960s.[37]
Eduardo Paolozzi. I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) is considered the initial standard bearer of "pop art" and first to display the word "pop".
Main articles: Pop art and Western painting
In 1962 the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted The New Realists, the first major pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in England in 1958 the term "Pop Art" was used by Lawrence Alloway to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior in favor of art that depicted and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi (who created the groundbreaking I was a Rich Man's Plaything, 1947) are considered seminal examples in the movement. Meanwhile in the downtown scene in New York's East Village 10th Street galleries, artists were formulating an American version of pop art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show the works of Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Later Leo Castelli exhibited the works of other American artists, including those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for most of their careers. There is a connection between the radical works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists with a sense of humor, and pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings reproduce the look of Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction.
Main articles: Minimalism, Minimal music, Literary minimalism, Postminimalism, and 20th-century Western painting
By the early 1960s minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction of Kazimir Malevich, the Bauhaus and Piet Mondrian) that rejected the idea of relational and subjective painting, the complexity of abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement. Minimalism is variously construed either as a precursor to postmodernism, or as a postmodern movement itself. In the latter perspective, early minimalism yielded advanced modernist works, but the movement partially abandoned this direction when some artists like Robert Morris changed direction in favor of the anti-form movement.
Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism,[38] examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism.[38] He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."[38]
Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005. Created in 1970, it still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt.
In the late 1960s Robert Pincus-Witten[36] coined the term postminimalism to describe minimalist-derived art which had content and contextual overtones that minimalism rejected. The term was applied by Pincus-Whitten to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt, and Barry Le Va, and others. Other minimalists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others continued to produce late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainders of their careers.
In the 1960s the work of the avant-garde minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley also achieved prominence in the New York art world.
Since then, many artists have embraced minimal or postminimal styles and the label "postmodern" has been attached to them.
Related to abstract expressionism was the emergence of combining manufactured items with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. The work of Robert Rauschenberg exemplifies this trend. His "combines" of the 1950s were forerunners of pop art and installation art, and used assemblages of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photographs. Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz were among important pioneers of both abstraction and pop art. Creating new conventions of art-making, they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion in their works of unlikely materials. Another pioneer of collage was Joseph Cornell, whose more intimately scaled works were seen as radical because of both his personal iconography and his use of found objects.
In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. He professed his intent that people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "readymades". Fountain was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, the exhibition of which shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art, other famous examples being John Cage's 4'33", which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning. Many conceptual works take the position that art is the result of the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not of the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain was exhibited, it was a sculpture.
Marcel Duchamp famously gave up "art" in favor of chess. Avant-garde composer David Tudor created a piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross, that features a chess game in which each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. Duchamp and Cage played the game at the work's premier.[39]
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner identify Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as part of the transitional phase, influenced by Marcel Duchamp, between modernism and postmodernism. Both used images of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their work, while retaining the abstraction and painterly gestures of high modernism.[40]
Another trend in art associated with neo-Dada is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new art forms along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet, husband of artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp.
During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with a wide range of interests began to push the boundaries of contemporary art. Yves Klein in France, and in New York City, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono and in Germany Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik were pioneers of performance-based works of art. Groups like The Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina collaborated with sculptors and painters creating environments, radically changing the relationship between audience and performer especially in their piece Paradise Now. The Judson Dance Theater, located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York; and the Judson dancers, notably Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Simonne Forti, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and others; collaborated with artists Robert Morris, Robert Whitman, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and engineers like Billy Klüver. Park Place Gallery was a center for musical performances by electronic composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass and other notable performance artists including Joan Jonas. These performances were intended as works of a new art form combining sculpture, dance, and music or sound, often with audience participation. They were characterized by the reductive philosophies of minimalism and the spontaneous improvisation and expressivity of abstract expressionism.
During the same period, various avant-garde artists created Happenings. Happenings were mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in various specified locations, often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physicality, costuming, spontaneous nudity, and various random or seemingly disconnected acts. Notable creators of happenings included Allan Kaprow—who first used the term in 1958,[41] Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman.[42]
Another trend in art which has been associated with the term postmodern is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new art forms along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet married to artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp. Ihab Hassan includes, "Intermedia, the fusion of forms, the confusion of realms," in his list of the characteristics of postmodern art.[43] One of the most common forms of "multi-media art" is the use of video-tape and CRT monitors, termed video art. While the theory of combining multiple arts into one art is quite old, and has been revived periodically, the postmodern manifestation is often in combination with performance art, where the dramatic subtext is removed, and what is left is the specific statements of the artist in question or the conceptual statement of their action.
Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931–78), a Lithuanian-born American artist. Fluxus traces its beginnings to John Cage's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other media with little or no background in music. Cage's students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht and Dick Higgins.
Fluxus encouraged a do-it-yourself aesthetic and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.
Andreas Huyssen criticises attempts to claim Fluxus for postmodernism as "either the master-code of postmodernism or the ultimately unrepresentable art movement – as it were, postmodernism's sublime."[44] Instead he sees Fluxus as a major Neo-Dadaist phenomena within the avant-garde tradition. It did not represent a major advance in the development of artistic strategies, though it did express a rebellion against, "the administered culture of the 1950s, in which a moderate, domesticated modernism served as ideological prop to the Cold War."[45]
The continuation of abstract expressionism, color field painting, lyrical abstraction, geometric abstraction, minimalism, abstract illusionism, process art, pop art, postminimalism, and other late 20th-century modernist movements in both painting and sculpture continue through the first decade of the 21st century and constitute radical new directions in those mediums.[46][47][48]
At the turn of the 21st century, well-established artists such as Sir Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, and younger artists including Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Sam Gilliam, Isaac Witkin, Sean Scully, Mahirwan Mamtani, Joseph Nechvatal, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, Richard Serra, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Joel Shapiro, Tom Otterness, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, and dozens of others continued to produce vital and influential paintings and sculpture.
By the early 1980s the postmodern movement in art and architecture began to establish its position through various conceptual and intermedia formats. Postmodernism in music and literature began to take hold earlier. In music postmodernism is described in one reference work, as a "term introduced in the 1970s".[49] while in British literature, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees modernism "ceding its predominance to postmodernism" as early as 1939.[50] However dates are highly debatable, especially as according to Andreas Huyssen: "one critic's postmodernism is another critic's modernism".[51] This includes those who are critical of the division between the two and see them as two aspects of the same movement, and believe that late modernism continues.[52]
Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural movements. Postmodernism is essentially a centralized movement that named itself, based on socio-political theory, although the term is now used in a wider sense to refer to activities from the 20th century onwards which exhibit awareness of and reinterpret the modern.[53][54][55]
Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise modernism "after the fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.[56]
In a narrower sense, what was modernist was not necessarily also postmodern. Those elements of modernism which accentuated the benefits of rationality and socio-technological progress were only modernist.[57]
Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art.[citation needed] Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of the obsolescence of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.[5][6]
T. S. Eliot's emphasis on the relation of the artist to tradition. Eliot wrote the following:
"[W]e shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work, may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."[58]
Literary scholar Peter Childs sums up the complexity:
"There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair."[7]
These oppositions are inherent to modernism: it is in its broadest cultural sense the assessment of the past as different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more complex, and that the old "final authorities" (God, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny.[citation needed]
A paradigmatic modernist exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, which in the 1940s, invited to challenge conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony:[10]
"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. Just as it cannot be reduced to abstract form, with equal necessity it must turn its back on conventional surface coherence, the appearance of harmony, the order corroborated merely by replication."[10]
Adorno would have us understand modernity as the rejection of the false rationality, harmony, and coherence of Enlightenment thinking, art, and music.[citation needed] Arnold Schoenberg rejected traditional tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided music making for at least a century and a half. He believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows.
Abstract artists, taking as their examples the impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne and Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that color and shape, not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art. Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development.
Other modernists, especially those involved in design, had more pragmatic views. Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced the horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or from the Middle Ages. In some cases form superseded function. Following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958), became the archetypal modernist building. Modernist design of houses and furniture also typically emphasized simplicity and clarity of form, open-plan interiors, and the absence of clutter.
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) is the official name of Spain's national museum of 20th-century art, located in Madrid(informally shortened to the Museo Reina Sofía, Queen Sofia Museum. The photo shows the old building with the addition of the Elevator to the exterior of the structure with the close up of the modern art tower
Modernism reversed the 19th-century relationship of public and private: in the 19th century, public buildings were horizontally expansive for a variety of technical reasons, and private buildings emphasized verticality—to fit more private space on increasingly limited land. Conversely, in the 20th century, public buildings became vertically oriented and private buildings became organized horizontally. Many aspects of modernist design still persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture today, though its previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama.In other arts such pragmatic considerations were less important.
In literature and visual art some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists rejected such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch.[59] Greenberg labelled the products of consumer culture "kitsch", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music, Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism.
Some modernists did see themselves as part of a revolutionary culture—one that included political revolution. Others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. Many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a conservative position. Some[59] even argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.
The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition.[citation needed] Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.
After the rise of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed futurism and constructivism. The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" and "Negro" (see Anti-semitism). The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art. Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.[60]
In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth sub-culture emerged calling itself "modernist" (usually shortened to Mod), following such representative music groups as The Who and The Kinks. The likes of Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg and The Rolling Stones combined popular musical traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, James Thurber, T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, and others. The Beatles developed along similar lines, creating various modernist musical effects on several albums, while musicians such as Frank Zappa, Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart proved even more experimental. Modernist devices also started to appear in popular cinema, and later on in music videos. Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplified and stylized forms became popular, often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future.
This merging of consumer and high versions of modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism". First, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Second, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers[who?] declared that modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as postmodernism. For others, such as art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.
"Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to an inability to see systemic and emergent effects. Many modernists came to this viewpoint, for example Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, in The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (2000), Fredrick Turner in A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself – that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make everyday life more emotionally acceptable.
Some traditionalist artists like Alexander Stoddart reject modernism generally as the product of "an epoch of false money allied with false culture".[61]
In some fields the effects of modernism have remained stronger and more persistent than in others. Visual art has made the most complete break with its past. Most major capital cities have museums devoted to Modern Art as distinct from post-Renaissance art (circa 1400 to circa 1900). Examples include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. These galleries make no distinction between modernist and postmodernist phases, seeing both as developments within Modern Art
The years between 1910 and 1945 are often regarded as one of the richest periods in British and American literature providing a paradigmatic shift in all forms of the arts as well as in aesthetic perception. Artists who lived through this period and the horror of the two World Wars challenged old principles and dedicated themselves to the formula “to make it new”. It was the time of movements, manifestos and various Isms such as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism or Cubism of which some proved to be influential and some to be only short-lived.
This seminar aims to give students a general idea and understanding of the varieties of modernist poetry, prose and their sister arts – painting and photography. We will also approach Modernism as an international phenomenon and hence works of American exiles who lived and worked on the European continent will also be discussed. Against this background, works by T.E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and many others will be subjected to close analysis in order to trace recurrent formal principles and thematic aspects.
This seminar aims to give students a general idea and understanding of the varieties of modernist poetry, prose and their sister arts – painting and photography. We will also approach Modernism as an international phenomenon and hence works of American exiles who lived and worked on the European continent will also be discussed. Against this background, works by T.E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and many others will be subjected to close analysis in order to trace recurrent formal principles and thematic aspects.
History of Modernism
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Modernism: Characteristics
Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing because it was bound by the artificialities of a society that was too preoccupied with image and too scared of change. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially primitive cultures. For the Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society. | |
The first characteristic associated with modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles as the only means of obtaining social progress. In other words, the modernists repudiated the moral codes of the society in which they were living in. The reason that they did so was not necessarily because they did not believe in God, although there was a great majority of them who were atheists, or that they experienced great doubt about the meaninglessness of life. Rather, their rejection of conventional morality was based on its arbitrariness, its conformity and its exertion of control over human feelings. In other words, the rules of conduct were a restrictive and limiting force over the human spirit. The modernists believed that for an individual to feel whole and a contributor to the re-vitalization of the social process, he or she needed to be free of all the encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy | |
The rejection of moral and religious principles was compounded by the repudiation of all systems of beliefs, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or philosophy. Doubt was not necessarily the most significant reason why this questioning took place. One of the causes of this iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century culture was literally re-inventing itself on a daily basis. With so many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place, the world was changing so quickly that culture had to re-define itself constantly in order to keep pace with modernity and not appear anachronistic. By the time a new scientific or philosophical system or artistic style had found acceptance, each was soon after questioned and discarded for an even newer one. Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative energy always looming in the background as if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory. | |
As a consequence of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of constant anticipation and did not want to commit to any one system that would thereby harness creativity, ultimately restricting and annihilating it. And so, in the arts, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th-century, artists questioned academic art for its lack of freedom and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went as far as experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to feel too comfortable with any one style.
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The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The arts were now beginning to break all of the rules since they were trying to keep pace with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were changing the whole structure of life. In doing so, artists broke rank with everything that had been taught as being sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages that could more appropriately express the meaning of all of the new changes that were occurring. The result was a new art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the artistic standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the appearance of nature, people, and society. In other words, art was supposed to be judged on the standard of how well it realistically reflected what something looked or sounded like.
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This mimetic tradition had originated way back in ancient Greece, had been perfected during the Renaissance, and had found prominence during the nineteenth-century. But for modern artists this old standard was too limiting and did not reflect the way that life was now being experienced. Freud and Einstein had radically changed perception of reality. Freud had asked us to look inwardly into a personal world that had previously been repressed, and Einstein taught us that relativity was everything. And, thus, new artistic forms had to be found that expressed this new subjectivity. Artists countered with works that were so personal that they distorted the natural appearance of things and with reason. Each individual work begged to be judged as a self-sufficient unit which obeyed its own internal laws and its own internal logic, thereby attaining its own individual character. No more conventional cookie-cutter forms to be superimposed on human expression | |
What were some of the artistic beliefs that the modernists adopted? Above all they embraced freedom, and they found it in the artistic forms and emotions of the primitive cultures of Africa, the Orient, the Americas and Oceania. This act was the repudiation of all of the stylistic refinements that were the basis of 19th-century artistic endeavor. On the one hand, primitivism represented the simplification of form, which was to become one of the hallmarks of modernism. This abstraction of form suggested that some essential structure, previously hidden by realistic technique, would come to light. Art had, according to the modernists, become too concerned with irrelevant sophistications and conventions that detracted from the main purpose of art: the discovery of truth. On the other hand, primitivism was the expression of all that civilized man had to repress in order to enter into contract with society. According to Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, in order for man to partake in civilized society, he had had to lay aside many uncivilized urges within the self, such as the natural appetite for adultery, incest, murder, homosexuality, etc., all held as taboos. It is this repression of natural desires that, Freud argues, is the source of modern neurosis. As a Jew, Freud was too well acquainted with the THOU SHALL NOTS of the Ten Commandments. Symbolically, the embrace of primitivism is a negation of the very principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition and an affirmation of authentic expression of that hidden self that only finds expression at night when we dream.
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The modernist interest in primitivism also expressed itself in its correlative, the exploration of perversity. This obsession with the forbidden and the lurid was tantamount to the re-discovery of passion, a way of life which so many creative people at the time believed to have been repressed or had lain dormant. Frederich Nietzsche blames this dormancy on the 19th-century's preoccupation with form. In his seminal work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had traced the origins and development of drama back in Ancient Greece to the balance that existed between two gods who existed in opposition to one another, Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo represented the essence of light, rationality, civility, culture, and restraint. In contrast, Dionysius suggested wine, the primitive urge, all that was uncivilized. Although these two gods existed in opposition to one another, they were both, nevertheless, revered equally, thus striking a balance between form (the Apollonian) and creative impulse (Dionysius). The modernists concurred with Nietzsche that art had degenerated because it was too concerned with the rules of form and not enough with the creative energies that lie underneath the surface.
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It is that exploration of what is underneath the surface that the modernists were so keen about, and what better way to do so than to scrutinize man's real aspirations, feelings, and actions. What was revealed was a new honesty in this portrayal: disintegration, madness, suicide, sexual depravity, impotence, morbidity, deception. Many would assail this portrayal as morally degenerate; the modernists, on the other hand, would defend themselves by calling it liberating. | |
Ironically, the modernist portrayal of human nature takes place within the context of the city rather than in nature, where it had occurred during the entire 19th-century. At the beginning of the 19th-century, the romantics had idealized nature as evidence of the transcendent existence of God; towards the end of the century, it became a symbol of chaotic, random existence. For the modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and passé, for the city supersedes nature as the life force. Why would the modernists shift their interest from nature and unto the city? The first reason is an obvious one. This is the time when so many left the countryside to make their fortunes in the city, the new capital of culture and technology, the new artificial paradise. But more importantly, the city is the place where man is dehumanized by so many degenerate forces. Thus, the city becomes the locus where modern man is microscopically focused on and dissected. In the final analysis, the city becomes a "cruel devourer", a cemetery for lost souls. | |
The Forces That Shaped Modernism
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The year 1900 ushered a new era that changed the way that reality was perceived and portrayed. Years later this revolutionary new period would come to be known as modernism and would forever be defined as a time when artists and thinkers rebelled against every conceivable doctrine that was widely accepted by the Establishment, whether in the arts, science, medicine, philosophy, etc. Although modernism would be short-lived, from 1900 to 1930, we are still reeling from its influences sixty-five years later. | |
How was modernism such a radical departure from what had preceded it in the past? The modernists were militant about distancing themselves from every traditional idea that had been held sacred by Western civilization, and perhaps we can even go so far as to refer to them as intellectual anarchists in their willingness to vandalize anything connected to the established order. In order to better understand this modernist iconoclasm, let's go back in time to explore how and why the human landscape was changing so rapidly. | |
By 1900 the world was a bustling place transformed by all of the new discoveries, inventions and technological achievements that were being thrust on civilization: electricity, the combustion engine, the incandescent light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, X-rays, fertilizers and so forth. These innovations revolutionized the world in two distinct ways. For one, they created an optimistic aura of a worldly paradise, of a new technology that was to reshape man into moral perfection. In other words, technology became a new religious cult that held the key to a new utopian dream that would transform the very nature of man. Secondly, the new technology quickened the pace through which people experienced life on a day to day basis. For instance, the innovations in the field of transportation and communication accelerated the daily life of the individual. Whereas in the past, a person's life was circumscribed by the lack of mechanical resources available, a person could now expand the scope of daily activities through the new liberating power of the machine. Man now became literally energized by all of these scientific and technological innovations and, more important, felt a rush emanating from the feeling that he was invincible, that there was no stopping him. | |
Modernity, however, was not only shaped by this new technology. Several philosophical theoreticians were to change the way that modern man perceives the external world, particularly in their refutation of the Newtonian principle that reality was an absolute, unquestionable entity divorced from those observing it. The first to do so was F. H. Bradley, who considered that the human mind is a more fundamental feature of the universe than matter and that its purpose is to search for truth. His most ambitious work, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893), introduced the concept that an object in reality can have no absolute contours but varies from the angle from which it is seen. Thus Bradley defines the identity of a things as the view the onlooker takes of it. The effect of this work was to encourage rather than dispel doubt. In one of the most seminal works of this century, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Albert Einstein's theory of relativity held that, if, for all frames of reference, the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same, then both time and motion are found to be relative to the observer. In other words, there is no such thing as universal time and thus experience runs very differently from man to man. Alfred Whitehead was another who revised the ideas of time, space and motion as the basis of man's perception of the external world. He viewed reality as living geometry and believed in the essential relevance of every object to all other objects: "all entities or factors in the universe are essentially relevant to each other's existence since every entity involves an infinite array of perspectives." For all of these thinkers, subjectivity was now the main focus.
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Several psychological theoreticians were to also fundamentally alter the way that modern man viewed his own internal reality, an unexplored heart of darkness. Sigmund Freud was the first to gaze inwardly and to discover a world within where dynamic, often warring forces shape the individual's psyche and personality. To explain this internal world within each of us, he developed a complex theory of the unconscious that illustrated the importance of unconscious motivation in behavior and the proposition that psychological events can go on outside of conscious awareness. And so, according to Freud, fantasies, dreams, and slips of the tongue are outward manifestations of unconscious motives. Furthermore, in explaining the development of personality, Freud expanded man's definition of sexuality to include oral, anal, and other bodily sensations. Thus his legacy to the modern world was to expose a darker side of man that had been hidden from view by the hypocrisy of 19th- century society. | |
Freud was not the only psychological theoretician who asked us to gaze inwardly to better understand the human psyche. His disciple, Carl Jung, was also to develop another theory delving into the unconscious which explored the nature of the irrational self and which explained the common grounds shared by so many cultures. Jung's Theory of the Collective Unconscious, about an area of the mind that he believed was shared by everyone, states that there are patterns of behavior or actions and reactions of the psyche which he calls archetypes that are determined by race. These instinctive, universal patterns manifest themselves in dreams, visions, and fantasies and are expressed in myths, religious concepts, fairy tales, and works of art.
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The French philosopher Henry Bergson was also to turn his gaze to the unconscious to explore the nature of memory as experienced in the present moment. Bergson's Time and the Free Will was an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or lived time, as opposed to what he viewed as the spatialized conception of time measured by the clock and commonly known as chronological time. According to Bergson, states of conscious memory permeate one another in storage within the unconscious, in the same way that "oldie-goldies" are stored in a juke-box. A sense impression, such as whiff of cologne or the taste of sweet potato pie, might trigger consciousness to recall one of these memories, much like a coin will cause the record of your choice to play. Once the submerged memory resurfaces in the conscious mind, the self becomes suspended, there might be a spontaneous flash of intuition about the past, and just maybe, this insight will translate into some kind of realization of the present moment. In fact, isn't this what we do when we listen to an old song, forget the present, re-experience the past, and, then, all of a sudden, apply it all to our lives in the present? And thus, intuition leads to knowledge. | |
Politics and the economy would also transform the way that modern man looked at himself and the world in which he lived. Science and technology were radically changing the means of production. Whereas in the past, a worker became involved in production from beginning to end, by 1900 he had become a mere cog in the production line, making an insignificant contribution. Thus, division of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated not only from the rest of society but from himself. One of the effects of this fragmentation was the consolidation of workers into political parties that threatened the upper classes. And, thus, the new political idealism that was to culminate in the Russian Revolution that swept through Europe. | |
Week 5 Readings: Modernism/Postmodernism
In this week's readings from Lukacs, Williams and Jameson we have some representative analyses of modernism and postmodernism from the Marxist tradition. Marxism has complex relationships to modernism and postmodernism. It is both a product of the epoch of modernity and a systematic critique of some of the most fundamental features of modernity, such as capitalism and individualism. It has influenced postmodern critique, but many Marxists criticize postmodern theories for being nihilistic or self-defeating because they offer no clear basis for distinguishing between possible values or paths of action.
Here I will offer a brief review of the terms to keep in mind as you read the texts. But if you would like to do more background reading, probably the two most widely known texts are Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, and Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Excerpts from these texts and other useful texts are collected in an anthology, From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence Cahoone. My own understanding of the conjuncture of the material relations of production and the ideological paradigm of global capitalism in the 1990's is especially indebted to David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (see esp. Ch. 2-3) and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's essay "Post-ality: The (Dis)simulations of Cyber-capitalism" in Postality: Marxism and Postmodernism. An insightful account of the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the academy, especially as it relates to English studies and Composition studies, can be found in Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality.
Modernity
The social and economic conditions of modernity began to emerge as early as the sixteenth century, with the expansion of international trade, the urbanization of the peasant populations of Europe, and a steady rise in literacy. These social and economic conditions were reflected, and to some extent enabled, by superstructural phenomena such as the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis upon individualism, literacy and the patriarchal nuclear family, and the Enlightenment, with its emphasis upon rationality, faith in human progress, the development of the scientific method, etc. The period of modernity was characterized by a high degree of centralization of control of production, increasingly large scale capitalization of industry, and a high degree of routinization and standardization of products and processes. Modernity reaches one of its high points of development in the industrial practices of "Taylorism" (follow this link for a Wall Street Journal backgrounder on Taylorism archived on the Cool Fire Technology site) in which the worker's actions are segmented and standardized, effectively making each worker interchangeable, and "Fordism" (follow this link for Ruppert's account of Fordism by Mark Ruppert of Syracuse University) which adds to Taylorism a systematic attempt to control the workers' off-the-job life as well--hence Ford's planned communities, housing, control of media, adult education, etc. The Enlightenment ideals of rationality and scientific progress are similarly reflected in the late 19th century-early 20th century "eugenics" movement, which sought to "perfect" the human race through a selective breeding scheme based on Darwin's theory of evolution. The modernist faith in scientific progress was profoundly shaken when it became clear that these ideas could lead to such horrible consequences as the holocaust.
The social and economic conditions of modernity began to emerge as early as the sixteenth century, with the expansion of international trade, the urbanization of the peasant populations of Europe, and a steady rise in literacy. These social and economic conditions were reflected, and to some extent enabled, by superstructural phenomena such as the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis upon individualism, literacy and the patriarchal nuclear family, and the Enlightenment, with its emphasis upon rationality, faith in human progress, the development of the scientific method, etc. The period of modernity was characterized by a high degree of centralization of control of production, increasingly large scale capitalization of industry, and a high degree of routinization and standardization of products and processes. Modernity reaches one of its high points of development in the industrial practices of "Taylorism" (follow this link for a Wall Street Journal backgrounder on Taylorism archived on the Cool Fire Technology site) in which the worker's actions are segmented and standardized, effectively making each worker interchangeable, and "Fordism" (follow this link for Ruppert's account of Fordism by Mark Ruppert of Syracuse University) which adds to Taylorism a systematic attempt to control the workers' off-the-job life as well--hence Ford's planned communities, housing, control of media, adult education, etc. The Enlightenment ideals of rationality and scientific progress are similarly reflected in the late 19th century-early 20th century "eugenics" movement, which sought to "perfect" the human race through a selective breeding scheme based on Darwin's theory of evolution. The modernist faith in scientific progress was profoundly shaken when it became clear that these ideas could lead to such horrible consequences as the holocaust.
Postmodernity
Postmodernity is characterized by a perceived general breakdown of the conditions of production of modernity as capitalism enters a new phase. For some futurists and other social observers the production of information now seems more important than more traditionally "material" products. Yet, while heavy industry seems to be disappearing in the "first world," it really has been shifted to sites in the "two-thirds world"; mostly to Asian and South American sites. The era of postmodernity is sometimes dated from 1945. This date would include as part of the shift from modernity to postmodernity the wave of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia after World War II; colonialism was a key feature of modernity. This date also marks an ideological watershed; it is harder than ever to defend the assumptions of modernity and modernism after the holocaust, which depended upon modern technologies and "perverted" (or perhaps more orthodox than is generally acknowledged) versions of modernist assumptions about the "perfectability" of the human race. An alternative date for the transition would be the early 1970's, when the Arab oil embargo shook the western industrial machine to its foundations. The oil embargo, which in some ways can be related to the anti-colonial struggles in the 1950's and 60's, provoked a crisis in global capitalism from which rank and file workers in the developed industrial countries have never recovered, though the effects have been somewhat masked by shifts in labor patterns toward two-income households and an increase in child (teenage) labor.
Postmodernity is characterized by a perceived general breakdown of the conditions of production of modernity as capitalism enters a new phase. For some futurists and other social observers the production of information now seems more important than more traditionally "material" products. Yet, while heavy industry seems to be disappearing in the "first world," it really has been shifted to sites in the "two-thirds world"; mostly to Asian and South American sites. The era of postmodernity is sometimes dated from 1945. This date would include as part of the shift from modernity to postmodernity the wave of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia after World War II; colonialism was a key feature of modernity. This date also marks an ideological watershed; it is harder than ever to defend the assumptions of modernity and modernism after the holocaust, which depended upon modern technologies and "perverted" (or perhaps more orthodox than is generally acknowledged) versions of modernist assumptions about the "perfectability" of the human race. An alternative date for the transition would be the early 1970's, when the Arab oil embargo shook the western industrial machine to its foundations. The oil embargo, which in some ways can be related to the anti-colonial struggles in the 1950's and 60's, provoked a crisis in global capitalism from which rank and file workers in the developed industrial countries have never recovered, though the effects have been somewhat masked by shifts in labor patterns toward two-income households and an increase in child (teenage) labor.
Modernism
Modernism is an intellectual and artistic movement that developed in conjunction with, and eventually in opposition to, fully developed modernity. Modernist artists and intellectuals were disgusted with the banality and "dehumanized" quality of life in industrial capitalism. They responded to this degradation of the quality of life by retreating into a nostalgia for pre-capitalist organic social order (F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot), by embracing fascist leaders and ideologies (Ezra Pound's support of Mussolini, Gertrude Stein's support of Marshal Petain, etc.) by seeking refuge in radical and sometimes anti-social individualism (Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, etc.) or agrarian populism (Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom and the agrarian "fugitives," of the 1930's, etc.). High modernist art often features fragmentation and disruption at the level of form (e.g. James Joyce), though it generally attempts to recuperate a sense of order and faith in universal values at the level of content or overall effect. In this way the modernists attempted to "shore up" (invoking Eliot's phrase from "The Waste Land") the grand narratives, the "absolute" truths and values, of the western tradition.
Modernism is an intellectual and artistic movement that developed in conjunction with, and eventually in opposition to, fully developed modernity. Modernist artists and intellectuals were disgusted with the banality and "dehumanized" quality of life in industrial capitalism. They responded to this degradation of the quality of life by retreating into a nostalgia for pre-capitalist organic social order (F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot), by embracing fascist leaders and ideologies (Ezra Pound's support of Mussolini, Gertrude Stein's support of Marshal Petain, etc.) by seeking refuge in radical and sometimes anti-social individualism (Hemingway, J. D. Salinger, etc.) or agrarian populism (Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom and the agrarian "fugitives," of the 1930's, etc.). High modernist art often features fragmentation and disruption at the level of form (e.g. James Joyce), though it generally attempts to recuperate a sense of order and faith in universal values at the level of content or overall effect. In this way the modernists attempted to "shore up" (invoking Eliot's phrase from "The Waste Land") the grand narratives, the "absolute" truths and values, of the western tradition.
Postmodernism
Whereas the high modernists experimented with abstract representation and formal fragmentation as a way of resisting the degradation of social life in industrial capitalism, postmodernists have embraced this condition, ostensibly rejecting the grand narratives and values for parodies of the classics and exalting popular or "low" culture at the expense of traditional high culture. Postmodern art, then, is characterized by highly self-conscious uses of strategies like parody and pastiche to undermine a sense of order, timeless values, universal truths, and grand narratives. In doing so it emphasizes surfaces at the expense of substance and depth...insisting that "appearance" or "representation" are, effectively, all there is to what the modernists would have called "reality," and that there are in fact many plural "realities" rather than a universal one. For a more detailed introduction to this concept, follow this link to a lecture on postmodernism by Mary Klages, of the University of Colorado.
Whereas the high modernists experimented with abstract representation and formal fragmentation as a way of resisting the degradation of social life in industrial capitalism, postmodernists have embraced this condition, ostensibly rejecting the grand narratives and values for parodies of the classics and exalting popular or "low" culture at the expense of traditional high culture. Postmodern art, then, is characterized by highly self-conscious uses of strategies like parody and pastiche to undermine a sense of order, timeless values, universal truths, and grand narratives. In doing so it emphasizes surfaces at the expense of substance and depth...insisting that "appearance" or "representation" are, effectively, all there is to what the modernists would have called "reality," and that there are in fact many plural "realities" rather than a universal one. For a more detailed introduction to this concept, follow this link to a lecture on postmodernism by Mary Klages, of the University of Colorado.
Modernism and Cultural Studies: Address to Modernist Studies Association, Birmingham, 26 September 2003
Is there an 'and' - or at least room for the two to come together frictionlessly, a chance for one to be reflected through the other and both to remain unchanged? If there is a meeting point it is one that is negatively formed - one sits in the empty space vacated by the other. Any co-operation between Cultural Studies - which is essentially a methodology and set of presuppositions for approaching cultural analysis, and Modernism - the collective products of an art practice of a certain period defined by formal experimentation and, frequently, socio-political redefinition - would find it hard to reveal anything pertinent about either. And is it not the case that, in many respects, the relationship between them has been constructed as one of animosity and exclusion? Of course - this is no dialogue, but strictly a one way conversation. How could one speak of what Modernism thinks of Cultural Studies, for Modernism by my definition - unlike the avant-garde - is over and all we have is a community of scholars interested in historicising, analysing, explicating an inheritance. And what they think of Cultural Studies is various, given the different understandings of what Cultural Studies might be. So my examples of what this non-relationship might be come only from the Cultural Studies' side.
The self-description of the European Journal of Cultural Studies gives a glimpse into the set of themes that exercise those in Cultural Studies: it 'covers topics including youth culture and class relations, gender, constructions of identities, cultural citizenship, migration, popular culture, consumer cultures, media and film, the body, postcolonial criticism, cultural policy, sexualities.'
All these terms presuppose a compact history of theoretical discussion that underpinned the various rejections of various opposites - youth culture not adult culture, constructions of identities not essential, pre-formed identities, migration not indigenousness, popular culture not high culture, consumption not production. Media and film not literature and art, the postcolonial not the colonial, the body not the mind and so on. And cultural policy - culture's administration rather than cultural production - that is to say, the question of the artist and of production, and therefore of aesthetics, is elided.
A second example - a recent job advertisement for a Cultural Studies post at Middlesex University - I cite this because it seems to me to be the current generic job description in Cultural Studies.
Research and Teaching Interests:
One or more of the following: Cultural theory and identity, popular culture, theories of postmodernism, information society.
There's a set of more or less implicit references here, and each implies the expulsion of Modernism - an emphasis on the contemporary - though perhaps Virginia Woolf could be an allowed as an interest, if her work were accessed through cultural theory and questions of identity - but immediately this would not be an aesthetic interest as such, but a presentation of her and her work in relation to social theories of sexuality and gender.
Popular culture - implicit is contemporary popular culture - and this is always presented at the exclusion of high culture or other types of culture. Popular culture comes to us as the positive sounding term, which necessarily excludes more derogatory terms such as mass culture or low culture. The message - no criticism of the popular allowed.
Theories of postmodernism - more than one, proliferating - whereas Modernism is always presented as homogenised for it to work as the thing that was superseded by the post, that is, for it to be the thing that is worked against, and worked against by something which claims its own nature to be the very multiplicity, beyond all rigidity, that had to be vanquished - that makes sense of the post prefix.
That Postmodernism is always there means that Cultural Studies is always already Postmodernist and therefore not Modernist - or unable to look at Modernism apart from through the characterisation of it from the perspective of the post - a little word which comes to signify so much, and much that is seen to be virtuous. For Postmodernism is fluid, democratic, empowering, and interested in difference. While Modernism is rigid, elitist, hierarchical, insistent on revolution - be that formal or political.
Connected with Postmodernism is information society - a post-war formation - with no apparent Modernist reflex there, even if Walter Benjamin might be brought on for a moment, but always as a precursor to the more contemporary Baudrillard.
Research and Teaching Interests:
One or more of the following: Cultural theory and identity, popular culture, theories of postmodernism, information society.
There's a set of more or less implicit references here, and each implies the expulsion of Modernism - an emphasis on the contemporary - though perhaps Virginia Woolf could be an allowed as an interest, if her work were accessed through cultural theory and questions of identity - but immediately this would not be an aesthetic interest as such, but a presentation of her and her work in relation to social theories of sexuality and gender.
Popular culture - implicit is contemporary popular culture - and this is always presented at the exclusion of high culture or other types of culture. Popular culture comes to us as the positive sounding term, which necessarily excludes more derogatory terms such as mass culture or low culture. The message - no criticism of the popular allowed.
Theories of postmodernism - more than one, proliferating - whereas Modernism is always presented as homogenised for it to work as the thing that was superseded by the post, that is, for it to be the thing that is worked against, and worked against by something which claims its own nature to be the very multiplicity, beyond all rigidity, that had to be vanquished - that makes sense of the post prefix.
That Postmodernism is always there means that Cultural Studies is always already Postmodernist and therefore not Modernist - or unable to look at Modernism apart from through the characterisation of it from the perspective of the post - a little word which comes to signify so much, and much that is seen to be virtuous. For Postmodernism is fluid, democratic, empowering, and interested in difference. While Modernism is rigid, elitist, hierarchical, insistent on revolution - be that formal or political.
Connected with Postmodernism is information society - a post-war formation - with no apparent Modernist reflex there, even if Walter Benjamin might be brought on for a moment, but always as a precursor to the more contemporary Baudrillard.
Always post. But what Modernism is this post? What is Modernism for Postmodernism? In some accounts Modernism is assimilated to the enlightenment - this is the long view of Modernism and one which appears not to have heard of Adorno's 'dialectic of enlightenment', the immanent Modernist critique. For many Postmodernists, Modernist time is linear progressive time. Modernist space is homogenous. (These are characteristics not many who are interested in Modernist aesthetics would recognise). Modernist culture is elitist. Modernism has a belief in progress - to support this view, mention might be made of Clement Greenberg's progressive development of forms, his teleology - a succession of avant-gardes fulfilling a move towards formal autonomy. This notion of Modernism features for example very strongly in recent design history, strongly influenced by Cultural Studies, where Le Corbusier is taken to be the exemplar of Modernism. His architecture is stark, undecorated, anti-clutter, anti-sentiment, productivist and uniform or universalising - he is a kind of Henry Ford 'any colour as long as it's black' mentality. Against that Postmodernism is vernacular, emotional, pluralistic, respectful of difference and choice. But this version of Modernism, which served the purposes of many who needed something to define against, is such a partial one in many respects and cannot account for Surrealism, dada or various other Modernist experiments, and, anyway, there is always a different story with architecture, for architecture, unlike poems or photomontages or a musical score, must always be bound up with vast sums of money and concentrations of power for it to gain a material presence.
Cultural Studies took two paths to get to the point of Postmodernist rejection of Modernism. One headed for voyeuristic specialism in a sociology of culture that trafficked in a reification of popular cultural practices. The other opted for style, surface, simulacra, textuality, semiotic analysis and the lure of 'cultural theory. Both versions valued the notion of 'difference', and yet asserted 'identity' as their cherished category. Precipitate of both versions was the development on from Althusser's delineation of ideology, and ideological state apparatuses, whereby the state and its organs produce contexts for thought that serve class interests and the market is a force of control, an ideological justification of class oppression. Cultural critique moved towards an embrace of 'culture', understood as the ideological superstructure in all its forms, which came to represent an authentic or post-authentic expression of subjectivity. Ideology was no longer a problematic effluent, but rather the very site of pleasure, resistance, power and counter-power, a place of negotiation. Culture was first hailed as resistant, dissident or empowering, until the point was reached when everyone forgot what was being resisted. Then culture became instead a site of affirmation of (different) identities, while theory focussed on the consumer, that is, on taste, the language of market research, and niche marketing - capitalism's refined tools for product placement. There has been a transformation of Cultural Studies from something interested in resistance in the popular to something interested only in consumption and the ways in which culture is a motor of capitalism, rather than its brake. Now early Birmingham Cultural Studies appears - to a current generation of Post-Cultural studies purveyors - almost as the mirror-face of Modernism. It sought an avant garde but in the popular. It mirrored Modernism's isms in the succession of subcultures - mods, rockers, hippies, punks - and in its heralding of an excluded, marginalised, unassimilable set of practices assumed that the role of culture was to be abrasive, critical, disruptive. Such a progressivist and capital-critical stance is severely chastised by proponents of today's post-subculturalism. Even more so now, populism is all. Anything else is elitism. Modernism was most definitely elitist, then. And it was against the status quo, desirous of change, formal or socio-political. It thought there were fights worth fighting, outside existing systems of representation, in their broadest senses.
If Modernism was junked - too elitist, too high a practice, then another word had to be substituted to deal with that time period. Modernity. (Modernity served another function - it allows capitalism to be bracketed out: with the junking of Modernism came also the junking of Marxism. Which leads me to ask about the connections between those two things, as did Eugene Lunn once, more on that later). Modernity, then, did two jobs - it opposed Modernism, now condemned, and revealed to be partial, and it substituted well for the nasty ring of another epochal descriptor, industrial or high capitalism.
There has been another twist in the theoretical skein. At the heart of modernity are identified cultural formations that can be grouped together under the term Visual Culture. This is a hippogriff of Cultural Studies, Media Studies and Art History. It diagnoses a turn to the visual across the culture, and shifts focus away from objects towards processes or looking - the gaze, the act of seeing, acts seen through Foucault's lens, seeing inculcated with power relations. As 'The Journal of Visual Culture' puts it in its call for papers, which begins: technologies for seeing, machines of the visible, architectures of vision, gazes, glances, voyeurism, narcissism,· the public sphere, privacy, the visible and everyday life, etc. It also permits a move away from exclusive emphasis on popular culture. All that can be seen can be analysed. But Visual Culture always returns to modes of experience, modes of looking, accessed by the self. Subjectivity and power are its key terms. Like Cultural Studies before it, it does not allow the autonomy or objectivity of cultural forms.
Modernism, as cultural practice, is defined by its innovations in form - innovations that can of course be correlated to new modes of experience, but the pressure of Cultural Studies' push towards ordinary rather than extraordinary experience, means that increasingly average life, average vision, is the focus of attention, rather than the special modes of attention of the artist or producer, or the audience with its newly transformed powers of perception or new syntax or new stock of images, still in their infancy and so not generalised yet..
The historicizing and contextualising entreaties of Cultural studies and Visual Culture have been very persuasive. In some sense Cultural Studies has won out. Who fights over the canons anymore? Who would dare to claim that there are hierarchies of culture? Holly Henry's recent book on astronomy in Viginia Woolf notes that Modernist Studies has already moved away from an image of the Bloomsbury Set - the very epitome of High Modernsim - as effete and disconnected from the concerns of the public audience. It is, she notes, not uncommon to find books on Modernism and psychology, Modernism and physics, Modernism and film, Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Few though are the studies that do not dissolve their object into the wider setting, losing hold of specificities, doing more than simply telling us that their chosen author was living as an intellectual in a world of change, utilising a reflectionist paradigm, seeking walk-on parts for chosen themes in the life and work of chosen author. We would expect nothing less of a writer, wouldn't we? And especially a Modernist. Where had studies of Modernism got to if they were unable to account for the world that made this culture meaningful, that energised it and was, in turn, energised by it?
But there is a danger in too excessive an embrace of Cultural Studies for any aesthetic analysis. At the heart of all versions of Cultural Studies resides sociology. There is little interest in form and so there can be no aesthetics. Semiotic readings might be undertaken but this is always in order to decode a set of external values pressing in on the work. Where does this leave Stephane Mallarmé's Modernist declaration: 'L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition elocutoire du poete, qui cede l'initiative aux mots.... ("The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words....") "Crise de vers").
Still in another sense, there has been a certain take up of Modernist aesthetics into cultural theory more generally. A Modernist interest in multiple identity, dehumanisation, fracture, ambiguity - became a quality of theory. Art was not necessarily necessary to examine this - life itself might substitute. In Judith Butler's performative identities there is a sense of accessing the Virginia Woolf in all of us, or that in Deleuze's striated space we reside alongside Marcel Duchamp's staircase-descending nude. There's something to this - representation as a separate realm is abolished and the life-impulses that formed Modernism return in this Modernism-for-all theory version. It returns to Modernism at least some sense of the greater scope of that project, of Modernists' theoretical sophistication, of the embeddedness of Modernist cultural practice within wider social, historical and political formations - that Modernism is from the very start a confrontation with fragmented lives and bodies, a sense of exploded time-space…
But all this assumes - just as does Cultural Studies - that Modernism itself is homogenous. And yet, I know, that given my background in German Studies, my sense of Modernism, and the avant-garde, is different to that prevalent in English departments here. Mine includes or even places centrally - unlike Greenberg's version - Dada and Surrealism, (which Greenberg despised and which are often bracketed out as avant-garde, rather than being key to the Modernist project), photomontage, Russian futurism and excentrism, Moholy Nagy, Karel Teige, Brecht - that is to say, I am listing countless practitioners, who were multi-disciplinary and frequently politically engaged as revolutionaries - some might prefer to reserve for them the term avant-garde. My Modernism sets out from Walter Benjamin's politically rooted techno-criticism, as much as from Adorno's simultaneously utopian and pessimistic proposition that mass culture and high culture both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change and both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.' Contained in that phrase is the retort to so much recent hot air about blurred boundaries and Adorno's so-called elitism.
To finish, a return to the question of Modernism and Marxism, and that a Marxism informed by Modernism, a Modernism informed by Marxism. For this is, for me, the question, rather than Modernism and Cultural Studies. Marxism is modernism's immanent critique, and Modernism is Marxism's corrective. This Marxism is not about membership of a party - and certainly not the historical Communist Parties, but about the artwork's orientation to the world, its existence in the world, to questions of the division of labour, of the split of mental and manual work, culture and barbarism (those terms placed in relation by Walter Benjamin) - issues of the place and possibility of art, of art existing in a world as simultaneously commodity and not commodity. Modernism was about revolution - revolution in form, formal innovation - the imaging of new possibilities in art, for art, and sometimes, often the re-imagining of the relationship between art and world, and imagining new social possibilities. Explicitly or implicitly Modernism related to the proximity of social revolution, as did Romanticism before it - sometimes in terror, sometimes with enthusiasm. A world presses in on Modernist culture, even if that culture spends its energies walling that world out.
It didn't need Cultural Studies to reveal Modernism's historical foundations or its political resonances after the event - for it had those - working within a Modernist-Marxism - who did it adequately at the time, and who understood that much of what seems paradoxical about Modernism (its distance from popular taste, while it insists on speaking for the masses, its difficulty, while it draws on popular source material, its fundamentalism, while espousing freedom, its commitment to both uniqueness and mass reproduction, its dissolution of the self and its reinforcement of the genius artist) is a by-product of the failure of international social revolution. Indeed Modernism itself, as theme of study, as institutionalised canon, as palette of star turns, is also a product of the failure of the avant garde to transform the art world and the world. Modernism - or a certain version thereof - was born of a New World settlement that emerged after the horrors of Naziism, and it kept art markets, galleries, cultural institutions afloat, Europe's booty now in its safe US home where post-war power was concentrated.
In the conjunction of Modernism and Marxism are the theorists who do most to carry out the work that Cultural Studies wants to do, but cannot do - that is politicizing the work and the world into which it is born and goes on living - that is, historicizing. Adorno, Greenberg, Walter Benjamin, Meyer Shapiro are all touched by Marxism, as much as they emerge contemporaneously from the world that produced Modernism - without bemoaning or rejecting it, a la, in their different ways, TS Eliot and Lukacs. The anti-Stalinist Marxists are the representatives of Modernism's self-criticism, its internal critique. They understand Modernism still in its living form, and worth fighting over. All had simultaneously a social reading (we might say, the aim of Cultural Studies) and an insistence on art's autonomy (Modernism's own contribution). Just as did Trotsky, whose double reasoning may sound contradictory but only because culture exists in contradiction: Trotsky insisted that art must be judged by its own laws. And art cannot be separated from the social world that produces it. What these theorists were able to bring out is the specific truth of Modernism -- that it is about human vision seen through an eyeball requiring a supporting brain, body and (social) being. That it is about words on a page where the print and the paper matter - are matter and have been socially, economically, politically formed as such. Why do we need Cultural Studies to bring this outside world in?
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