Modernisms  & Postmodernisms

The art historian/critic James Elkins made an interesting statement in his 2005 book on modernisms  & postmodernisms, Master Narratives and their Discontents. The focus of the book is the role of painting in modernist & postmodernist theories and the core question of whether painting is irrelevant to contemporary visual arts.

If our understanding of contemporary visual arts is based on the assumption that there is a clear trajectory of progress in art-making where the avant guard reject the outdated, unconscious approach of the past and present and lead us forward into the future through new ways of presenting images, then the Postmodernist rejection of painting is justified.  Postmodernism and painting are mutually exclusive because painting is a creature of modernist theory, and modernist theories rest on belief in the ability of art, specifically painting, to transcend the human condition.

Postmodern theories suggest that modernism’s belief that art can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created are at the core of paintings irrelevance. From this perspective, the whole history of modernist painting is its coming painfully to an understanding of its place in the disenchantment of the world. Criticism of modernism is essential based on the uselessness of the received rules of painting and the hopelessness of proceeding as if painting could be the place where the world is “re-enchanted” (pp. 52-55).

In response to modernism and painting’s association with hopeless efforts to re-enchant the world, contemporary art schools and postmodern critics reject painting in favour of other visual art media, such as video and other new media. And those who do continue to paint are careful to avoid using received rules. Elkins touches on the problems with this approach:

“It is certainly much easier to make an acceptable piece of video art than it is to make an acceptable painting, and…the reason for the relative ease of video art is that painting has a longer history: more strictures, more limitations, fewer possibilities, a much denser lexicon of critical terms. Therefore…the ease of video is a reason to keep considering painting, especially when it’s a place where things seem to keep going wrong, or where the artists are deliberately misbehaving themselves, piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. (p. 164) He uses the example of Jeff Koons, whose “…place in the history of twentieth century art is assured in part because of his apparently deeply sincere endorsement of kitch ideas and kitch media“(p. 70) .

The Torment of the Artist

The disenchantment of the world is captured in a few evocative sentences by my author, Richard Powers. In his 2009 novel, Generosity, he describes the torment of the artist reluctant to contribute to the meaningless torrent of artistic works flooding the world at any given moment. In the face of ecological, social and economic megadisasters an artist can only tell,”...the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.”(Powers, Richard, Generosity 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 152) This is the quandry that postmodernism has met with scepticism, suspicion and anti-authoritarianism.

Powers outlines the decline of modernism through the disenchantment of a budding art historian who “…nurtured the belief that the deepest satisfaction lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism….shook her faith in masterpieces.A course in Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.” (p. 61)

Elkins describes postmodernism not as the name of a period with a definable approach such as  postimpressionism but as “…a condition of resistance that can arise wherever modernist ideas are in place. Postmodernism works like a dormant illness in the body of modernism: when modernism falters and fails, postmodernism flourishes.” (p. 89)

Elkins’ & Power’s complementary works agree that the assumption that art can transcend the human condition is a core value of modernism that the postmodern critique rejects. So how can artists, especially painters, step out of the here and now and create works that are timeless, universal and make transcendence possible?

The Return of Myth

In his blog, [Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth, Brendan Dempsey, a graduate student at Yale University, courageously entered the fray. He suggested that “metamodern mythopoeia reasserts a form of ‘transcendence’ without forfeiting postmodern immanence as it reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century“. He includes the work of several young artist who he feels are involved in is artistic mythmaking that oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality.

Dempsey used this work by Adam Miler as an example of a painting that, “reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century” and “oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality“. In The Roses Never Bloomed So Red, Miller delivered an impassioned critique of late-capitalist decay by depicting a fauness vanquished by the violent spirit of development.

This is an early work by Miller and the egregiously curvaceous fauness dooms this painting to the level of soft-core porn, despite its censoriousness. Some of his later work, while still featuring voluptuous nudes being violated in erotic ways, is undeniable in its technical mastery and force. But Miller’s latest work, such as his Comedia Humana” project, is more strongly connected to myths so that, for the most part, the female nudes escape the problem of the male gaze. But overall, Miller has been lured into the same traps that have ensnared artists of earlier epochs.

Perhaps myths are not something that can be conjured up by modern men, steeped in a myth-denying culture. Myths are stories that live in our DNA and make sense to us because they are part of the fabric of ourselves as human beings. As Joseph Campbell would say in his book The Power Of Myth, “…true myths are our ties to the past that help us to understand the world and ourselves.The myths that have come down to us through thousands of years of oral and written history are precious strands of our true selves and attempting to discredit them is like trying to discredit the seasons“. Myth is clearly not a vehicle that will automatically “reassert a form of transcendence” but must be used with conscious awareness and humility to work.

Post-Clement Greenburg

It could perhaps be said that much of post-modernist theory has been developed in reaction against Clement Greenburg‘s definition of what makes or breaks good painting. Greenburg simply defined good painting as something that someone with good taste, such as himself, could see was a good painting.  His point of view is somewhat offensive to our post-modern sensibilities, but he was not aware of post-modernism’s greatest contribution to criticism in all genres – the disparaging of bias.

Scientific research on perception showed that the mere act of observation affects the thing observed. This has led to a general understanding that it is impossible to be objective – that the observer sees based on a set of values and assumptions that influence what is seen. This understanding has led to a cultural revolution in all areas including the arts. This cultural revolution meant that dead white men were no longer automatically considered the “greats” of literature, drama, music and the visual arts. It was no longer intellectually acceptable to assume that women and minorities were grossly under-represented among the “greats” because they were less capable of creating masterpieces. But once using the “greats” as a yardstick for excellence was gone, the very concept of excellence came under attack, all criteria for assessing the arts was dismissed and everybody is now an artist.

But the postmodernist critique, while entirely justified and rational, has been taken to extremes, until, as Elkins says, we have been subjected to exhibitions “piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. So it is worthwhile to revisit Greenberg’s worldview to retrace our steps.

Greenberg never examined his assumption that, because he was a person with good taste, what he saw as a good painting was a good painting and he needed to provide no further evidence of this. But the reason his attitude is still appealing is because he is right in assuming that the point of art is to abandon oneself to the pleasure of viewing. It is not an intellectual activity that requires several wall-feet of text to understand. Art should be a visual, visceral, sensuous experience that bypasses the busy brain and transcends mundane day-to-day life.

Jackson Pollack was Greenberg’s most famous protégé and is a good example of a painter whose work as a visual experience is not narrative, not conceptual and certainly not banal. It is a pleasure to lose oneself in this artist’s ability to weave a surface of textures and patterns with all the complexity of nature but the intentionality of a human sensibility.

Other painters that Greenberg loved, such as Larry Poons, also confirmed his good taste.

Not all of the painters Greenberg admired are immediately recognizable as a visual, visceral, sensuous experience. Perhaps, as he said, you had to stand in front of them. But the point he was making is that a great painting can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created.  Paintings is not and never can be irrelevant because we only have to look at a great painting like those above to know that they can create a place where the world is “re-enchanted” and can achieve transcendence.

The post Transcendence first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Now that change is the constant, Powers suggests that nothing has substantively changed since that critical moment. And when progress of a system becomes so accelerated, “it thrusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection”. This produced a species capable of understanding its own biological evolution. In terms of its psychology the species has become aware of its defence mechanisms, so that the self can never again defend itself in the old ways. And “Art that was once a product of psychological mechanisms is now about those mechanisms and – the ultimate trigger point- about being about them.” (p. 81) “Art takes itself as both subject and content; post-modernism about painting…” and other disciplines about themselves.” (p. 83)

The self-reflexive aspect Powers refers to is clearly evident in, for instance, a film recently shown at the Vancouver International Film Festival called Faces, Places by 89 year old French filmmaker, Agnès Varda.

A quintessentially post-modern piece, the film, feature 2 film-makers who travel around the French countryside taking photographs of ordinary folks, blowing them up to monumental size and pasting them on buildings. It is a film about making a film of 2 film-makers who travel around the French countryside taking photographs, etc.

It was a charming film and very well done. But it was as insubstantial as the photographs that would be washed away by the first storm. Other than being a delightful portrait of the 2 artists and their working relationship, it made no attempt to touch on anything outside that frame. It was a portrait of a world where nothing is constant. so we came away from the film visually gratified and celebrating the ephemeral.

In contrast, an Egyptian film, The Nile Hilton Incident, directed by Tarik Saleh, was a riveting political allegory. Set in Cairo on the edge of revolution, this film explored the corruption that is endemic to tyranny and the near-impossibility for any of us to remain uncorrupted in a culture of greed and violence. While from a post-modern perspective, the film broke all the rules about narrative and morality, this was a piece of great art. It is impossible for the viewer not to be changed by the powerful experience of seeing the film. It was at once illuminating but challenged our complacency and willingness to comply.

This is a good example of how art can be transformative, despite the widely held belief that this is no longer possible in the jaded 21st Century. This jaded view holds that, as self-reflexive beings, art can no longer charm us into believing in a reality that isn’t there or make us suspend our disbelief. The Nile Hilton Incident showed us that whether or not we can fully participate in the experience is not a problem because art can explore powerful ideas and reveal truths outside itself.

However, the idea that there are any truths to be had or that artists can reveal truth and make us more aware is challenged by contemporary art criticism. In his essay, Doubt, Richard Shiff explores modernist and postmodern criticism. Though the nomenclature differs, the self-reflexive issue arises when he discusses the matter of identity which looms large in postmodern discourses. He also refers to the present as in a constant state of change which, to him, precludes absolutes. He then goes on to relate this lack of absolutes to the individual sense of self. if there are no absolutes & everything is relative, there can be no fixed self but a series of selves that appear according to the situation.

Shiff calls these “innumerable configurations of personality and emotion” self-differing.  He contrasts the self-differing self to the idea of a phantasmatic “all-at-oneness” that suspends the temporal dimension. Shiff discounts this idea by stating that the self always self-differs and never integrates, so that self-difference becomes its identity and that to differentiate the immediate from the temporal is pointless. He claims that all modern & postmodern art explores “orders of difference and temporalized plays of memory” then describes how some artists have attempted to resist self-differing: “the gap between reason & emotion, mind & body, identity by name & identity by feeling”. He suggests that this is impossible based on the aforementioned constant state of change, lack of absolutes and the irreconcilable divide between belief & doubt.

The point of his argument is to critique the style of art criticism that entails a consciously subjective approach, where the critic simply relates a personal response to the artwork. A good example of this is John Berger‘s 2015 book, Portraits, in which he provides a wholly subjective review of mostly male artists. Shiff’s point is that, if there can be no fixed self, there can be no coherent subjective point of view.

So though this may be very true of art criticism, an appreciation of the irreconcilable divide between belief & doubt may not lend itself to understanding art. Shiff’s thinking about art is based on ideas about the nature of the self (a series of selves ) and art as an expression of self-differing. But in my view, the integration of the self has little to do with the dichotomy between belief and doubt as these are simply mental states. The self is not a mental state but a state of being, of which the mind is but a part. Integration of the self does not entail reconciling belief & doubt but is a process whereby body, mind and emotions become one with the self rather than conflicting and disintegrating states. Complete integration of body, mind, emotions and soul is clearly present when a great dancer or musician performs with total commitment and belief in the work and no evidence of an irreconcilable divide. At one remove is the experience of viewing a great painting or other artwork that is clearly the product of an artist wholly integrated during the creative process.

Then there is the integration of the self with consciousness itself – that “phantasmatic all-at-oneness” that is dismissed in this relativistic view. But by dismissing this possibility – the potential for transcendence, this view also dismisses the potential for art to reveal truths, to transcend “orders of difference and temporalized plays of memory”.

In Buddhism, the Sand Mandala painting originated in Vajrayana Buddhism for meditative purposes. The center of the mandala mostly contains a circle to represent spiritual enlightenment, freedom, or the Buddha. Mandala helps practitioners to find themselves as part of nature and become one with the wholeness of the universe. It may not be possible to describe this process using reason, no matter how elegantly delivered but it may be perceived if we suspend the busy reasoning mind.

So there are examples, both contemporary and traditional, that counter Power’s pessimistic view that art is doomed by a culture of change to only be about itself and not relevant to the rest of the world. There is still the potential for transcendence and for art to reveal truths, to transcend “orders of difference and temporalized plays of memory”.

For more on transcendence and the arts, you can visit another blog on the topic.

The post Doomed by A Culture of Change? first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.