Modernism

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MODERNISM.

EARLY EXPERIMENTS
WORLD WAR I: ALIENATION AND DISILLUSIONMENT
AFTER 1945: FINDING A PLACE FOR ART
BIBLIOGRAPHY

The word modernism is used to characterize a wide range of aesthetic, political, and social movements in the twentieth century. Within the visual arts, architecture, and literature, modernism is most often recognized as demonstrating an intense engagement with a particular medium and the limits of its form. The larger constellation of social and political forces that bolster cultural production fall under the rubric of modernism as well. From the Bauhaus to surrealism to existentialism, all modernist works can be held to one overarching principle: the evaluation and expression of the governing parameters of an art form mobilized to critique and rediscover its proper essence. Indeed, the question "what is modernism?" is already anticipated by the very forms of modernist art. This self-critical tendency has given rise to a large, heterogeneous body of work, because each sociopolitical challenge to art and its role in modernity required a specifically devised aesthetic response.

EARLY EXPERIMENTS

Some of modernism's most important aesthetic experiments were conceived before 1914 but continued to exert influence on the arts throughout the rest of the century. In particular cubism—led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque—had a profound effect on painting, using the limits of two-dimensional representation as an analytical device for transforming everyday objects into drastically altered amalgams of lines and shapes. The cubists became a major touchstone for artists looking to radicalize a given medium, as well as for avant-gardes seeking to cut ties with the past; only the profound devastation and loss surrounding World War I would have as acute an impact on artistic production in the first half of the century.

WORLD WAR I: ALIENATION AND DISILLUSIONMENT

Between 1914 and 1918, scores of European intellectuals, artists, and writers fought in the trenches. The aesthetic and political sensibilities of those who survived were forever altered by the war. For many, the effects of the war and the impact of mechanization demanded a critical engagement based on the new relationships between self and community in light of emerging concerns about technology.

In Italy, the futurist artists and poets embraced the new machinery of war, creating works that attempted to embody the heightened sense of time and motion that accompanied the advance of technology. Founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti drafted the group's "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909) shortly before the war began, arguing for the evisceration of Romantic-expressionistic concepts of the self under the new horizon of mechanical mediation and delineating the futurists' proto-fascist ambitions for art and politics to merge violently in the social sphere.

In other European nations, the avant-gardes were more critical of the political establishment. Dada, which was founded in Switzerland and later spread to Germany and France, used absurdist humor to ironize traditional art-world standards, the war, and the bourgeois values behind it. A diverse group of artists were associated with the movement, including Jean Arp, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Francis Picabia, and Hans Richter. The dadaists worked in nontraditional forms and employed innovative techniques such as photo-montage to represent the vertiginous flow of visual information that typified the urban experience of the new postwar metropolis.

Surrealism was a direct outgrowth of the Dada movement and worked to reformulate its politically charged engagement with popular culture and the mass media. The French writer André Breton penned a manifesto for the group in 1924, but the movement had many distinct voices and expressions. The surrealists were fascinated with the operations of the unconscious and developed formal procedures for realizing its effects through automatism and chance procedures. Writers and artists alike worked to fuse a Marxist critique of capital with the newly popularized tenets of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud and later elaborated by Jacques Lacan, mining their unconscious desires to imagine pictorial and literary landscapes that were both liberating and derisive.

The combination of multiple endeavors in service of a singular aesthetic reached a pinnacle with the founding of the Bauhaus School of Art and Architecture. Formed in Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus's mission was nothing less than the amelioration of society on all fronts by combining the pedagogy and practice of craft and fine arts. The school preached the elimination of excessive ornamentation and superfluous design. Its affinity for clean, industrially inspired modeling was also championed by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose treatise Vers une architecture (1923; Towardsa NewArchitecture, 1927) helped to establish the international style in modernist architecture.

While the Bauhaus worked toward unification via the arts, writers throughout Europe attempted to capture and represent the alienation and fragmentation of the individual following the war, which resulted in an explosion of inventive narrative techniques. The Irish writer James Joyce radicalized the novel as a form, rejecting traditional structures such as plot in an attempt to represent the interior world of a character. Virginia Woolf, a British novelist and critic, developed a similarly innovative technique, writing in a stream-of-consciousness style that moved fleetingly through a range of characters' thoughts to produce connections between individuals that would not otherwise be evident. In the dark and surrealistic writings of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, the individual experience is again the focus; by placing an ordinary protagonist in an extreme and usually unexplained circumstance, Kafka's works provided a worm's-eye view of one person's struggle against the dizzying and circuitous movement of an endlessly systematized bureaucracy.

The modernist torch was all but extinguished with the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Although many of the artists and intellectuals associated with these movements emigrated abroad, this critical phase of artistic engagement was all but eradicated by the Degenerate Art exhibition (1937), where Nazis confiscated some twenty thousand works that were deemed unsuitable to their social vision.

AFTER 1945: FINDING A PLACE FOR ART

In the wake of the Holocaust, artists in Europe worked to restore the potential for modernist art in a climate of tragedy and confusion. Some wished to revisit the legacy of the prewar avant-gardes, and others looked to the past with greater scrutiny. For these artists, the avant-gardes' vision of mobilizing artistic movements for political ends helped define the ethos of prewar totalitarian regimes. The aesthetic movements that surfaced in the years immediately following World War II were thus largely characterized by an engagement with this contested past via a return to painting, specifically abstraction. The memory of the war and the legacy of both cubism and surrealism made an uneasy framework for painting. The multiplicity of artistic responses registered the inability of artists working in the wake of World War II to find a clear trajectory.

Several small, disparate movements that illustrate European artists' struggle to cope with the aftermath of the war and the ever-burgeoning influence of capitalism cropped up in the years between 1945 and 1960. One such movement in theater and literature aligned itself with the tenets of existentialist philosophy. These expressions were most thoroughly embodied in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose plays, novels, and philosophical writings drew a portrait of the individual as an agent of responsibility set against the backdrop of a massive and hollow universe. In painting, a group of French abstractionists revisited the surrealists' notions of automatism and "informal" gestural practice under the appellation art informel. Artists such as Jean Fautrier and Hans Hartung employed disparate modes of representation that moved between heavily impastoed surfaces and lyrical, academic abstraction.

In the early 1950s, a collective of English artists and architects who called themselves the Independent Group began exhibiting works that turned away from art's past to engage directly with the new forms of advertising and consumerism. The Independent Group advocated a critical surrender to the philosophy of consumer capitalism by integrating art into innovation and leisure. In their signature 1956 exhibition, This Is Tomorrow, the group's members explored their growing fascination with the erotics of the artificial and the reproducible, blending the popularity of new styles of consumer advertising with the sensibility engendered by aesthetic encounters.

Beginning in the 1960s, artists across Europe began working outside of the traditional media of painting and sculpture. Groups such as the New Realists in France and Arte Povera in Italy delved further (and sometimes fruitfully) into the cross-pollination of art and consumer culture. Opting for direct confrontations with the power structures of Europe, these movements proposed a more ambivalent relationship to the commodity form. They integrated into their canvases materials that were traditionally scorned by the practitioners of modernist painting. Paintings became fields in which the tensions between high and low culture, the aesthetic and the everyday, and the political and the social were mapped onto one another. The goal was to open the exclusionary boundaries of the picture frame to the contiguous social forms that were erupting in the changing political climate of the 1960s. Art's assumed place as an elite institution in the privileged realm of bourgeois society came under fire, and the search for its legitimacy in a culture of social revolution became a growing concern for modernists.

In Germany, the attempts to reckon with art's legacy in the aftershock of the war were especially fraught. Joseph Beuys, whose works and performances dealt with a return to the mythic structures of artistic practice, believed that everyone had the potential to be an artist. Under his tutelage, a new generation of young artists attempted to reconcile art-making with the broader community of student movements and social protests of the 1960s, most notably the fluxus and capitalist realist movements. The capitalist realists, lead by Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, pursued painting as a necessary vehicle for critique of the commodity and of consumerism. For these artists, the longevity of modernist practice depended on pitting competing elements of popular culture against one another in an effort to reassert a place for art within the increasingly visualized forms of quotidian life.

With the 1970s came the rise of conceptualism, performance art, and other dematerialized artistic practices that stressed ideas over material production. This shift away from traditional modes of art-making is often considered the start of the so-called postmodern era. The legitimacy of this demarcation is a topic of serious debate within the study of modernist art, and has led some critics to argue that what has been hailed as postmodernism is merely the latest avatar of modernism itself. Advocates of postmodernism have maintained that the ambitions of modernism, which include its claims to authenticity and autonomy, were effectively exhausted or negated by the movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. In particular, turning away from the idea of originality and self-expression as elements essential to a work of art have been the key points of contention within these aesthetic movements.

This postmodern face of late-modernist art recodes the self-critical thrust of modernism as an investigation into the very groundwork of modernism itself. The material substrate of art as an object in the world is pulled apart and analyzed through language, performance, and institutional parameters. In the work of artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans Haacke, the museum itself took the place of traditional fine arts media, effectively becoming the nexus for modernism's reflexive explorations. These artists worked to expose the insidious social and commercial networks that support the production, exhibition, purchase, and sale of works of art, undermining the notion of the artist as a singular agent of creative expression in an effort to create awareness of the constructed division that art maintains between the social world and its own privileged spaces.

With the evolution of mass media, art has continually been forced to re-imagine its place in a globalizing market. As a result, the 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in concern with regionalism, nationally constructed identities, and nomadism through the work of artists caught between an inherited ethnicity and an adopted nationality. In England, the rise of cultural studies and postcolonial theory precipitated the emergence of the black British arts movement of the 1980s, which opened the formal questions of modernism to issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Young artists such as Sonia Boyce and Isaac Julien began working to destabilize these categories, employing a variety of media such as digital video and photography to investigate the construction of subjectivity under the influence of globalism.

Wherever art appears to be in crisis or the aesthetic is threatened by the demands of market capitalism or political censorship, one finds the circumstances vital to modernist practice. Predicated on the threat of its own obsolescence, modernist art strikes out at itself in anticipation of the future conditions of its own compromised existence. Whether in feminist critique, performance, or photomontage, modernism is best understood as the need to envision new forms for art through intensive self-critical investigation. This is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, because art's place within the social sphere has become increasingly marginal since the dissolution of the state-controlled art academies of the nineteenth century. With the disappearance of this institutionalized reception, modernist art could look only to itself to replace its absent interlocutors. Both progenitor and critic, modernism will persist as long as the community that surrounds it continues to vanish.