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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
To answer these questions, we need to look more closely at the crisis that modernism responded to and the answers it gave. Modernism came into being at the precise moment when the relationship of art to life became problematic: It was an attempt to answer questions that had never before been posed with such force: What is art? Does it matter? How can it express a reality that is itself no longer known? The early modernists struggled mightily (and often, as we've seen, kookily) with these questions -- and were sometimes tortured by both the questions themselves and the answers they came up with.
Caws acutely notes that "some Modernist manifestos give off an odd aura of looking back, to some moment they missed." This sense of loss is, at bottom, spiritual -- it is the sense that God is dead and something that used to be called "art" has to take his place, and no one knows how that's supposed to happen. Much of the energy and tension of modernism derives from its attempt to replace God -- but that attempt is tortured by the artists' consciousness of its impossibility. (Much modernist bravado is a mask.) This impulse lies behind the disquieting need of so many of these movements to force various artistic forms to do what they by definition cannot do -- to make painting talk, music see, words sing. What can these doomed leaps into a formal void be if not attempts to force the world to become transfigured, holy, other?
Now that modernist works are safely enshrined in museums, they seem to exude the repose and calm of Olympian masterpieces. What many of them really are, in fact, is magnificent records of a struggle, not a victory -- attempts to shore up fragments against ruin, traces of prayers that didn't work, scaffolding built for an assault on heaven that collapsed. Yet even a spiritual journey that has not reached its goal can be an artistic success. By engaging with ultimate questions, the modernists kept the faith -- even if it was the faith of nonbelievers.
The founding struggle between "art" and "life" divides modernists into two camps. One group denigrates life -- or nature, or the "self" -- and exalts art. The vorticist R. Aldington writes, "The Vorticist does not suck up to life. He lets Life know its place in a Vorticist Universe!" Mondrian, with his metaphysical fetish of the right angle (Caws notes that while lunching with Jean Arp, the nature-hating Dutchman "requested a seat at the window so as not to have to look at the landscape"!) writes disparagingly that "In the natural, however, unity is manifested only in a veiled way." And Malevich writes, "the only obligation to nature which mankind has taken upon itself [is] to create art." The other group rejects art, or at least all previous art, in favor of the higher truth of life or nature. Thus Marsden Hartley: "We are most original when we are most like life. Life is the natural thing." Or the constructivists Gabo and Pevsner, who denounce beauty and write, "All is a fiction ... Only life and its laws are authentic."
In the end, it doesn't matter what side of this debate an artist is on; what matters is simply that he or she engages with it. Many answers emerged from that struggle: the mysticism of the Russian symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov and Malevich's ascetic formal purity; the dreamlike rebuses of Magritte and the scientistic gravity of the constructivists Gabo and Pevsner; the audacious innovations of Picasso and Braque and the frightening masks of Artaud. Yet all these manifestations share a common element: an overarching belief that art matters, that it has something vital to say. That belief, carved out of a struggle with silence and expressed in a strenuous engagement with form, was the driving force behind the great artistic achievement of modernism.
We gaze upon that belief with disbelief, that enchantment with disenchantment. Inevitably, reading these fiery documents, which were written not so long ago, leads to nostalgia, to an acute sense of cultural loss -- the same sense, ironically, the moderns themselves felt when looking at primitive art. Where did that belief in art come from? What happened to it? And how can we get it back?
The short answer to the last question is: We can't, at least not in the same form. Modernism was the product of a uniquely cataclysmic change in society. In his study of modern art, "The Shock of the New," Robert Hughes quotes the French writer Charles Peguy, who said in 1913 "the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last 30 years." This accelerated change in all areas of society -- Einstein's rewriting of the laws of nature (which a recent book argues played a significant role in Picasso's development of cubism), the invention of the car, the plane, the phonograph, the triumph of industrialization, the city, bureaucracies and rationalized capitalism -- was unprecedented, and it will never happen again.
Modernism, which arose in reaction to those inconceivably rapid changes, was also unprecedented -- Hughes calls it "one of the supreme cultural experiments in the history of the world" -- and it, too, will never happen again. Perhaps the healthiest attitude we can have regarding modernism is to appreciate it as something rare, beautiful and very, very strange that came and passed -- a comet that streaked across our sky for an uncanny moment, then disappeared forever.
