Organic art = the patterns of life (5)

4.  Western Late-Modernity sows the seeds of After-Modernity

Long ago it downed on me that there is no way to untangle the arts from societal evolution and its economic, political or geo-political aspects. All are intertwined and their interconnections are what creates the reality of what happens in our present societies.

Understanding our present implies that we get a handle on the evolution of these interconnections from the past, to the present, to the future.

Only when we understand our present can we feel the ways of our species in the future and then we adapt our being accordingly in the present …

---

The communist party ‘owns’ China

In the Peoples Republic of China the communist party literally owns the institutions of state and no interference in the decision making of these institutions is accepted by any group of interest. This is quite different from the West where lobbies write the laws relating to their interests. What this means is that the communist party has an absolute control over the way society functions. Now this does not mean, as most Westerners believe, that China is a dictatorship. Individuals and economic actors are participating in the decision making process by giving their ideas and opinions about what should be done. During this consultation phase civil society debates with the representatives of the party and the state about solutions and the media also relays these debates. Once the consultation phase concludes civil society retreats and lets the party and state institutions formalize the decisions and their implementation. And once the rules of the game have been formalized everybody is expected to participate in their implementation.

Big capital holders own Western ‘democracies’

In democracies a few families own controlling stakes of the capital that is invested in strategic sectors of the economy. This gives them, for example, the control over the media and ensures them the power to shape public opinion. And so the political decision making process is rendered captive of a public opinion that is being constantly framed around the interests of big capital holders.

From Modernity to After-Modernity. (27)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations 

Summary sketch of part 2.

Life is one of the applications installed in the operating system of the universe and it emerges eventually in those of its sub-sets whose context contains all the ingredients for life to emerge.

Humanity is one of the youngest species to have evolved from such a process of emergence on earth. As all species humanity is subservient to the application of the principle of life. By that I mean that we can’t escape its rules; we are merely dancing to the tune of its music.

From Modernity to After-Modernity. (24)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations 
Chapter 5. About the arts

Dear readers I'm really sorry for this late publishing of the last articles in this series.  A software glitch left me stranded in Beijing and I could not find a way to access Blogger. There are 3 more posts to complete the publishing of what I wrote along the last winter. I'll post them weekly as I did in the past.
I wish you all a great summer. I'll be back publishing next November.
Best,
Laodan

5.3.4.3. Numerous contemporary ideas about the future.


People generally agree that modernity has yielded a series of bottlenecks but they widely disagree on their future outcomes for human societies. The range of future possible outcomes varies along the line between the following two extreme beliefs:

• the belief in technological singularity
• the belief in the collapse of modern civilization.

From Modernity to After-Modernity (about chapter 5)

 Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 5. About the arts

Hello to my regular readers and to everybody else,


As of my post last Friday my writing this winter already generated 560 book pages.  I started working on the last chapter, this chapter 5, but will pass this week's publication because I was exhausted and needed some time to put my ideas together. This chapter should be the culmination of this winter's writing so I feel I need to get it right.

This is how I presently envisage the architecture of this text:

What now in painting? Part 2: The visual form of meaning.

Summary of Part 1:
= Art as an illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day:
........... but who are the men of knowledge in late modernity?
........... artists have to build up their own knowledge base
= Knowledge as the outcome of:
........... an accumulation of knowings by scientists.
........... a philosophic vision of the human atom as particle of an unattainable whole.

The plight of the visual artist in late-modernity.

Seen from a historical perspective the form taken by visual art appears to have greatly evolved over time while its function has nevertheless remained constant, indeed, along 99.99% of its timespan visual art has been the visual representation of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day, by the artist, at the attention of his fellow citizens.

From early on humans understood that they could not survive by themselves alone in the wild but that they needed to be part of a societal grouping to assure their reproduction and that of their children. Societies were thus a fact of life for humanity since way back in time as it is also for most other animals. But once in existence societies behave like ensembles on their own and devise strategies to preserve their own reproduction. It's inside those societal strategies of reproduction that visual art finds its roots.

Through adaptation and evolution the eye evolved as the most important human sensor. Since millions of years each individual has been bestowed with vision to protect himself from the dangers lurking in his immediate environment and this, in turn, has shaped the foundations upon which humanity has developed its understanding of reality.

Under animism, along far more than one hundred thousand years, primitive arts have represented the worldview of the shaman. The role of the shaman (the man of knowledge within the tribe) was the formation of knowledge about what reality is all about, that means about all aspects touching the existence of his tribe. He then used visual illustrations, symbols, and signs to transmit the essence of his acquired knowledge to his fellow tribesmen. The sharing of those visual signs and their content was unifying the tribe behind a common set of beliefs and the tribesmen reinforced that belief through the use of those visual signs as decoration of their daily use utensils. Both the visual creations by the shaman and the functional creations by the tribesmen constitute what is commonly called "primitive arts" or "arts premiers" (following their decision to open a museum especially reserved for "animist arts" and in order to avoid being criticized for Eurocentrism, the French lately termed those arts "first arts" or the ones that came first on the human societal evolutionary ladder).

It always struck me that there seems to be such a strong resemblance in the content of animist works. African, American Indian, Indian India, Chinese or anywhere around the world animist works may vary in their form, the materials they are realized in but the story they represent for the observer to see are invariably identical: the interconnectedness of all living and inanimate elements present in the environment forming like so many yarns woven together in the gigantic tapestry of the one thing all fell they were part of, I mean, the ultimate reality; the Whole, the One.

Under religion, during a few thousand years, the creed has been the exclusive object to be represented visually. With the unification of tribes as a consequence of the larger population densities unleashed by agriculture the unity of content found in animism vanishes and is replaced gradually by parochial foundational stories used by the local men of power to strengthen their control over their subjects.

This is the time when the illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge started to specialize and gradually the making of visual signs established itself as an autonomous societal function. But this autonomization has been a very slow process that was only completed, in Europe, during the late Middle-Ages.

The separation of functions between knowledge production and its diffusion through visual signs was initially realized amongst the monks. Some specialized in learning and developing the creed while others specialized in spreading the foundational story through speech and visual signs. Seen that the only literate beings were the monks and priests visual signs took preeminence in the diffusion of the creed among the populations of Europe. When cities started to develop at the interstices of freedom on the periphery of the manors, commoners gradually took over this image making function from the monks which thus established the craft as one among the many others.

What is remarkable in this process is the extremely low social esteem that was recognized to the image making craftsmen. This stands in sharp contrast to the role of the artist under early modernity. The entreprizing aristocrats and new rich merchants accumulated their wealth against the will of the church which was forbidding banking activities and greatly discouraging the accumulation of material possessions. This acted like a powerfully incentive on the new rich to start spreading their own worldview. Image crafters were then hired to represent the virtues of individualism that ultimately procured the wealth of private property (portraits of those living in the mansions, landscapes around the mansion and stills of what lay on the tables in the mansions). One can easily imagine that the inquisition did not see with a benevolent eye its image making crafters passing at the service of the infidel, the enemy, and its punishment through fire acted as a severely inflating factor on the remuneration of those image crafters who dared brave the inquisition by jumping over board in the camp of the new rich. This incentive of very high remunerations fast changed the perception of the social status of the image crafters. Wealth for themselves procured them also gradually a high prestige and their craft soon was to be called art and themselves artists. This is indeed the origin of the words art and artist as we understand them under modernity.

Nothing is being meant to last eternally and so the high remuneration that went with the exercise of the artist's craft, in early modernity, would soon be memory. From the wealth and prestige of Rubens history surfs indeed very fast towards the misery of Van Gogh.

The combination of the logic of capital and philosophic rationalism extending in applied science eventually ensued in industrialization and democratization. This process that expands approximately along two centuries resulted in the separation of the men of power from the men of knowledge which, by the way, procured to the visual artist the freedom to represent whatever he wants. The new men of knowledge, the scientists, were left to compete on the "level playing field" of the free market with anyone presenting a foundational story about reality.

In this process visual artists have gained total freedom over the content of their works but the substance of that content had vanished and thus their market was gone, they had lost the societal function that had been theirs until then. But, for sure, nothing changes overnight. All movement forward continues for a while even after the energy prompting its movement has been cut. Inertia sets in and inertia conquered modernity or to be more precise the mature stage of modernity what some also call "high modernity".

High modernity can be summed up as a short period of search, by "thinker-artists", for a new narrative about what is reality. The whole enterprise was centered on content, on meaning, and form was only of marginal concern for the artists themselves. But force is to recognize that the content of most of the works from that period does not carry forward much helpful meaning and that it is their form that is being remembered in late modernity. As a direct consequence of this paradox, visual arts lost:

- any trace of a narrative: the naive belief in an "end of history" did not leave any space for another historical narrative and whatever the artist does is considered sufficient to be called art.

- any trace of a public: from the onset of a high modernity Paul Klee already noted that "the people are not with us" (Uns tragt kein Volk)

Having lost any notion of a narrative (a story about what reality is all about), having lost their public, the question that begs for an answer now in late modernity is "for who do visual artists continue to create?".

Answering this question comes down to isolate the different market segments where the creator, the artist, can try to place his wares and this should also shed some light on the content of his works.

1. The market for interior decoration expanded from being exclusively reserved to luxuries for the rich to a mass market for the middle-class that was then satisfied by the proliferation of cheap prints and cheap originals. The profit imperative of the corporation being what it is the bulk of the prints on the market are mass copies of works that fell out of intellectual protection. Some artists experiment with limited edition copies of their works but, all in all, the marketing imperative most often leaves them in the quandary of having to decide being an artist or being a marketeer. Lately the production of cheap originals (copies or works in the style of...) has been delocalized to China and other countries of the South. You can buy an excellent copy of the Mona Lisa in Beijing for 50 US dollars frame included. Only the frame costs more that that in the West. Furthermore the level of technical skills of painters in the South is rarely seen nowadays in the West. Copies and works "in the style of..." relate to subjects of the past: portraits of those living in the mansions, landscapes around the mansion and stills of what lay on the tables in the mansions. This does not fit the content of contemporary art works. In sum the process of delocalization has left many Western painters discovering the hardship of having to sell their own wares at a Chinese price.
2. The memory of our culture and the cultural importance recognized by history to artworks is being cultivated in Western education systems and speculators equipped with PR and advertisement exploit the memory of that cultural importance to make fast bucks by speculating on the value of works that they buy initially for a cheap price. Charles Saatchi is a perfect example of this new group of art buyers. What counts here is the generation of hefty returns. Art is of no importance. Charles Saatchi candidly describes the criteria that motivates his purchases as a certain quality to generate scandal, to shock the observer and he lately declared that English art schools have lost their prime strength and fallen behind their successes of the eighties and nineties when he bought and rendered famous just graduated art students whose crap contained the genius to repulse the observer, and provoke his angry reaction, which in finale is what made the crap to the news bulletins. So if artists want to be selected by Saatchi or his peers the lesson is absolutely clear. They need to provide substance for the news hour. Scandal leading to shock and provocation or whatever else will catch the eye or the ear of the TV news channels will do. Charles Saatchi's company will then amplify the noise which will lead to a surge in value of the works he presents to the public and when the value is ripe to his taste he pockets the fantastic returns on his initial small investment. Saatchi justifies his move by saying that the high returns he pockets will allow him to buy so many more works from beginners. I have nothing against speculators but I have something against stupidity. Scandal never will qualify as art, at least not as visual art, but perhaps could it be conceived as the art of marketing. Why can't the speculators reintroduce art and its meaning in the art market? The answer here seems to be double headed. For one it comes from the artistic illiteracy of the speculators. But again I have nothing against speculators per se. They are indeed not responsible for their own illiteracy. Western societies, as a whole, have indeed become artistically illiterate. The first to blame are the media companies that want to give their poorly educated viewers what they most want, scandal and sensation and the second to blame are the bureaucrats of the artistic institutions. They are the ones who make all the noise about art and they just don't get it. Their talk is most generally total emptiness. Only the noise of words rattling onto one another. But where is the meaning in all their speeches and writings? In the end we have nevertheless to acknowledge that no-one is really responsible, for, it all boils down to the logic of capital that drives us all. In the face of their competitors the medias have to generate returns and the artistic institutions and their bureaucrats have to please donators for the sake of their donations.
3. Galleries live from sales of art works. Not surprisingly most owners focus their attention on what sells and force is to observe that what sells is conventional, in other words, what sells is what is already recognized. Those trying to promote artistic substance are a small minority. In the present overwhelming confusion, about what art is all about, it goes without surprise that this small minority is preponderantly poor in capital and in consequence its marketing reach is rather limited.
4. The art bureaucracy consists of speakers and writers making noise about the works of artists. It starts with art critics and commentators in the media and finds its true meaning in the functions serving, the modern form of public art temples, the museums. Money is the language of power and speculators and merchants target those modern art temples with the entirety of their power. Having their artistic possessions find a place in those temples consecrate their value in the eyes of all... The artists who might want to target that segment of the market better be advised first to try to be enlisted by a powerful speculator. Their direct encounter with this bureaucracy could at best only result in the sharing of some charitable proceeds in the form of meager grants or other.
5. Are there still some art connoisseurs out there? Yes they did not disappear all together. One still can find some specimen here and there but most generally they are not that wealthy, albeit, they are well educated or cultured. Those rare specimen of art connoisseurs are the best that can befall an artist. They know what they speak about and for artists they act as stimulating intellectual muses.
6. The last segment of the artist's market is himself. He will not generate any income by pleasing himself but it nevertheless remains, and by far, the most rewarding experience for the artist to try to understand the reality in which he struggles and ultimately see his understanding becoming the generator of the content of his works. We artists gained our freedom from the men of power and the men of knowledge but in this process we lost a given content and now our only escape from absurdity is through the generation of our own knowledge base. In our present societal predicament targeting one's own productions for him(her)self has the best chance to lead to a dialog between the reason of the brain and the execution of the hand. This is also the only way for the artist to regain a clear understanding of the societal meaning and function of art.

Modernity has triumphed:

- economically: the logic of capital substantiates all our social interactions.

- educationally: economic functionality obliging; science and its applications are transmitted, to one degree or another, to all of us through our education systems.

- philosophically: we all have fallen, to one degree or another, under the charm of rationality but to our surprise we also discovered that the growth of knowledge, predicated by rationality, is also expanding our field of ignorance.

But modernity never morphed into a worldview accessible to all nor did it ever give a foundational story of itself for all to share. Max Weber noted that "scientific rationality offered us artificial abstractions unable to teach us anything about the meaning of the world". Here we are thus left spectators of the utter limitation of modernity wondering "What now?".

With modernity painters gained the total freedom to represent whatever they want but never were they been offered the intellectual tools to come up with images corresponding to the reality of their times. What ensued was "whatever is art". Marcel Duchamp had it all seen come down on the art world and ridiculed the process by exhibiting a toilet seat that critics baptized "readymade". Profoundly distraught by this recuperation Duchamp quit painting for chess.

With late modernity we witness an initial sketching of the road of humanity towards its future in the form of an interaction on a worldscale of 3 determinant factors that will gradually displace modernity:

- a process of scientific revolutionizing that is churning out ever faster new "knowings" or bits of knowledge about the working of reality.

- the impact of the side-effects of modernity on life on earth will definitely mould our ways of doing and thinking in the future.

- globalization is expanding the frontiers of modernity to the whole world and as such we are assisting at a kind of radicalization of modernity. But ultimately this will project on the whole world the civilizational, cultural, societal and other values of 85% of the world population that was until now only experiencing the destructive impact on their traditional structures of a dominating European or Western modernity.

We have entered an age characterized by a total absence of certainty that will transform into a maelstrom of destruction of our past givens and creation of new forms. This process that could well take decades if not centuries to complete will end with the sharing, by all, of a new paradigmatic vision of reality; a common worldview.

It is the understanding of this process that today offers a chance to the artist to engage into a dialog between the reason of his brain and the execution of his hand. Starting from the self the artist then regains the pleasure of understanding how his creations can fit and play within the context of his society.

That's where the artistic adventure finds a new start, a societal meaning, letting us quit late modernity and entering the unknown of what comes after...

Here are some sketchy trails into that unknown:

1. On the front of ideas the dualistic certainties founding our views of things (beginning versus end, good versus bad, white versus black and so forth) will be displaced by more interactive, polar, circular or cyclical visions of change coming to us from the civilizations of China, India, Africa and south America as well as from advanced science and a rediscovery of animism.
2. On the front of our environment the fact that reality is made-up of systemic complexity, or complexity within ever farther-apart ensembles interacting upon one another, will gradually be firmly inserted into our minds, albeit, under the impact of necessity.
3. On the front of our macro universe will gradually emerge the certainty of our ultimate incapacity to apprehend the whole. Understanding the working of the parts will never indicate us if the whole, we are such a tiny particle of, is a pink elephant nor, if it really is a pink elephant, how many family members it lives with.
4. On the front of visual representations our confrontation with Chinese philosophy and Xieyi painting (writing down the meaning) will help us reassess the link between knowledge and the act of painting and ultimately its societal function. Xieyi painting was never a specialization as such. It was a practice by the men of knowledge on a par with music, philosophy, history, strategy and other.

A vision is slowly sinking into my mind; under the urgent necessity of clarifying his own role the artist is slowly weaving the dress he'll be wearing as a kind of shaman for postmodern times.

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. 

________

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.