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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
But to do that would not, I think, mean giving up our connection with what is enduring about modernism -- its drive to find forms that mirror our new sense of the old chaos, what Frank Kermode has called our "rage for order." In this regard, Paul de Man is right: every age is modernist. Or, as Borges said, "The Ultraists have always existed." But it does mean pruning out the dead part of modernism, the part we can't use -- and which is precisely the part that still holds us in a rigor mortis-like grip.
"Has Modernism Failed?" the critic Suzi Gablik asked. Yes and no. There is a strain within modernism -- its most absolute, nihilistic and Manichaean strain, its quintessential one -- that denies the value of art itself. It is found playfully in dada, elegantly in Duchamp, scarily in those pure varieties of futurism that exalted war because it made life into a work of art. And this part of modernism -- which was really postmodernism avant la lettre -- did fail. It had to, because it had nowhere to go. It led to the extreme, self-canceling gestures with which we are all too familiar: dice-toss art, silent art, readymade art -- all those cute, nihilistic table-trimmings for what Kermode called a "farcical apocalypse."
Recognizing this is a start in breaking modernism's dead grip on us. And it should open our eyes to its corollary: the heart-quickening idea that there is no progress in art.
So reading these manifestos inspires gloom, but it also instills hope. The passion of the documents gathered here is an unpleasant reminder that our own passion about art -- at least in our public pronouncements -- does not match theirs. But these credos also remind us that great art can be created in any historical situation, even one as glibly ironic and commodified as ours. All that is required is the belief in form, the inner tension required to investigate and mirror the world.
But can we still generate that belief, that tension, today? It's all well and good to say that there is no progress in art, but there does seem to be decline -- and history seems to work against the possibility of rejuvenation. Modernism drew its tension from its questioning of art itself, but at a time when that questioning still could be folded back into art's great, unbroken tradition: modernist masterpieces, whether Joyce's "Ulysses" or Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" or de Chirico's "The Disquieting Muses," derive their power from the collision of innovation and tradition, a collision in which destructiveness and creation are inextricably tangled. Once questioning becomes the tradition, which is the situation we now find ourselves in, all that is solid melts into air; the walls artists need to push against vanish. Artists still go through the motions of manipulating form, but their heart isn't in their subversions anymore -- nor can they return to the good old unconscious days when just imposing their own individual style on the style of the day was enough. Art always must move forward, find a new way to steal the old fire -- but after modernism, there is no forward. Nietzsche's fear that nihilism, "uncanniest of all visitors," would win has come true.
But to accept this is to give the accidents of history too much power over us. The true spirit of modernism -- not its dream of an end to art, but its search for forms that, in John Lennon's words, howl and move -- will endure. Yes, it was that intoxicating fork in history's road that unleashed the demons and angels of modernism, and that fork will never come again. But the road goes on.
If we listen to modernism itself, there is hope. Modernism teaches us that humans have an archetypal need to express, which primitive art reveals and which modern man shares. It teaches us that the struggle with form, with the materials given by the world which can be used to discover the world, always has the capacity to be heroic. It teaches us that, in the end, art matters. If these lessons are true, modernism's own towering achievement will not stand as an epitaph -- and a human activity that goes back to those magical bison painted on the walls of the caves of Altamira will not die.
It's true that things have changed. The old enemies are gone. This time, we will have to do without a God or a tradition to battle with: We will have to construct and create using only the tension of our own souls. But every generation faces the same unknown and radiant world. And if the triumph of the modernists is our triumph, there will be art.
