#3
Log: Defining “Modernism”
ManetRaymond Williams’s talk, “When Was Modernism,” proposes a critique of “a dominant and misleading ideology” that for him underlies the contemporary valuation modernism. He cautions that an uncritical and ahistorical acceptance of the modernist canon will fail to appreciate how rapidly “modernism lost its anti-bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new international capitalism” (26). The question that you should be asking yourself might be phrased like this: How has it come about that a style that opposed itself to the main stream has become “the easy iconography of the commercials?” (26). By way of explanation, Williams asserts that “the innovations of what is called modernism have become the fixed forms of our present moment” (27) because our usual accounts of the movement ignore the social and cultural history that played crucial roles in the inception of modernism. For instance, these accounts exclude the contributions made by the great realists of the nineteenth century who “devised and organized a whole vocabulary and its structure of figures of speech with which to grasp the unprecedented social forms of the industrial city” (24). Additionally, the reception accorded to the modern style in the years immediately following World War Two meant that artists who saw themselves as “marginal or rejected” became the “classics of organized teaching and of traveling exhibitions in the great galleries of the metropolitan cities” among other processes of institutionalization (26). The effect was to confine “modernism” to a now “highly selective field” and to deny the value of everything done afterwards. In his most memorable phrase, Williams describes this double action of classification by division as “an act of pure ideology, whose first unconscious irony is that absurdly, it stops history dead” (26). Indeed one characteristic of the “post-modern” may be that in its obsession with the present it gives to history no social value, other than ornamental, for display or excitation of the senses. But I am not ready to develop a critique of the postmodern yet. Instead, I want to examine the interplay between visual culture and social history. In class discussions we have associated the modern historical period with the growing impact of technology on ordinary lives and a shift in paradigms that occurred as early as 1600. For most of this period and even today, “to modernize” meant to improve upon a previous situation. Nineteenth century realism had already manifested a degree of disillusionment and uncertainty concerning the social facts of urban life. The style and typical gestures of the arts during the first half of the twentieth century can be seen as a turning away from that engagement with the ordinary and a turning inward of the subjective gaze. For Williams, “the late-born ideology of modernism” aligns itself with Freud’s discover of the unconscious and with “a radical questioning of processes of representation” (24). Detachment and irony became valued, even fashionable, as a result of historical processes that valorized “the experience of visual and linguistic strangeness” and “raised to the level of a universal myth [an] intense, singular narrative of unsettlement, homelessness, solitude and impoverished independence: the lonely writer gazing down on the unknowable city from his shabby apartment” (Williams 25). Modernism, in many ways a struggle to comprehend human values, became a stance with a market value of its own, detached from the social realities that shape the history of the period. Soon we will study this dynamic in the particular case of the life and works of Pablo Picasso.
According to Williams, and in the judgment of many other art historians and cultural theorists, works in the modern style are self-reflexive with respect to subjectivity and deconstructive with respect to materials and processes of image making. A work that is self-reflexive is often incomplete or uneven, a flawed or distorted reflection in a mirror, allowing the viewer a glimpse of the artist's struggle with his or her materials. It contains marks both as to how the artist stands in relation to the subject matter and in relation to the materials of composition. Among other things, modernism often appears as an affront to cultural authority, especially bourgeois taste. Unlike the arts of the nineteenth century, in Williams’s words, “it repudiates … the very necessity for market popularity (such as Dickens's or Manet’s” (24). The “representatives [of modernism] either chose the formerly aristocratic valuation of art as a sacred realm above money and commerce, or the revolutionary doctrines, promulgated since 1848, of art as the liberating vanguard of popular consciousness. (25-26). Modernist artists and authors then, unlike those of the nineteenth century, chose to align their work with the sacred or the revolutionary as opposed to the ordinary or the everyday. In some cases this assessment will prove to be true, in others, I think not. The degree to which Manet chose to pursue the ordinary as his subject is extraordinary and provides a good exemplification of Williams's point.
#4 Continue reading: First reflections on “authenticity”