Re-imaging modernism

I know plenty and about art and I know what I like. And it isn’t much, at least not in today’s boring and empty art scene, but critics and artists alike have declared that visual art is undergoing a significant change, one that will see a return of aesthetics. If this does occur it would indeed mark a radical break from the recent history of art.

When British journalist Brendan O’Neill criticised Marc Quinn’s statue of disabled artist Alison Lapper, then placed on the ‘fourth plinth’ in Trafalgar Square he ran the risk of being characterised as a philistine. O’Neill’s argument noted that the work suggested, “the aim of public art is to hector the public, and help us to snap out of our apparently prejudiced views” rather than emerging from any consensus of what art should actually be. (1) It’s an interesting view, especially because it gets to the heart of how much of today’s art has been, on the one hand, robbed of its autonomy and subject matter while simultaneously being dragooned into service as a crude propaganda tools for officialdom.

Quinn’s statue has now vacated the plinth, making room for the next in an unending line of artworks that will be displayed in the square – something that in itself suggests a culture that is unsure of itself. It was replaced by Thomas Schuette’s ‘Model for a Hotel 2007’ and followed, in July of this year, by ‘One and Other’ a project developed by acclaimed sculptor Anthony Gormley which sees members of the public ascend the plinth and stand where a statue might. (2) Without wanting to get into interminable debates about what qualifies as art, the popularity of Gormley’s project stems not from its value as a work of art, but from its characteristic as a fun activity: a chance to stand in a place normally forbidden, as well as a fair amount of exhibitionism. This was underlined by the fact that the first person to climb atop the plinth was a protester who gatecrashed the launch in order to promote his idea of a tobacco ban.

Politics and art have a long and complicated relationship, from early patronage by the Catholic Church, through the Medicis and the rise of the bourgeoisie, to the revolutionary eras and then the state sponsored arts councils of today. Thankfully, few people today judge art on its political content but that doesn’t mean that art has no political or social significance. At the very least, art and culture will always tell us something about the society that produced it – after all, even the greatest of artistic geniuses didn’t exist in atemporal bubbles, they build on the work of their predecessors and reflect the values of the societies they live and work in.

Modernism, the art movement which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was among the most avowedly political collisions between art and ideology that we have ever seen. It is really only rivalled by post-modernism, its gravedigger, which was political insofar as it completely rejected any lingering commitment to the Enlightenment project and humanism. While early modernists viewed change with hope, admiration and not a small amount of revolutionary zeal – something that reached its zenith, in political terms at least, with constructivism in the Soviet Union, a movement which attempted to marry abstract art, politics and engineering – the art of much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries consciously rejected not only any so-called ‘grand narrative’ but even the concept of beauty. Aesthetics were rejected as irrelevant by conceptual artists whose cold, calculated works of art could often only be judged after consuming vast amounts of supporting material and documentary evidence.

This was a marked change from modernism. Even during the 1950s, by which point public optimism had started to dissipate and was being replaced with Cold War-inspired paranoia, modernism in the form of abstract expressionism served a social purpose in dragging American art out of its local ghetto personified by the regionalists and onto the world stage. (3) The fact that this was actively promoted by the CIA in order to improve America’s standing with European intellectuals, who has thus far been inclined to view Marxism as the key progressive force in society, does nothing to undermine the fact abstract expressionism was a significant form of modernism and was directly linked to the rise of the US as a self-confident culture. American critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1948, on the cusp of the rise of the abstract expressionists: “The conclusion forces itself, much to our own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the centre of production and political power.” (4)

From the 1960s onward, things began to change. Increasingly art became a spectacle, not an aesthetic spectacle but a performative goading of critics and audiences who were being asked to defy the status of works of art. When this inevitably happened, particularly with the uninitiated general public who were baffled by intentionally ugly or boring anti-aesthetic art, the art world’s priesthood would simply sneer at them and call them philistines. Suddenly anyone who expressed doubts about contemporary art was either an ignoramus or a ‘reactionary’ like fusty critic Brian Sewell.

Whatever about the merits of the era (and it did, of course, produce some interesting work) what post-modern art says most clearly is that life is pointless. It is no surprise then that an era defined by confusion and the rejection of any kind of positive vision for society, or indeed humanity itself, produced art that was at once ghoulish and ultimately empty. From the blankness of minimalism, through the aggressive obscurity of much performance art, to the horror freak-show of the 1990s ‘Young British Artists’, the period from the 1960s to today is characterised by art that may shock or confuse but has nothing much to say – and certainly nothing positive..

There is, however, now a growing consensus that the era of post-modernism is finally coming to an end. Artists and critics alike are beginning to talk about ‘alter-modern’, a term coined by French critic Nicolas Bourriaud, that encapsulates attempts to create an ‘alternative modernism’ that is relevant for our changed world.

As Tate Modern put it in a press release that accompanied its ‘Altermodern’ exhibition earlier this year: “If early twentieth-century modernism is characterised as a broadly Western cultural phenomenon, and post-modernism was shaped by ideas of multi-culturalism, origins and identity, alter-modern is expressed in the language of a global culture. Alter-modern artists channel the many different forms of social and technological networks offered by rapidly increasing lines of communication and travel in a globalised world.” (5)

What this actually means in practice remains to be seen. Visitors to the Tate, and indeed critics, tended to give a mixed view of the exhibition, and those not versed in contemporary art theory dialogue would have a hard time distinguishing much of this work from what went before it.

Still, art historian Francis Halsall told forth there was a return to beauty underway in visual art, saying young artists rejected the nihilism of their tutors: “One way of understanding this may be in generational terms; and their manifestation in institutions (particularly art schools). Students will be influenced by their tutors, but will also want to move beyond what they do.

“There are specific historical reasons for this ‘aesthetic appetite’. They emerge from the tendency (inherited from the modernist avant-garde) for generations of artists and critics to attempt a clear differentiation from the preceding artistic paradigm. Currently, this attempt at differentiation is informed by the perceived move away from the perceived conceptualism and/or anti-aesthetic attitude of the post-modernism (itself a problematic concept) of the closing decades of the 20th century,” he said.

Halsall says that part and parcel of this change will be the re-emergence of the significance of the individual work of art: “It is no mistake that Hal Foster called his collection of essays on post-modern culture ‘the Anti-Aesthetic’. By doing so he demonstrated that what was at stake in post-modernism’s rejection of modernism was the enacting of an incredulity toward the autonomous aesthetic of unique works of art. Thus, within art practice and theory, the move away from post-modernism, which reflects the desire to establish a generationally-specific working praxis might be understood through an aesthetic turn.”
Halsall’s view has much to commend it. It would be unfortunate, however, if he is ultimately correct that the key driving force is merely a generational shift. If this turns out to be true ‘alter-modernism’, or whatever we might want to call it, will fall short of its modernist forebear precisely because in rejecting the ‘old’ of post-modernism simply because it is old it will trap art in a vicious cycle of back-and-forth between those who are interested in aesthetics and those who are not. But then, we as a society get the art we deserve. In the modernist era, a time defined by industrial progress and genuine battle of political ideas, even the most apolitical art such as that of the abstract expressionists took on a social significance. From the 1960s onwards, however, art became increasingly divorced not only from society but even from wider culture, not, as some conservative critics claimed, because it was simply a reflection of a shallow consumer society, but because in dispensing with aesthetics it had ultimately undermined its own purpose.

It seems unfair to use a political thinker like Karl Marx to criticise art, and I certainly have no desire to see art being made subject to any kind of ideological vetting, but as the old aesthete himself said: “History repeats itself – first as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

(1) Statue of limitations, spiked, August 24, 2007

(2) A monument to Big Brother culture, Nathalie Rothschild, spiked, July 6, 2009

(3) The Producers: Clement Greenberg, modernism and the rise of America as a high culture superpower in the immediate post-war era, Jason Walsh, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland, December 2008

(4) ‘The Decline of Cubism’, Clement Greenberg, Partisan Review, 1948, collected in ‘Art in theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas’, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), 2003

(5) Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Modern, January 2, 2009