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Resurrecting Modernism
I used to be a quite regular visitor to the Tate Modern Gallery in London, something now curtailed by my move to Singapore. Most of the visits were opportunistic: usually I was in London for another reason and I did not expressly visit to see any particular special exhibition. As such I tended to wander without much purpose, happening upon old friends (“Oh good you are still here, how are you? I have missed you: Are they taking care of you?”), and if lucky discovering a new hanging by a favourite artist or one I had previously missed. The works that engender this warmth and familiarity, and also produce the ‘Wow’ factor are produced by a relatively few number of artists and in this essay I will examine why it is only they that give me this experience.
The title of the this essay is Resurrecting Modernism, and will therefore start by defining what is, and what isn’t, in my opinion, Modernism, and why for me it is the one art historical theory that holds water, not just in the 1950s when it was the pre-eminent theory but also for the now and for the future. I will look at some artists that I believe were prime instigators in the creation of Modernist art, and also some that were not and try to analyze why they were not. And lastly I will look at the question that Modernism was an art theory of its time that has no place in today’s contemporary society. There are several things in common with the favoured works, they are paintings, largely abstract, they were painted in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, the painters are recognised as being significant contributors to the canon of twentieth century art and they were all lauded by the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg and as such have (retrospectively in some cases) been included in the Modernist canon. The dominance of Modernism as the principal art critical movement of the twentieth century disintegrated in the late sixties leading to a disparate range of movements (if I can call them that), including conceptual art, performance art, minimalist art etc. etc. exemplified by their non-medium specificity (i.e. move away from painting). Modernism at this time turned from the passive critique of Greenberg to the more aggressive defence of Michael Fried, but although attempts have been made to merge it with other critical thinking I think, today, it is now regarded as a discredited theory with all the juice rung from it. However no encompassing art critical theory includes all of the later movements and we can only categorize them by saying they are not-Modernist (as opposed to post-Modernist). The Greenbergian definition of Modernism was of the work having flatness which, of course, confines a Modernist work to painting only, although Fried did later include the sculptures of Caro, mistakenly in my view. Other art theories abound, feminism, queer theory, semiotics, iconography, social, cultural, Baxandalian, psychoanalytical; but all of these has tried to be applied to all art. Panofsky never tried to apply his theory of iconography outside of Renaissance and early Netherlandish art, but latterly others have applied to other, less suitable, art forms.
However, as I have noted, the works that for me produce that ‘Wow factor’, that I do put the greatest worth to, are Modernist works, so before dismissing the theory, lets look at a non-Modernist work. When Panofsky extended his iconographical methods to iconology, his third method, he was aware of the problems he was inviting: he likened the possible outcome to that of astrography becoming astrology. And at the time he was writing, (the 1950s), he was aware that the charge of being unscientific could be brought, discrediting his whole theory. Iconology, Panofsky wrote, relies on intuition. Today we live in world of science and pseudo-science: there is no mystery anymore: religion is dying and anyone who steps outside the norm is regarded as a crank. The problem with abstract art is it does not fit with this society: it requires a suspension of belief: we have to stop analyzing and interpreting and ‘go with flow’, wherever it takes it us. Appreciation of abstract art may require society to return to more Humanist times, to Croce’s pillars of the Beautiful, the True, the Useful and the Good. Abstract art was born from a society in need of the spiritual and died when society felt it no longer needed that.
My struggle describing my experience in front of a Modernist work could perhaps point us in the direction of a value judgement for art. Wittgenstein wrote, ‘aesthetic judgements about what is beautiful cannot be expressed within a logical language since they transcend what can be pictured in thought: they aren’t facts.’ I struggle to find the words to describe a Rothko because to describe the painting is to describe the feelings I have for the painting. But for non-Modernist works there is only the description, there is nothing more. Non-Modernist works either ‘work’ or don’t: a verdict is reached or a conclusion is found. Abstract art has infinite layers and defies conclusion, it is an enigma, which is why it intrigues and why it warrants return visits. It is not the artwork on the wall but my reaction to it that I am exploring which is why it is different every time I view it. Modernist works invite us to view the painting aesthetically: if we view a painting with the aim of valuing it we do not bring to it an aesthetic eye, non-Modernist works also refuse this aesthetic engagement because viewer has to go through a process to understand them, they do not have the immediacy that beauty has.
Whiteread’s work, Nine Tables, is a sculpture of the void between objects: she displays what is in effect the back of the Limewood Sculptor’s figures. The material she uses is also of particular relevance; the softness of the wooden tables is replaced by the hardness of concrete and the method of manufacture, an automatic process replacing the handcraft of the original, deliberately removing the mark of the artist, blurring the boundary between what is ‘high art’ and what is craft. The intimate domesticity of the originals locations is also removed as the work is intended for display in a public place and the transitory nature of the originals are replaced by a massiveness and permanence. The inverted works also capture an action, what actually happened at the tables rather than just a cast of the objects themselves, they are ‘reliquaries to the unknown living’ or to quote Sue Malvern, they are ‘metaphors for the human body’. However the work did not give me Fried’s ‘instantaneousness’, they needed time, they needed some explanation; without the explanatory plaque on the wall I wouldn’t know what they were of, and therefore would not have been able ‘get into’ the work, to start imagining the lives of those who had inhabited those spaces, and the work is not comprehensible without the explanation, and without that comprehension it does not appear to ‘stand alone’ as work. So the work does not give me that immediacy that Fried requires, and certainly it does involve me in his theatre, I need to walk around the work to be able to see the subtle impression in the concrete (something the Tate now largely thwarts), dispersing and de-intensifying the experience. The Italian Benedetto Croce also writes of the ‘immediate awareness’ of an object giving the object form. The next time I visit the work I may notice one or two things I did not notice first time but there will be a time when there is nothing more to be found and if I spent enough time on my first visit that would be it, I would have exhausted the work. Because the work is representing something it is possible to drain the work of its impact and sensation. If I don’t go to see it for a long time when I return I may experience some emotion, but this will be because of an ill-remembered aspect of the work such as its size or a new gallery position, not because of anything ‘in’ the work itself. As such the non-Modernist works have a transitory novelty, the better ones involving you in some intellectual game, but in their confrontational nature they lack beauty. The very nature of works which usually involve some participatory role for the viewer stops us from enjoying the work: as Fried wrote, ‘For Judd, as for literalist sensibility generally, all that matters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain interest’.
I would like to believe Robert Storr when he says that painting is not dead, but has fallen into disuse or misuse. Aside from the political or social upheavals that may have given rise to the non-Modernist movements I think one problem that Fried and Greenberg had realised with the theory of Modernism was the end game, were Olitski and Newman as far as they could go (and who else was taking on the mantle), or as Burgin puts it, were we at, ‘ 'the terminal point of [a] historical trajectory' . I think Fried tried to progress Modernism by the inclusion of the sculptures of Caro but in so doing fractured the Modernist theory. Other art-historical theories draw back from aesthetic engagement with the work, charging that with being unscientific: the deep empirical analysis of the work probably precludes an aesthetic appreciation anyway. Let us be clear however, non-Modernist art has not moved us forward, theatrical art was already a well trodden path, by the Futurists, the Expressionists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists, in some ways post-Modern art is Pre-Modern art. At least now the avenues have all been explored: when we reach a problem often the best step is to retrace our steps to where we began and begin again.
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