Modernism

This is my PC desktop image as it happens, I saw the piece and the film Moholo-Nagy made of its effects at the Bauhaus museum in Berlin; it was called "light-space modulator" then:


Is modernism a constant demand for the new and radical as Mark K-punk suggests, or a historical movement from the early 20th Century, even if this incorporates the former and is something to which we can never go back? Surely as marketing and advertising have appropriated most of the gestures and styles of modernism (or been co-opted by capitalism e.g. Saatchi), there was nowhere to go but postmodernism, for good or ill. It would be intriguing to see modernism as itself an anachronistic throwback, as if within a culture that will to futurity and radical experimentation can only really happen once. Will all the real creation and new developments henceforth happen elsewhere, in the developing world, or is it still possible to have a significant intervention within "western" culture, in any sphere - art, cinema, music...

'co-opted'? how far was modernism opposed to capitalism in the first place. advertising and movies are two capitalist enterprises that were often 'modernist'.

special Modernism thing in the Guardian G2 today including an article by JG Ballard.

Owen: That Robert Hughes piece is incredibly smug and irritating

Henry- not for the first time, i think we're conflating all manner of different pheomena under the rubric 'modernism'...

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Yes indeed, Owen, and the other articles in that Guardian collection are equally odiously revisionist. Take, for instance, Jonathan Jones' truly obnoxious piece on cinema, "Action", eg "Nazis and communists alike wanted to 'engineer human souls'... In the 20th century millions gyrated to the tune of savage megalomaniacs. Modernism is the art of that era ..." before proceeding to equate Riefenstahl's Nazi documentaries with the core of the modernist project proper (no mention, of course, of the fact that Riefenstahl's earlier feature film work was socialist, her film scripts having been penned by her then lover, a Marxist Jew!!).

Modernism proper was of course a challenge to the nonsense that Jones attributes to it, just as it remains a challenge to postmodernity's fascist certainties and subjectivist obscuranticism. Jones' unbelievably, cluelessly smug conclusion "To survey the cinema of modernism is to recognise its affinity for political extremes, and to realise that we are the lucky ones, enjoying the cinematic echoes of Metropolis in the architecture of Tate Modern's turbine hall before going into the museum cinema to savour those shadows - from a distance." Oh yes, the "lucky ones" in whom all ideology is now settled, in whom the "engineering of human souls" is now "self-evidently" complete, and manifested in the political unconscious of the Tate Modern's architecture ...

it's not like theres no modernist/fascist overlap. or modernist apologists for stalin. this thread is confusing.

Owen said:

if anything, the dictatorships of the 30s were the first postmodernists- the first to harness innovation to obscurantism.

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luka said:

it's not like theres no modernist/fascist overlap. or modernist apologists for stalin. this thread is confusing.

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Sure, it is easy to conflate avant-garde modernism with 20th century modernity's contemporaneous reactions to it, but it is clear why the modernist avant-garde [as opposed to the earlier bourgeoise modernist project of autonomising art, from politics, from society] failed to deliver on its promises to abolish oppressive ideologies and institutions or to merge art and life in a progressive social transformation. The militant rhetoric and manifestos of the avant-garde rang loudly for little more than a decade before being silenced by fascism, bureaucratic socialism, capitalism, and war. In Germany, the avant-garde tradition was stopped in its tracks in 1933 when Hitler came to power and banished all forms of modern art as decadent. In Soviet Russia, the last vestiges of a flourishing avant-garde tradition were exterminated by 1934 with the declaration of socialist realism as the official style under the cultural czardom of Zhdanov. In the United States, the avant-garde was defanged during the 1940s and 1950s, less harshly but no less decisively, with the canonization of modernism in the universities and museums and the commodification of art in a dramatically expanding art market. Modernist art lost its sharp critical and oppositional edge, becoming an adornment to the consumer society, while its techniques were absorbed into advertising, packaging, and design, as well as the aestheticization of everyday life, in short into post-modernism ...

But returning to some other examples of avant-garde modernist architecture: in the prissy, reactionary Ireland of the post-independent 20th century there was the singular Michael Scott [1905-1989], Ireland's only avant-garde 20th century architect [described by critics as "an unreconstructed militant modernist"], modernism having been ruthlessly censored by a reactionary, bourgeoise Catholic theocracy [hence the exiled-modernist flight to continental Europe of Joyce and Beckett]

The only example of rigorous architectural "small structure" modernism in the whole of Ireland, Scott's 1950's house [where he lived for many years, converting the adjacent Napoleonic Tower into the Joyce Museum, it having featured prominently in Chapter One of Joyce's Ulysses]:

Admitedly, not up to the small-structure formal brilliance of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion

[Incidentally, Scott's house is just a stone's throw away from Beckett's NOT I adolescent abode] :


Scott's best-known achievement, Dublin's main Bus Station, Busarus, which was - and still is - predictably hated by most of the classicist/pomo population:

not sure if this fits the proposed topic - modernism to me is very much about the modernist project in Literature (Joyce/ Eliot/ Lawrence/ Pound et al - 'make it new')

but i went to this place last year

http://www.fondation-maeght.com/

jenks said:

not sure if this fits the proposed topic - modernism to me is very much about the modernist project in Literature (Joyce/ Eliot/ Lawrence/ Pound et al - 'make it new')

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"The category of the new has been central to art since the middle of the last century. . . . there has not been a single accomplished work of art in the last hundred years or so that was able to dodge the concept of modernism. . . . The more art tried to get away from the problematic of modernism, the sooner it perished."-T. W. Adorno

Certainly, early modernism was quickly associated with literature.


Beginning in the 19th century, "modernism" took shape as a tendency in the arts that articulated new artistic styles and techniques and new ideologies about the function of art and the role of the artist in society. In the 1850s, Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire called for a form of modern poetry that would be able to capture the uniqueness of modern experience, especially the shocks of urban life. His successor Arthur Rimbaud demanded, "il faut être absolument moderne," that art be "absolutely modern," and poet Ezra Pound insisted that artists "make it new." Modernist art sought innovation, novelty, and contemporary thematic relevance, rejecting tradition by negating old aesthetic forms and creating new ones. In this sense, modernism in the arts followed the basic processes of modernity, which involved negation of the old and creation of the new, producing continual originality and "creative destruction" in all spheres of life." (From Berman, 1982).



... but "make it new" is never enough, given society's ideological entrenchments. In one sense, the modernist imperative toward ceaseless change and development involved an embrace of the ethos of capitalism, in which variation of product means new markets, shifting tastes, and more profits. During the modernist century (approximately the 1850s to the 1950s), the artist was forced to sell his or her wares on the market, independent of the patronage or feudal systems that formerly supported art. This led to an internal contradiction within modernism between the need to produce novel and attractive products for the market and the urge to purify art of anything external or extraneous to the art object. Thus, conflicts erupted between the logic of aesthetic autonomy and its religion of "art for art's sake"-driving modernist artists to avoid contaminating their art with mass society and mass culture-and the "high art" imperative to sell their products for the highest price.

During the early decades of the 20th century, however, modernism split into different, often warring, camps. While a formalist modernism sought primarily to pursue pure aesthetic concerns, avant-garde modernist movements emerged that aspired to revolutionize society, culture, and everyday life by assaulting the institution of art, seemingly corrupted by the bourgeois market society, and redefining the relation between art and life. Whereas modernism tried to transform (romantic) alienation into individual subjectivist autonomy and creativity, the political avant-garde exploded the boundaries isolating the artist from society in order to use the unique position of the artist as a means of advancing radical social change. Paradoxically, the extreme individualists of avant-garde art worked in artistic movements that sought to align themselves with whatever social forces - scientific, technological, or political - that they believed augured emancipatory change. Until ...

"Abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. . . . the younger generation of the 1960s will confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which "weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living," as Marx once said in a different context."-Fredric Jameson

i lik ethe idea of BS Johnson's that you propose. I think in some ways he is right, the assimilation of the modernist impulse in art and music is much more apparent than that of lit (or architecture). People are more than happy to look at abstract art - in fact if you go to many provincial art shows that can be pretty much all you'll see (and pictures of boats, of course).

and because music is by its very nature abstract that too can quickly be absorbed - we don't riot when we hear stravinsky, in fact it can sound quite pleasant and we wonder what all the fuss was about (ditto, the impressionists)

but the novel (and poetry) has never really convinced the general populace that it too can remain modernist and popular. I think people still feel that somehow it's all emperor's new clothes, that a joke is being played upon them if they don't get their Lit 'straight'. I speak from some experience because I am married to someone who reacts quite violently to the modernist project in Lit - that it is unnecessarily tricksy and therefore 'insubstantial' - i disagree and often feel that the work of Joyce and Beckett, for example are perfect examples of the difficulties of articulating the nature of being 'human' in the twentieth century.

and it's the same with modernist architecture i suppose - we are a nation of Prince Charlies - muttering about monstous carbuncles, calling the south bank complex in London an underground carpark. It's intentionally dismissive and intentionally philistine, as if to accord it the respect of a proper critical response is beneath us.

{not sure where i am going with this, so i shall leave it there, am also aware of a few too many quote marks - stylistically sloppy, i know}

Padraig said:

The only example of rigorous architectural "small structure" modernism in the whole of Ireland, Scott's 1950's house [where he lived for many years, converting the adjacent Napoleonic Tower into the Joyce Museum, it having featured prominently in Chapter One of Joyce's Ulysses]

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Interestingly, Barry Byrne designed in 1928 possibly the first major modernist (with a strong Art Deco influence) building in Ireland, and possibly the first modern church in Europe, the Church of Christ the King in Turner's Cross in Cork, built 1929-1931:



This was controversial at the time, not least due to the use of reinforced concrete, which precipitated a building trade strike - concrete was not just a more plastic and modernist material, but much cheaper than brick/stone, and rendered stone masons unnecessary for the construction.

Byrne was American, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and built many churches and other buildings, ranging from Prarie Style to more rigorous modernism, mainly in the US, like the Church of SS. Peter & Paul, Pierre, South Dakota (1941)

Thanks for that historical reference, dharry.

It does though, depressingly confirm how different strands of modernism were co-opted/appropriated to reactionary ends, here the use of new technology (concrete) in the service of ecclesiastical, Catholic Church aggrandizement. A bizarre parody of modernism, surely? [And don't get me going on Art Deco!!].

As with many modernizing projects from that period [others being electrification/hydro-electric power plants, where the Germans were called in to do all the work] "foreigners" were always brought in to avoid exposing the keep-them-passive-and-ignorant locals to any "strange ideas."

Padraig said:

[...]Catholic Church aggrandizement. A bizarre parody of modernism,[...] "foreigners" were always brought in to avoid exposing the keep-them-passive-and-ignorant locals to any "strange ideas."

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Absolutely, with that odd twist of the local strike. But I'm also inclined to read the story against the grain somewhat, as it was the church's limited budget which encouraged Byrne to use concrete and make his, and Ireland's, first step into architectural modernism. (It could almost be seen as a monument to the eventual undoing of the church's power in Ireland, despite the grotesque incongruity; an opening for the modern into one of the most repressive societies in Europe, the bitterest irony of all, given the revolutionary and feminist aspects of the 1916 emancipatory struggle).

Sorry for semi-derailing the post!

dHarry said:

Absolutely, with that odd twist of the local strike. But I'm also inclined to read the story against the grain somewhat, as it was the church's limited budget which encouraged Byrne to use concrete and make his, and Ireland's, first step into architectural modernism. (It could almost be seen as a monument to the eventual undoing of the church's power in Ireland, despite the grotesque incongruity; an opening for the modern into one of the most repressive societies in Europe, the bitterest irony of all, given the revolutionary and feminist aspects of the 1916 emancipatory struggle).

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Yes, I suppose in retrospect we could read it as the first nail in the coffin of theocratic rule; its just that, those very years circa 1929-1932 were perhaps the very foundation of absolute Catholic rule in Ireland, 1932 especially, when DeValera came back to power and the Catholic Hierarchy orchestrated the most elaborate and intimidating public rituals in the country's entire history, laying the incestuous/opppressive groundwork for the subsequent 40 years or more of repression [see what happened to just-passed-away-today novelist John McGahern (who bravely chose to stay rather than join his exiled colleagues) during those years, his teaching career destroyed because he married a divorced woman!!!... I'm just not so sure we can give the credit for unravelling all of this to the economically-challenged use of union-contested concrete for Church construction in 1929 ...

"given the revolutionary and feminist aspects of the 1916 emancipatory struggle."

Yes, but then rapidly repressed by that same concrete-favouring Church, wiping out Connolly's socialist Citizen Army and banning women from public life (indeed, during WWII, "The Emergency", DeValera rounded up all of those early women revolutionaries, now middle-aged or older, with growing families, and imprisoned them in internment camps for the duration of the War, just in case they still had any ideas contrary to church dogma ...)

Interesting posts Dharry and Padraig...

There's an argument too that Michael Scott's architecture was just the ticket for Whittaker and Lemass to use as part of the rhetoric of modernization (as opposed to modernism) in the 1960s in Ireland, modernization being code for total integration into the circuits of American capital and the final betrayal of the Revolution. Scott built the RTE (Irish Television) administration building in Donnybrook, for example, and the Bank of Ireland headquarters in Baggot St., two key nodes in this integration.

Padraig said:

just-passed-away-today novelist John McGahern

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is this true? shit he was so good