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Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism: The Style

Self-conscious experimentation in form and technique (from the Impressionists and Symbolist poets, through to Stockhausen and minimalist abstraction)

Self-conscious distancing from (some) earlier stylistic conventions

Self-conscious distancing from popular mass culture: ‘Art for art’s sake’; aesthetic autonomy (though later on, politicized modernists complicate this)

Accordingly: No ornamentation; form predominates; form (supposedly) follows function

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Clement Greenberg (1908-94)

“Mr. Modernism” – Highly influential American art critic. Champion of abstractexpressionism in painting, in particular,the work of Jackson Pollock.

In “Avant Garde and Kitsch” (1939) Greenberg argues that modernist art is a way to challenge the ‘dumbing down’ of art in mass culture. (Compare: Dewey)

Avant garde art is a critical enterprise, a critical response to contemporary experience (e.g., to life in the age of consumerism)

Modernist Painting (1961)

‘Immanent Criticism’: Distinctively modern art, like Kantian critical philosophy, explores the conditions of its own production and the conditions under which we experience and understand the world.

The Enlightenment criticized from the outside: It criticized what had come before, in its own terms.

Modernism criticizes from within: Immanent self-criticism. Kant, says Greenberg, is the first modernist.

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Faced with the task of providing a rational justification of itself, art risks becoming assimilated to mere entertainment (or, like religion, to mere therapy).

(Recall the consistent, empirical aspect of Hume’s aesthetics; Dewey on mass art; Collingwood on ‘amusement’ and ‘magic’ art)

Greenberg: Each art form must demonstrate that it provides some sort of experience that is valuable in its own right and not available from any other source…

Painting: A Two Dimensional Art

Greenberg asserts: “the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium”

Accordingly, starting with Manet, through the Impressionists, and continuing with the abstract expressionists, we arrive at the culmination of Modernist art: An emphasis on the surface, the 'flatness' of the picture plane…

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Form & Representation

In contrast to formalist critics (e.g., Bell), Greenberg maintains that painting has become more abstract (less representational) not simply in order to better present form, but to rigorously embrace the fact that it is a two-dimensional art form.

Accordingly, Modernist abstract painting does not necessarily exclude representation because it is illustrative or representational, but because recognizable entities suggest three-dimensional space (which is the province of sculpture).

Individualism & Continuity

Greenberg: The ‘immanent criticism’ effected by Modernist art isn’t primarily ‘theoretical’ or programmatic—Modernist art isn’t a rulebook or a school.

“The immediate aims of Modernist artists remain individual before anything else, and the truth and success of their work is individual before it is anything else” (457)

Instead, it is something like the continuation of a (modern) historical trajectory…

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“The essential norms or conventions of painting are also the limiting conditions with which a marked-up surface must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limiting conditions can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but is has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have be observed” (456, emphasis added)

Likewise, Modernist art, according to Greenberg, is not primarily subversive (i.e., throwing off old conventions for the sake of liberating the artist)

“Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling of anterior tradition, but it also means its continuation” (457)

But it is, nonetheless, a primarily critical project—a way of preventing the “leveling down” of art into entertainment or therapy by asserting its distinctive value.

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Autonomy

While Greenberg barely mentions the word in this essay, it is reasonable to interpret his story about Modernist art as part of a story about progressive attempts to secure the autonomy of art. (i.e., art as distinct from ‘illustration’ or entertainment or therapy)

Whether or not it is actually possible or desirable for art to lead an autonomous cultural sphere is one of the basic questions at stake in wider debates over modernism/postmodernism…

Habermas: Modernity—An Incomplete Project

Modernity (after Weber): The separation of the rational authority formerly possessed by religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres:

Science (→ truth) Morality (→ normative rightness)Art (→ authenticity and beauty)

I.e., In order to effect our emancipation, in order create a better world, the former unity of knowledge has been separated out into separate specialized spheres of professional, expert competence…

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Autonomous Art

Under this scheme of ‘autonomous spheres’, art and culture (like the other spheres) have become the domain of specialized experts–but, by the same token, increasingly remote from the lifeworld.

(Recall Dewey on ‘the museum conception of art’)

The hope was that, through expert specialization, the real emancipatory potential of reason could be realized, that art could help to make sense of life (for ‘the bourgeois layman’, 465)…

Colonization of the Lifeworld

…but in fact “the 20th century has shattered this optimism. The differentiation of science, morality and art has come to mean the autonomy of the segments treated by the specialist and their separation from the hermeneutics of everyday communication” (463)

Art has become remote from life, obsessed with formalism and experimentation, unable to affect the wider world.

So should we reckon the Enlightenment project to be a failure? Should we “declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause”?

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Aesthetic Modernity

“The emphatically modern document no longer borrows [the] power of being a classic from the authority of a past epoch; instead, a modern work becomes a classic because it has once been authentically modern.” (460)

So (in some contrast to Greenberg) modernism has become the demand continually to “make it new”– to “revolt against the normalizing functions of tradition”

In the heyday of modernism, asserting the autonomy of art involved ‘neutralizing’ the standards of morality and utility: épater le bourgeois ! …

…But recently, the modernist artistic project has begun to seem stale; its spirit has “begun to age”

On the one hand, we’ve all become ‘Baudelairesmanqué’: Modernism has “infected the life-world” – and inculcated demands for “authentic self-experience and the subjectivism of a hyperstimulated sensitivity” (461)

But, contrary to aims of the Enlightenment, this has not effected our emancipation—precisely because the demands of the aesthetic modernity are so remote, so incompatible with the demands of ‘the system’…

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So…What to Do?

René Magritte, La trahison des images, 1928-9

“…to blow up the autarkical sphere of art and to force a reconciliation of art and life”

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Neoconservatism

Another alternative: Declare the modernist impulse dead and declare ‘postmodernity’ to have arrived

In fact, Habermas argues, this can amount to a kind of neo-conservatism. (E.g., Daniel Bell; social conservative objections to the excesses of ‘high brow’ art, 461)

Sometimes also this (neo-)conservatism assumes a disguised form, according to Habermas – e.g., in the case of self-styled ‘postmodernists’

Conservatisms & Pre/Postmodernisms

“Young conservatives” (Derrida, Foucault)

Recapitulate the basic experience of aesthetic modernity; “a decentered subjectivity, emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness” (466)

“Old conservatives” (Strauss, Jonas)

Simply avoid contamination by cultural modernism, withdraw to pre-modern conceptions (e.g., neo-Aristotelianism)

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Other Neoconservatives (Wittgenstein, Schmitt)

One thesis asserts “the pure immanence of art, disputes that it has utopian content, points to its illusory character in order to limit the aesthetic experience to privacy” (466)

The potentially explosive content of modernism can be defused; art returned to the condition of, in essence, entertainment or therapy…

Completing the Incomplete Project

Habermas argues that we must reappropriate the expert’s specialized culture – not just in the domain of culture, but in the cognitive/instrumental and moral/practical domains as well – from the standpoint of the life-world.

In part, this entails that the life-world “develop institutions out of itself which set limits to the internal dynamics of an almost autonomous economic system and its administrative components.” (466)

But what exactly does that mean, especially for art? What would such institutions be like? (“…the chances for this today are not very good”)

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Lyotard: Postmodernism

Jean-François Lyotard (1925-1998)famously characterizes the postmoderncondition as one of “incredulity towardmetanarratives.”

In particular, modernism, for Lyotard, can be seen as simply another (perhaps the last) grand unifying, totalizing narrative (of total freedom, total knowledge gained through science—a teleology of progress).

Postmodernity, by contrast: Difference, diversity, multiplicity, locality, incommensurability of language games (< Wittgenstein)

On Habermas

“If modernity has failed, it is in allowing the totality of life to be splintered into independent specialties…while the concrete individual experiences ‘desublimated meaning’ and ‘deconstructed form’” (467)

Habermas: We need a (re)unification of the spheres, in which art plays a mediating role between cognitive, ethical, and political discourses. (Intertextual art like Burgin’s? Engagé art like Beuys’?)

Lyotard: If this is understood to be unification in the manner of Hegelian dialectic–an organic whole–then Habermas offers simply another metanarrative…

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The Sublime

…an alternative, for Lyotard, is to take seriously Kant’s notion of the sublime.

Kant (you’ll recall): We may experience a mixture of anxiety and pleasure when we encounter an object or situation that is incalculably large or ominously powerful.

The pleasurable aspect, says Kant, is due to reason. Our senses cannot take in the object; our imagination cannot find an adequate presentation of it, but reason can grasp the infinite and, in this sense, shows itself to be more powerful than the most powerful object or event…

The Unpresentable

Lyotard (taking a different emphasis): How ironic–the great thinker of the Enlightenment recognizes that we can’t always rationally organize our experience!

Some things are unpresentable, incapable of being fitted neatly under concepts.

For Lyotard (in contrast to Kant), concepts most acutely fail when it comes to particularity, to difference.

The Différend – A point at which the mind is strained at limits of concepts; a dispute between language games so different from each other that no consensus can be reached.

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Realism

Various forces have demanded a end to artistic experimentation, to avant-gardism, for the sake of order, security, identity, ‘finding a public’ (Öffentlichkeit) – in short, for unity.

“Artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or at least, if the latter is considered to be ill, they must be assigned the task of healing it” (468) (Compare: Habermas. Or, for that matter, Dewey)

Once upon a time, this demand could be made in the name of realism…

Derealization

But, on the one hand, realism is ‘derealized’ by capitalism–“realistic representations can no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery, as an occasion for suffering rather than satisfaction.”

For one thing, there is no prospect of real experienceunder capitalism. (Compare Dewey)

Also, commercial cinema and photography will always outstrip painting and the novel as means “to stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it a recognizable meaning”…

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So, for those who follow the “correct rules”: Pornography, kitsch, and mass culture.

For those who question the rules: Experimentation and avant-gardism seem to provide an escape route past ‘therapeutic’ realism. (Compare: Greenberg)

Yet the demand for reality is constantly re-asserted:

Realism as party platform: Reactionary banning and slandering of ‘degenerate art’, socialist realism…

Art in the Postmodern Economy

And under contemporary capitalism?

Eclecticism: “…one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo…” (470)

Yet “anything goes” remains a form of realism in so far as “in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield.”

(The techno-scientific criterion of ‘performativity’)

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Possibilities of Art

Successful art (to the extent that it resists realist re-appropriation) is, for Lyotard, connected to the sublime –it presents the fact that the unpresentable exists.

Modern variant: A nostalgic aesthetic of the sublime –the unpresentable is presented as missing contents (missing reality), but form continues to offer solace and pleasure

Postmodern variant: “..that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms; the consensus of a taste that would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable”