the crisis of modernityieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_8769.pdf · 3.withdrawal from the modern world...
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The crisis of modernitygap between the modern world and the
world of art (high culture)
the world is increasingly less like a home
crisis – the root of modern art
Reason 1 reason: instrument of freedom → instrument of
oppression, policing, terror
inhumanity of science and technology
image of the machine
factory as dystopia, the production line
mad scientist
World War One: industrialised war
reason (science) breeding monsters (Frankenstein, nuclear energy, cloning)
Reason 2 inhumanity of rational bureaucracy: man as the
victim of reason (Dickens, Kafka)
social engineering: utopian social and political experiments (fascism,
communism) experience of modern history: trauma (man as
the victim of history)
the camp (segregation, surveillance, dehumanisation)
Reason 3 Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag: not
aberrations
(colonization)
Henri Lefebvre: “And human reason appears only as some terrifying, distant, dehumanized reason: scientific barbarity. … the concentration camp is the most extreme form of a modern housing estate, or of an industrial town” (The Critique of Everyday Life)
The crisis of modernity 2: Modernity –experience of disorder
the modern: cult of the new; idea of progress
sheer pace of life; speed; cult of the new
capitalist economy: constant change and growth
permanent revolution of technology (production, transport, communication)
Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days
crisis confusion, chaos
Karl Marx: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their … venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air” (Communist Manifesto, 1848)
crisis W.B. Yeats: “Things fall
apart, the center does not hold”
Ady Endre: “minden egészeltörött” (‘everything that used to be whole is broken’)
The chaos of the modern city
Georg Grosz: Funeral
crisis
Paradox of modernity: permanentrevolution, fast change - reproduction of the same
logic of consumer society
The crisis of modernity 3:loss of ideals
the citoyen → the petty bourgeois
the shopkeeper caring for his profit and comfort
boredom, pettiness, Philistinism
Julien Sorel: victim of an unheroic age
Soames Forsyte in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: paintings as investment
Walter
Sickert:
Ennui
Edgar Degas:
Absinthe
Edouard Manet: La Folie Bergère
Crisis of modernity 4:alienation
Søren Kierkegaard: existentialist philosophy
Karl Marx: specialization in factories
atrophy of the human being
The factory and the office: dystopian places
chinovnik; Bartleby the Scrivener
MODERNISM the art of late 19th and early 20th century
present in all the arts
the symptom of of modernity; its high culture, internal opposition
Now: Modernisms (eg. Modernist crimefiction)
MODERNISM
three attitudes of modernist art to the modern world:
1. affirming the modern world
2.revolt against the modern world
3.withdrawal from the modern world
1.Affirming modernity Italian futurism, pop art
Fortunato Depero: Skyscrapers and Tunnels (1930)
Modernist architecture Mies van der Rohe: Farnsworth House
Walter Gropius: Bauhaus Building in Dessau, 1925-6
Le Corbusier: Villa Savoie
Berthold Lubetkin: London Zoo, Penguin Pool
Lawn Road Flats (or Isokon Building, 1933-4, Wells Coates)
Lawn Road Flats
Lawn Road flat interior: FUNCTIONALISM
Victorian interior
Isokon inhabitants Marcel Breuer (Breuer
Lajos Marcell, Pécs)
Model B32 chair (1925)
Walter Gropius
Moholy-Nagy László
Agatha Christie
Goldfinger Ernő:
Trellick Tower
Goldfinger: Willow Road, Hampstead
2.Revolting against the modern world a, return to non-rational ways of thinking
(occult,mysticism, religion) eg. Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley
b, myth (Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, John Cowper Powys)
James G.Fraser (Scottish anthropologist): The Golden Bough – a 24-volume encyclopaedia of all mythologies
c, primitivism
Pablo Picasso: Mask - Demoiselles
Henry Moore: Reclining Figure (1929)
Revolt
d, cult of sexuality, desire, the unconscious, the body (Surrealism)
D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)
The Rainbow (1915)
Women in Love (1916-1920)
The Plumed Serpent (1925)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover(1928)
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Paul Morel and his parents
Miriam Leivers (farmer’s daughter; spiritual)
Clara Dawes (divorced factory girl; sexual)
sexuality split in two (affection and physical sex)
father: miner
Hades and Persephone
D. H. Lawrence
modern man: split between mind and body
“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true” (letter)
D. H. Lawrence’s modernism1. critique of modernity
2. mythological, cosmic awareness
3. rethinking the family (influence of Freud)
Revolt against modernity
e, social-political revolt
Expressionism, Surrealism
Modernist film: Fritz Lang: Metropolis; Chaplin: City Lights and Modern Times
3.Withdrawal from the modern world Émile Zola: “We are sick, no doubt, made sick by
progress”
Gérard de Nerval: “The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.”
Lady of Shalott image
Bildungsroman replaced by Künstlerroman (Marcel Proust)
integration into society→ exodus, exile from theworld
Withdrawal from the world artist vs. bourgeois art vs. life
renunciation of life/love;
Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray: “I wish I could love”
Joseph Conrad: “Solitude subdues me; it absorbs me. I don’t see anything ... It is like a kind of tomb, which will be at the same time a hell, where one has to write, to write, to write.”
split: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the devil)
Withdrawal from the world Figure of the artist: outsider, outcast, deviant
(criminality - “Tonio Kröger”)
Self-imposed exile: Joyce: Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen Dedalus)
Adorno: “Estrangement from the world is a moment of art”
Artist: high priest and clown (Kafka: “The Hunger Artist”)
Withdrawal from the world
Modernism: defines itself in opposition to popular/mass culture and middlebrow culture(commercialism and kitsch)
success = artistic failure
The difficulty, obscurity of modernism
elitism or respect for the reader
Features of modernist art and lit:
1. non-realist, non-mimetic l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)
Oscar Wilde: “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside, of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.”
art nouveau
(‘szecesszió’, Jugendstil)
Maurice Denis; Aubrey Beardsley; Rennie Mackintosh (Glasgow); Gustav Klimt; Antoni Gaudi
ART NOUVEAU
(Maurice Denis: Tuileries)
No depth, no plasticity
Line vs colour
(graphic art; Oriental effects)
Decorativity vs representation
ART NOUVEAU
Aubrey Beardsley
Ch. Rennie Mckintosh: wall plaque
Charles Rennie Mackintosh: chairs
Ingram Street Tea Rooms, Glasgow
Gaudí: Casa Milá (Barcelona)
ART NOUVEAU (Paris Metro - Horta House, Brussels)
Features of modernist art and
literature 2. purity poetry: made of words and nothing else
Mallarmé: poésie pure
Flaubert: “What I would like to write is a book about nothing”;
cult of MUSIC as pure art
painting: made of colours and lines.
representation vs. composition
Maurice Denis: “a picture – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours and assembled in a certain order.”
Features of modernist art and literature
3. self-reflexivity
art about itself
(Max Ernst: Surrealism and painting)
Features of modernist art and literature4. elimination of individuality (part of the ideal of “purity”)
Rilke: Cézanne painted not “I love this” but “here it is”
fiction: objectivity (Flaubert’s impassibilité)
‘The artist cannot appear in his work more often than God in his creation’
poetry: impersonal poetry (Eliot), Imagism (Pound)
The avant-garde Militant novelty
Breaking with the past
manifestos
Épater le bourgeois
Often aligned with political radicalism
Cubism - Georges Braque: Harbour in Normandy
Richard
Nevinson:
Arrival (1913)
Futurism – Nevinson: Returning to the Trenches (1917)
Expressionism
Edvard Munch:
The Scream
(1893)
Surrealism
Edith
Rimmington:
The
Oneiroscopist
Leonora Carrington:
Darvault (ca. 1950)
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