What is modernism after all?

When placed in a societal perspective (economic, social and cultural history) it seems to me that the seeds of modernism were planted with the plunder of Middle-Eastern luxuries during the crusades and the flow of trade that ensued along the following centuries.What I mean to say more exactly is that Modernism is one episode within the historical era of Modernity that starts with the long distance trade that was unleashed by the crusades. Viewed through the lens of the very long history Homo-sapiens' evolved indeed societally from:

1. bands to tribes. Homo-sapiens' first true model of society were tribal non-power societies.  This was when the genie Homo distinguished itself from the other animal species by evolving societally, through the usage of knowledge, from bands of individuals coerced under the authority of an alpha-male into tribes whose members were considered to be equal and so decided on all matters pertaining to their group at the unanimity. Tribal societies shared the vision of reality of their shaman and this glued the minds of tribesmen inside a commonly shared worldview. And the substance of this worldview was shared by tribes all around the world while variations in the form of its substance adapted it to local contextual settings. Anthropologists refer to this worldview as animism or shamanism. Tribal (wo)men of knowledge were those who initiated the practice of image making. It was their instrument per excellence to instill their vision of reality in the minds of their fellow tribesmen. Later that practice of image making was referred to as being art sometimes during the Renaissance in Western Europe. And once the nations of the rest of the world joined Modernity they also  inherited this appellation.
   
2. tribes to power societies: demographic growth eventually destabilized the golden rule about the size of tribal societies and after thousands of years of trials and errors larger groups settled for institutions of power in order to reproduce their societies over the generations:

• the first stage of power societies was the era of empire and kingdoms that started approximately around 5000 Years Ago and came to an end first in Western Europe sometimes in the 13-14th centuries. The rest of the world later followed in the footsteps of Western Europe. The worldview shared by all during the era of kingdoms and empires was religion that glued the minds of the individual atoms and the art of that era is religious art illustrating the creed... China was an exception to that principle.  First the worldview of its empire was not religious but philosophical. Secondly its men of knowledge were the mandarins or scholars who were especially educated to serve the institutions of the empire and art was one among their practices. And so Chinese art was a representation of the tenets of their traditional philosophy and not an illustration of any creed.
• the second stage of power societies was initiated in Western Europe between the 13th and 14th centuries as a result of the long distance merchants' adoption of "the reason at work within capital". This is what unleashed the societal era called Modernity... Modernity divides in 3 phases:  -- Early-Modernity 13-14th centuries to the 19th century,  -- High-Modernity 19th and 20th centuries,  -- Late-Modernity started after the 2nd World war sometimes in the seventies/eighties and is the world's present condition.

What is called Modernism is the revolution in the visual art world that was initiated largely by the Parisian avant-garde sometimes during the 2nd part of the 19th century. The dominance of Modernism waded after the 2nd World-war. 

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By the 14th and 15th centuries art was starting to transition in Western-Europe from being exclusively at the service of religion to becoming the illustrator and propagator of the visual signs of modernity. Religious stories had been the only accepted subjects to be represented in art for over a millennium following the imposition by the emperor Constantine of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire.

Jan van Eyck Madonna of Canon van der Paele,1436 oil on panel, Musee Communal at Bruges.

In the 14th to the 15th century art, which had been a practice describing religious stories at the attention of the followers of the church, start to be used to ensure the "sanctification" of the bourgeoisie's new values of individualism and private property. And gradually their commissions of works to be suspended on the walls of their mansions (financed with the proceeds of their plunders in far lands) overtook the purchases by the church and after a few centuries they eclipsed the traditional religious visual signs. This period is called the Renaissance for it was kind of a revolution to satisfy the emerging needs of the new rich, the enterprising aristocracy and merchants, through the recourse to Greek pre-Christian knowledge that had been lost in Europe during the Middle-ages but that long distance merchants rediscovered in the rich Muslim university libraries of the Middle-East. The new visual signs in demand now were -- portraits of the new rich and the members of their families, -- landscapes around their manors, -- and stills. Such subjects will dominate the visual art scene for the next four-five centuries.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Hunters in the Snow 1565; 

Oil on panel, 117 x 162 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna

Things start to change in the second half of the nineteenth century.
A technological explosion (trains, long distance communications,...) that goes in parallel with the emergence of philosophic rationalism somehow engender changing perceptions about what reality is all about. Van Gogh, Gauguin, the impressionists, the pointillists, the fauvists, the expressionists and others are challenging the "way to paint" but force is to observe that they continue to represent the first degree images that project on their retinas and what they see are still faces, landscapes, and stills.

Vincent van Gogh,  Wheatfield with Cypresses

, July 1890 (Auvers-sur-Oise), June 1889 original; Oil on canvas, 51.5 x 65 cm

By the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century science is blooming. At the contact of their friends mathematicians and physicists Picasso and a few other painters want to change the subject of representation by re-coursing to mathematical theories but in the end the only thing they succeed doing is what fast will appear as a trick (triangles and other abstract forms to represent more than one side of a same subject in one painting). Such tricks change the form of faces, landscapes, and stills but are still representations of the same first degree image  that projects on the retina. Duchamp understood this. He called cubism a trick and futurism an expressionism of movement.

Duchamp. Transition of Virgin into a Bride/Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée. 1912. 

Canvas 59 x 53.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.

At the contact with psychoanalysis the early surrealists, at least the thinkers of the movement, (Breton, Masson, Miro, Kandinsky...) experiment with automatism but while they escape the first degree image that projects on the retina they fail to theorize a new vision of reality. With Dali and Magritte the movement errs in commercialism and rapidly loses the steam of its original promises.



The second world war represents a radical turning point.

Coming out of the barbarity that had afflicted all nations of Europe artists and intellectuals proclaim their rejection of societal life as it had always been conceived of before. The members of Cobra are the most explicit. Constant, for example, speaks about the release of knowledge, as an outcome of the discovery of his desires through experimentation, hoping that this newly released knowledge will generate a radically new societal experience. Art started now to be conceived of as the description of a reality in the process of becoming and not any longer as an existing system that would be absolute and unchanging. This is when the artist projected the hope to mutate into a modern shaman who brings a vision of the rejected barbarity in the hope of gaining better days for all tomorrow.

Cobra Modification, 1949 

(Constant with Jorn, Appel and Corneille, on original by Richard Mortensen)

But real shaman are not stuck into rejecting the past. They offer a new vision that can be shared by all... As we see from "Cobra Modification" the past, the barbarity, is still the exclusive subject. We'll have to wait for artists in late Late-Modernity to dare starting to represent the first signs of a new vision of life in the process of becoming.

Having been spared the trauma of life through barbarity and not being excessively burdened by a past of theories and concepts American painters and artists are focusing on their individual feelings. This is best expressed by Jackson Pollock in "Three statements": "The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather then to illustrate them". Pollock and his colleagues limit their actions to the satisfaction of their personal ego, the expression of their feelings, and do not show the least interest for what their minds are thinking about nor for the impact of their works on societal functioning. With hindsight we come to better understand how they were the perfect match for ideologues and merchants.

 The ideologues of the US state department understood that by pushing the works of the New York Art School in the face of the whole world they would be able to contrast their freedom to paint "whatever" with the ideological rigidity of socialist realism. But the propaganda budgets of various branches of the US government also targeted the establishment of New York as the capital of the art market. European merchants were subsidized to transfer their galleries to New York while European painters who refused to move to New York were shunned by the market.

The failure by the painters of the Modernist avant-garde, to attain their objectives of representing reality at a deeper level than the first degree image that project on the retina, was not lost on the merchants. They sized on that failure to eliminate, from the commercial circuit, all works that focus on ideation and political messages. In that process form was favored over substance. And so we come to understand why the members of the New York Art School were not only pushed in the face of the world for reasons of propaganda but also for commercial reasons. Merchants want indeed to minimize the loss of eyeballs and buyers in order to maximize their returns. And to ensure maximum returns they eliminated everything that fostered ideation, debate, and rejection.

Pollock. Number 8, 1949 (detail) 1949; 

Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York.

This radical differentiation in creative attitudes on the two sides of the pond is largely due to daily life exposure or no daily life exposure to war barbarity. But the societal disparities between the two sides appear as radically important on creative attitudes as the exposure or not to daily barbarity. In short the war had considerably enriched the US economically while Europe ended largely indebted towards the US and with an infrastructure in taters. In the post war America ran at full speed into "marketization for consumerism" while Europe had to spend its time reordering its political houses. In short demand for visual signs for wall decoration were fast booming in the US while Europe continued to debate about ideas. This had a radically opposite impact on the intellectual and creative approach towards visual signs in Europe and the US. The American mass market needed politically sterile visual signs in order to reach the largest spread in demand while in Europe visual signs were largely expressing a political answer against war barbarity and the hope of better days to come.

Shed in such a light we understand a lot better the differences between abstract expressionism and Cobra and its followers and we also gain a better understanding as to why abstract expressionism gained wide market recognition while Cobra and other European artists remained in the shadows of the market.


But how will the input of both sides be judged in terms of the "long history" of visual art?

I venture to suggest that from a long haul historical standpoint:

• Cobra and the other European thinking artists will be seen as the true initiators of the unification of Europe as an antidote against barbarity. As such Cobra could well appear as an early gravedigger of modernity opening the way for later first steps into  what comes after modernity.

Constant. Untitled (Copenhagen), 1949. oil on canvas. 55 x 60 cm.

• The market success of abstract expressionism will be seen as the seeding ground of "whatever is art" and the free fall into the visual absurdities characterizing the end of modern art.

Richard Serra. One Ton Prop (House of Cards). 1969 (refabricated 1986). 

Lead, four plates, each 48 x 48 x 1" (122 x 122 x 2.5 cm). Gift of the Grinstein Family. © 2006 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Rejection of formalism. Postmodernism.

European intellectuals and artists rebelled against the focus of the art-world on form and soon the Post-Modernist school re-introduced substance. In their minds substance equaled ideation. But what is ideation? In "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge" Jean-Francois Lyotard posited that 'grand narratives' or worldviews had been ousted by rationalism and science and so ideation had to focus on limited phenomena just like science does. In other words Lyotard and his Parisian colleagues suspected meaning to be a trap that they thought they could escape by deconstruction and concentration on the fragmented pieces. In essence the artist was tasked to imitate science and its stated mission to comprehend the whole by addition of the comprehension of the parts.  

This very fact did not escape the powers that be. They had indeed been in a fight, over the best part of the last hundred years, against social movements that grand political narratives had glued into cohesive opposition groups. One such group, the Communist party in 1917, succeeded to take over Russia, then another group nearly took the control of Germany, and such groups have been since threatening the whole of Western Europe. To the agents of power theories about the rejection of grand narratives were like a gift from the sky. They controlled the institutions of higher education, they had vast state budgets, and rushed their most famous institutions into hiring the best known Postmodern French star theorists. The rest is history.

In the name of artistic substantiation Postmodern thought leaders imposed an arbitrary limit to ideation that has the ideological stench of propaganda and censorship. The rejection of the notion of worldviews and their societal functions by the theorists of postmodernism was tantamount to hoodwinking citizens to believe in grand illusions of freedom which would necessarily engage serious consequences for the future working of societies in the form of societal atomization followed by the collapse of societies. More generally Postmodern thought leaders gave everyone to see that they had no idea of what societal evolution is all about: gluing the mind of individual particles into sharing a common worldview so that their societies have a sufficient cohesiveness to possibly reproduce over the generations.

The reason at work within capital and the ‘knowings’ leading to rationality and science were full of the energy of life that frenetically pushes for ever more complexity and as such rationality and science were fostering an age of incredibly rapid societal evolution. In contrast, it seems to me, Postmodernism goes against the grain of societal evolution and it is harmful to the physical and moral well-being of the individuals. But perhaps this is again all at the image of the loneliness of Western individuals in their atomized societies in waiting to collapse...



What comes after Modernity and post-Modernity

To give a feel of how the works of modernity and post-modernity differentiate from what is to come, here are some examples of early After-modernity babble. No doubt this is early post modern learning, for, what comes after modernity will take many decades if not centuries to mature. We have indeed to acknowledge that what comes after modernity can only grow into fertile ground, if I may say so, and this ground is unfortunately represented by the completion of the expansion of modernity to the 4 corners of the world which inevitably ensures -- the maximization of all the side-effects of Modernity, and their convergence which sets in motion a raft of feedbacks among themselves...

See the contrast of these early works of After-modernity with the sad, mostly negative outlook in Constant's works. The latter is the phase of rejection (late evening) that allows for the dawn to set on the experimentation of better days to come. These new works dare starting to represent the first signs of a new vision of life in the process of becoming and what is striking is that these works denote a positiveness that suggest the break-down of many of the present-day existing obstacles to individual fulfillment. In this sense it is a new societal setting, a new worldview, that these works try to prefigure or imagine.

There is also visibly a reference to knowledge that could be available to all. Today the knowledge accumulated along the generations has to be learned and memorized by each individual. There is no reason to believe that the large mass of knowledge accumulated earlier should indefinitely need to be memorized by all.

One possibility is that extensions from the brain to computers will give us access to stored memory. In such a vision directly accessible accumulated knowledge is one of the most striking aspects of After-Modernity... Another possibility is that technology disappears in the maelstrom of side-effects of Modernity that unleash societal collapse and mass extinction of life. I'm personally more inclined to think that collapse and extinction are what comes our way... And if humanity survives the Anthropocene it will unmistakably have to compose with nature. Small groups of people will not have the time to inquire into abstractions. They'll have to toil to survive. To decrease their suffering while increasing their happiness they will have to delegate the task of knowledge formation to a specialized man of knowledge... And so we discover how a cycle of societal evolution closes while a new cycle eventually emerges...

In such a contextual setting the role of the real artist is thus to imagine how humanity might then conceive of reality in the future. Here are very early visual signs of such possibly better days to come when the organic reality of life necessarily re-imposes itself and men of knowledge start to search for patterns in the fabric of reality in order to gain knowledge about the working of the new realities confronting humanity...

Werner Horvath: "Hundertwasser's Dream". Oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm.

laodan. Transformation. Acrylic 17" x 22".

Note dated July 2016.

This post was written in May 2007. Nearly a decade later, while still agreeing with what I wrote there, I have to expand on the notion of "better days to come" and "Those works denote a positiveness suggesting the break-down of many of the present-day existing obstacles to individual fulfillment".

My view today is that our societies are definitely on an accelerated path to collapse. This will assuredly not be a picnic. But while collapse evokes hard times ahead it also evokes the liberation from a maddening worldview and the chance to recover one's sanity.

Modernity has been overly successful and this is what in the end is killing it. The side-effects of Modernity have no other explanation for them possibly affecting societies and individuals than the fact that the individuals have been dumbed down by an overly wild individualism and extreme consumerism that act like a lobotomization that reduces our minds into infantilism. In the future historians will be asking why Moderns did lose the usage of their minds. Why did they follow, like sheep, the abstract idea contained in the reason at work within capital? Why did they continue destroying life on earth while collapse was already well advanced?

To future minds our behavior today as a species will indeed appear baffling to say the least.

When you understand where humanity stands today you can only dread what is coming our way but at the same time you also feel a tickling of encouragement because it promises the ending of what can only be called an era of sheer insanity. It is in that sense that the expression "better days to come" has to be understood ...as being a promise of positivity, of pragmatism, that is contained as a tickling of encouragement in our minds.

My work "Transformation" here above reflects such a promise of leaving chaos and entering an emergent new era of order in which man starts a new cycle of knowledge formation...

Note Dated December 2018

To better visualize, in one glance, what Modernism is all about I invite you to visit my "Visual Encyclopedia of art". Scroll up from section 07 to 15 to visualize the unfolding of Modernism and, in sections 16 to 24, you can visualize how a new avant-garde is starting to venture in the representation of the artistic path out of Modernity towards what comes after Modernity.