Anarchy and the modern dialectic
by Robert Philbin
[ bookreviews ]
"Such modern phenomena as cosmopolitan nomadism, the democratic spirit, and the decline of religions, have reduced to uselessness the great, decorative, imperishable buildings that once expressed kingly authority, theocracy and mysticism. Nothing is more beautiful than the steel frame of a house in construction. It symbolizes our burning passion for the coming-into-being of things." FT Marinetti, 1911 (Quoted, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy) [1]
Noted scholar Peter Gay has written a traditional, comprehensive, ultimately disappointing survey of European and American arts from French poet Charles Baudelaire through the Impressionists, the Cubists, Surrealists, etc., to the Post-modernists, including contemporary iconic architect Frank Gehry.
"Here was modernist architecture at its most thrilling," Gay writes, encountering Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, "though, I admit, distant from my old favorites by classic modernists like Gropius or Mies van der Rohe."
The book is interesting, particularly Gay's take on architecture and film, but disappointing, not because of the author's intent, but the reader's expectations. Apparently the point of Modernism: The Lure of Heresy is that 'modernism' is largely a collection of artists working against the grain in every art form from 1840 or so though the early 1960s. Gay doesn't venture any working definitions other than to posit 'modernism' as a sum greater than its parts, and somehow 'heretical' to some 'sacred' past, which leaves the reader to parse the greater arch of what we might call our historic moment.
But "the moment" is existentially relative to the observer's culture and the modernist movement has yet to arrive in "traditional cultures" around the planet, except in diluted, chauvinistic, often invasive forms of corporatism (marketing, advertising, commercial film, pop music, toy technology and political propaganda) or worse, military intervention and occupation. Recalling Picasso's 'Guernica', there is nothing more perennially 'modern' than an impoverished village in some rural wasteland flattened by F-15 air strikes.
What is the current state of 'modernism' in Afghanistan, for example? Parsing through this analysis might prove more useful than any CIA campaign to reduce rural dependence on poppy crops. The arts either play a vital role in cultural progression, or they don't. Nobody can better articulate and communicate a future to Afghanis than Afghani artists, architects, and scientists.
Before venturing too far, however, a few definitions are in order: let's assume 'Traditionalism' is the discovery and perfection of 'form' in any art (or discipline, like science). Likewise, 'Modernism' can be viewed as the deconstruction (as opposed to rejection) of form in every art (and discipline); and 'Post-modernism' becomes the reinvention (reconstruction) of form(s), synthesised across inconsistently emerging arts, sciences, and global cultures. Let us further assume this messy cultural dialectic is universal.
Modernism is interesting, but of little consequence, beyond historic artefact, if viewed as a period of linear art history in Paris, Vienna, or New York City. Modernism's greater cultural dialectic takes on meaning when applied to a wider historic context, then projected into the emerging, always unclear, future. This broader definition presumes art (science, politics etc.) arises in any culture, but differently in different cultures, and it evolves in every culture more or less along a loose dialectic of the Traditional confronted by the Modern, progressing into the Postmodern, initiating further confrontations as the 'Modern' is rendered the new 'Tradition' by historians (if rarely by artists). [2] This Modern Dialectic is fundamentally driven by human nature, more precisely the apparently innate "anarchy" embedded in human nature, which Professor Gay chooses to omit from his analysis:
"I have not ventured to offer a psychoanalysis of modernism. On this crucial point, I have been Freud's loyal follower. When it came to the roots of artistic genius, he accepted the inconvenient assertion that psychoanalysis really has no comprehensive explanation to offer." [3]
Meanwhile, FT Marinetti, quoted above, had Modernism exactly right in 1909 and, by global extension, his recognition of the force of 'nomadism', 'democracy' and declining religion (irrationalism) remains completely relevant to the post-9/11 contemporary world today. One obvious problem is that the neocon government of the most powerful nation on the planet chose war and occupation over diplomacy and law in reaction to the extreme conservatism of organised Islamist terror. The result has been the expansion of 'terror', including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, as well as the empowerment of al Qaeda into Iraq, Pakistan, and a dozen other cultures.
The Modern Dialectic provides an analytical tool for understanding the relative state of any culture on the planet. Islamism, for example, is an extreme, religious-based (irrational) reaction against Modernism's expanding democracy, science, and sense of global culturalism (universal human rights, etc.). Modernism, beyond historic documentation, is relevant to cultures where oppression by 'tradition', remains unchallenged and deconstructed. Post modernism becomes a force for fusion when modernism exhausts itself and presumes a new status or tradition. Historians are excited by the act of rendering the present an extension of 'tradition', while post modernist artists and thinkers recognize 'tradition' as a useful starting point on the way to discovering the future. As with any dialectic, the process is sloppy, uneven, often politically costly in terms of false turns.
Professor Gay avoids such warp-like definitions and speculations, however, so he delivers a traditional cultural narrative; a personal, certainly interesting, linear exploration of the familiar from Baudelaire's flowering evils, through Impressionists busily exploring form and technique, to the turn of the century Cubist collapse of culture and form, God and dogmatic morality, to the symbolic blossoming evil of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, until de Kooning, Pollack, then Warhol and Bob Dylan arrive in the 1960s to destroyed the very idea that 'art' is somehow separate from human nature and common social and political activity.
Professor Gay implies some of this when his narrative includes the rise of museums and the business of profiting in art; but his conceit is that the 'modern' is somehow made possible, legitimised, by middle class acceptance. The 'middle class' by definition rarely accepts the fundamentally 'new' in any serious economic, political or cultural form. Professor Gay reflects this bourgeois reality (to my read) when he uses the term 'Heresy' as subtitle, implying a violation of the 'sacred' in the act of rejecting 'tradition' - which is simply another indication of bourgeois complacency if not 'adoration' of the status quo.
Gay ends up somehow pointing to middle class art collectors as the real supporters of modernism, without whom artists could not have survived. Which is rather like asserting Donald Rumsfeld invests in oil stock so he can support antiquity in Iraq. Investors invest in stocks, pork futures, and art to make a profit, not facilitate cultural change in their status quo. (Picasso painted in poverty for decades before financial success and no doubt he would have continued to do so - like van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne before him - for the rest of his life.) Art investors and speculators refer to themselves as 'collectors' largely because the term implies duration and accrued cache to their 'collections'. Furthermore, turn of the twentieth century 'art collectors' did not constitute 'the middle class' in America, nor do they now.
Art, as both Plato and Rudy Giuliani well know, is an attack on status quo, a challenge to the imperfections, injustices, inhumanities and lies in any culture. Plato preferred art as an exercise in craft, a lesson in technique and discipline, a tradition serving society, providing the 'ideal', the 'beautiful', by reinforcing a platonic status quo. Art is 'imitative' at best, according to Plato.
"That painting offends me," Catholic New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in 1999 when confronted at a publicly funded art exhibition in Brooklyn with the image 'Holy Virgin Mary', painted by an African artist using elephant dung as a medium.
"The idea of having so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick," Giuliani pronounced, promising the City of New York would cut funding to the Brooklyn Art Museum unless the exhibition was immediately closed. The Museum refused, so Giuliani froze $7 million of its operating funds, "in one of the most dangerous assaults on the First Amendment," as one legal authority commented, until US District Judge Nina Gershon declared Giuliani's actions unconstitutional in 2000, ordering funding restored. The mayor renounced Judge Gershon as "totally out of control," but backed down in the face of protracted litigation. [4]
Professor Gay's well illustrated survey never gets to a visceral discussion of what it means to be modern. He softens the dialectic, flattens it into linear history, and minimizes confrontation with status quo, which is the very essence of what it means to be 'modern'. Freud, the modernist in science and human nature, articulated many of his most interesting theories in terms of Greek mythology and drama, which is to say he appropriated the narratives of artists and dramatists who explored human nature and its place in culture thousands of year earlier.
The importance of the modern movement in Marinetti's sense of the nomadic (the global), the democratic (inferring human rights) and the decline of the irrational, has never been more relevant. There are artists working in Iraq, occupied Palestine, Afghanistan, and around the planet critically challenging their cultural status quo today, and much more effectively so, than military actions or global profiteering. As Marinetti wrote, "Nothing is more beautiful than the steel frame of a house in construction. It symbolizes our burning passion for the coming-into-being of things."
Notes
1 Gay, p285[Back]
2 One hastens to add that all three "cultural dynamics" exist concurrently in every contemporary culture. It's not as if one ended in 1846 and another began in 1962. (There are many American artists and writers and thinkers working in the traditional mode today, for example.) It's a matter of how one applies a system of analysis to a particular culture. The power of art to articulate and accelerate change (Modernism) has more to do with art's psychological, magical, or aesthetic ability to affect the individual. [Back]
3 Gay, p xxii. "Anarchy" in human nature is the apparently innate tendency, which Freud and others recognised, to naturally question authority. The implication is not a state of "lawlessness", but rather the "questioning" of authority as part of the process of law, as, for example, in the common democratic idea that we hold "the law above men." This "anarchical" tendency appears to be universal, and, if Freud is correct, innate. There is an emerging science of cognitive evolution, rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) expanding into "morality" (Hauser) and related applied psychological sciences (Pinker). [Back]
4 City agreed to halt its heated attack [Back]
I have given up all my days of joy
to rest here, by this river in south France,
and think these darkest thoughts alone,
filled with narrowing memory and remorse,
then to eat this thin sliver of ham my mother
wrapped in wax paper, all those years ago.
