Modernism. Thoughts, Ideas, Art

Transcription

1 Modernism Thoughts, Ideas, Art

2 Michael Levenson, Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 4: Crisis is inevitably the central term o fart in discussions of this turbulent cultural moment. Overused as it has been, it still glows with justification. War! Strike! Women! The Irish! Or (within the popular press), Nihilism! Relativism! Fakery! This century had scarcely grown used to its own name, before it learned the twentieth would be the epoch of crisis, real and manufactured, physical and metaphysical, material and symbolic. The catastrophe of the First World War, and before that, the labor struggles, the emergence of feminism, the race for empire, these inescapable forces of turbulent social modernization were not simply looming on the outside as the destabilizing context of cultural Modernism; they penetrated the interior of artistic invention. They gave subjects to writers and painters, and they also gave forms, forms suggested by industrial machinery, or by the chuffing of cars, or even, most horribly, the bodies broken in the war.

3 Michael Bell, The Metaphysics of Modernism, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 9-10: [Modernism s] peak period in the Anglo-American context lay between 1910 and 1925, while its intellectual formation encompassed a coming to terms with the lines of thought associated with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. [ ] Each of the great triumvirate turned human life into a fundamentally hermeneutic activity. Marx had analyzed the external realm of social and economic process and laid bare the false consciousness by which the advantaged classes unwittingly rationalized their own condition. Freud investigated the inner realm of the psyche and showed how, through the processes of sublimation, consciousness may itself act as a sophisticated barrier to recognizing the true nature of instinctual desire. And this is not just a personal problem to be diagnosed, it is the necessary basis of civilization. Meanwhile, Nietzsche diagnosed the whole tradition of Western metaphysics from Socrates onwards as a subtle form of falsehood reflecting an inner suppression and outer domination. Christianity in particular was a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the psyche on itself

4 Michael Bell, The Metaphysics of Modernism, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 9-10: In all three cases it is not just that external appearances, and the commonsensical or rational means of understanding them, are limited and fallible. It is that such appearances and reasoning may be actively disguising contrary truths to which, by definition, there is no other access. The very principle of reason collapses unnervingly into possible rationalization while reason remains the only means of negotiating this recognition. On this reading, the attempt of the European Enlightenment to bring about a rational and humane order not only suffered the dangers of rationalistic and utilitarian narrowness, to which reomanticism was partly a reaction, but was tainted in itself. On the darkest interpretation, neither Enlightenment, nor its alternatives are viable.

5 Science great men have contrived, with an incredible amount of thought, to make use of the paraphernalia of science itself, to point out the limits and relativity of knowledge generally, and thus to deny decisively the claim of science to universal validity and universal aims. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1967], 112)

6 Philosophy of Time: Henri Bergson "There are... two possible conceptions of time, the one free from all alloy, the other surreptitiously bringing in the idea of space. Pure duration [durée] is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states... it need not be entirely absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would no longer endure. Nor need it forget its former states: it is enough that, in recalling these states, it does not set them alongside another, but forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another." (Bergson, Time and Free Will)

7 Philosophy of Time: Henri Bergson "Our perception presents us with a series of pictorial, but discontinuous, views of the universe; from our present perceptions we could not deduce subsequent perceptions, because there is nothing which foretells the new qualities into which they will change... The qualitative heterogeneity of our successive perceptions of the universe results from the fact that each, in itself, extends over a certain depth of duration, and that memory condenses in each an enormous multiplicity of vibrations which appear to us all at once, although they are successive." (Bergson, Matter and Memory)

8 Philosophy of Time: Henri Bergson "There is, beneath these sharply cut crystals and this frozen surface [self], a continuous flux which is not comparable to any flux I have ever seen. There is a succession of states, each of which follows and contains that which precedes it. They can, properly speaking, only be said to form multiple states when I have already passed them and turn back to observe their track. Whilst I was experiencing them they were so solidly organised, so profoundly animated with a common life, that I could not have said where another commenced. In reality no one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other." (Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics)

9 The Emancipation of Sexuality and the Discovery of the Unconscious "The League aims at establishing sexual ethics and sociology on a scientific biological and psychological basis instead of, as at present, on a theological basis." (from the founding pamphlet of the World League for Sexual Reform, 1929) "It is far from clear that psychoanalysis made much real contribution to the elucidation of sexual matters in Britain, outside strictly analytical circles." (from Roy Porter and Leslie Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, [New Haven: Yale UP, 1995] 189)

10 The unconscious in literature "I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what Freudians call the subconscious but as for psychoanalysis, it's neither more nor less than blackmail." (James Joyce)

11 Freudian influence??? "The half swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit in that eternal moment at the apex of rupture sweeps into its flaming tides the whole essence of the man and woman and as it were, the heat of the contact vaporises their consciousness so that it fills the whole of cosmic space. For the moment they are identified with the divine thoughts, the waves of eternal force, which to the Mystic often appear in terms of golden light." (from Marie Stopes, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties, 1918 [London: Victor Gollancz, 1995] 106f.] "And softly, with that marvellous swoon-like caress of his hand in pure soft desire, softly he stroked the silky slope of her loins [...] And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender, and she felt herself melting in the flame. She let herself go. [...] She quivered again at the potent inexorable entry inside her [...] it came with a strange slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning. [...] And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving [...] [t]he consummation was upon her and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman." (from D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover)

12 from: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909) 1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt. 3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. 4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. 5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit. 6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. 7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.

13 from: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909) 8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed. 9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. 10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice. 11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; greatbreasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

14 from: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909) [ ] And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely? Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation. [ ] The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty; other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts we want it to happen! [ ] Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice. [ ] You have objections? Enough! Enough! We know them. We ve understood! Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors Perhaps! If only it were so! But who cares? We don t want to understand! Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again! Lift up your heads! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!

15 from Roger Fry, The French Group (1912) When the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition was held in these Galleries two years ago the English public became for the first time fully aware of the existence of a new movement in art, a movement which was the more disconcerting in that it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but implied a reconsideration of the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial and plastic art. It was not surprising therefore that a public which had come to admire above everything in a picture the skill with which the artist produced illusion should have resented an art in which such skill was completely subordinated to the direct expression of feeling. Accusations of clumsiness and incapacity were freely made, even against so singularly accomplished an artist as Cézanne. Such darts, however, fall wide of the mark, since it is not the object of these artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their knowledge, but only to attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences; and in conveying these, ostentation of skill is likely to be even more fatal than downright incapacity. [on Henri Rousseau, who was among the exhibitors] Here then is one case where want of skill and knowledge do not completely obscure, though they may mar expression. An this is true of all perfectly naïve and primitive art. But most of the art here seen is neither naïve nor primitive. It is the work of highly civilised and modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook.

16 from Roger Fry, The French Group (1912) They [post-impressionist artists] do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality. The logical extreme of such a method would undoubtedly be the attempt to give up all resemblance to natural form, and to create a purely abstract language of form a visual music; and the later works of Picasso show this clearly enough. [ ]

17 from Roger Fry, The French Group (1912) All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied functioning of the spirit, but in so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the objects which he represents, his work is not completely free and pure, since romantic associations imply at least an imagined practical activity. [ ] Classic art, on the other hand, records a positive and disinterestedly passionate state of mind. It communicates a new and otherwise unattainable experience. Its effect, therefore, is likely to increase with familiarity. Such a classic spirit is common to the best French work of all periods from the twelfth century onwards. [ ] It is natural enough that the intensity and singleness of aim with which these artists yield themselves to certain experiences in the face of nature may make their work appear odd to those who have not the habit of contemplative vision, but it would be rash for us, who as a nation are in the habit of treating our emotions, especially our aesthetic emotions with a certain levity, to accuse them of caprice or insincerity. It is because of this classic concentration of feeling [ ] that the French merit our serious attention. It is this that makes their art so difficult on a first approach but gives it its lasting hold on the imagination.

18 from: Blast (1914): Long Live the Vortex! Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town! We stand for the Reality of the Present not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past. We want to leave Nature and Men alone. [ ] The only way Humanity can help artists is to remain independent and work unconsciously. WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY their stupidity, animalism and dreams. We believe in no perfectibility except our own. Intrinsic beauty is in the Interpreter and Seer, not in the object or content. We do not want to change the appearance of the world, because we are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism), and do not depend on the appearance of the world for our art. WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it s crude energy flowing through us.[ ]

19 from: Blast (1914): Long Live the Vortex! [ ] Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental Artist that exists in everybody. The Ma in the Street and the Gentleman are equally ignored. Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people, as it is usually supposed to. It means the art of the individuals. [ ] AUTOMOBILISM (Marinettism) bores us. We don t want to go about making a hullo-bulloo about motor cars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes. [ ] The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.

20 from: Blast (1914): Long Live the Vortex! We hear from America and the Continent all sorts of disagreeable things about England: the unmusical, anti-artistic, unphilosophic country. We quite agree. [ ] The Art-instinct is permanently primitive. In a chaos of imperfection, discord, etc., it finds the same stimulus as in Nature. The artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an advanced, perfected, democratic, Futurist individual or Mr. Marinetti s limited imagination): this enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man. As the steppes and the rigours of the Russian winter, when the peasant has to lie for weeks in his hut, produces that extraordinary acuity of feeling and intelligence we associate with the Slav; so England is just now the most favourable country for the appearance of a great art.

21 from: Blast (1914): Long Live the Vortex! The Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius, - its appearance and its spirit. Machinery, trains, steam-ships, all that distinguishes externally our time, came far more from here than anywhere else. In dress, manners, mechanical inventions, LIFE, that is, ENGLAND, has influenced Europe in the same way that France has in Art. But busy with this LIFE-EFFORT; she has been the last to become conscious of the Art that is an organism of this new Order and Will of Man. Machinery is the greatest Earth-medium: incidentally it sweeps away the doctrines of a narrow and pedantic Realism at one stroke. By mechanical inventiveness, too, just as Englishmen have spread themselves all over the Earth, they have brought all the hemispheres about them in their original island. It cannot be said that the complication of the Jungle, dramatic tropic growths, the vastness of American trees, is not for us. For, in the forms of machinery, Factories, new and vaster buildings, bridges and works, we have all that, naturally, around us.

22 from André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) We are still living under the reign of logic [ ]. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. [ ] It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer and, in my opinion by far the most important part has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. [ ] The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. [ ] I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. [ ] Those who might dispute our right to employ the term surrealism in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner the actual functioning of thought. dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concerns.

23 from André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it. To the extent that he is required to make himself understood, he manages more or less to express himself, and by so doing to fulfill certain functions culled from among the most vulgar. Speaking, reading a letter, present no real problem for him, provided that, in so doing, he does not set himself a goal above the mean, that is, provided he confines himself to carrying on a conversation (for the pleasure of conversing) with someone. He is not worried about the words that are going to come, nor about the sentence which will follow after the sentence he is just completing. To a very simple question, he will be capable of making a lightning-like reply. [ ] Not only does this unrestricted language, which I am trying to render forever valid, which seems to me to adapt itself to all of life s circumstances, not only does this language not deprive me of any of my means, on the contrary it lends me and extraordinary lucidity, and it does so in an area where I least expected it. I shall even go so far as to maintin that it instruct me and, indeed, I have had occasion to use surreally words whose meanings I have forgotten. I was subsequently able to verify that the way in which I had used them corresponded perfectly with their definition. This would lead one to believe that we do not learn, that all we ever do is relearn.

24 from André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Poetic Surrealism, which is the subject of this study, has focused its efforts up to this point on re-establishing dialogue in its absolute truth, by freeing both interlocutors from any obligations of politeness. Each of them simply pursues his soliloquy without trying to derive any special dialectical pleasure from it and without trying to impose anything whatsoever upon his neighbor. The remarks exchanged are not, as is generally the case, meant to develop some thesis, however unimportant it may be; they are as disaffected as possible. As for the reply that they elicit, it is, in principle, totally indifferent to the personal pride of the person speaking. The words, the images are only so many springboards for the mind of the listener. [ ] The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood.

25 Modernist Humanism? Bell, 13: In the later twentieth century it has become common to speak disparagingly of humanism as an unacknowledged ideology naturalizing the given social order, and then to see Modernism in turn as tainted with this. But the opposite is closer to the truth: the relative status of the human was a central recognition of Modernism itself. e.g. Lawrence, in a Letter about The Rainbow and Women in Love: he only cares about what the woman is what she IS inhumanly, physiologically, materially what she is as a phenomenon (ar as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception.

26 from Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999): a catalogue of Modernist features 1. A commitment to finding new forms to explore how we see the world rather than what we see in it (e.g. the break with realist modes of narrative in favour of a stream of consciousness; in visual art, the emergence of Cubism, which represents objects as a series of discontinuous, fractured planes, all equidistant from the viewer, rather than using light and perspective to suggest pictorial depth containing solid, three-dimensional objects; in music, the abandonment of harmony in favour of tone). 2. A new faith in quasi-scientific modes of conceptualisation and organisation, for instance using basic geometric shapes like cubes and cylinders in the tower blocks of modernist architec-ture, as the expression of a rationalist, progressive society. 3. An ideologically inspired use of fragmented forms, like collage structures in art, and deliberately discontinuous narratives in literature to suggest the fragmentation and break-up of formerly accepted systems of thought and belief.

27 from Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999): a catalogue of Modernist features 4. Aesthetic self-reflexivity, in which artefacts explore their own constitution, construction and shape (e.g. novels in which nar-rators comment on narrative forms, or paintings in which an image is left unfinished, with `roughed-in' or blank sections on the canvas). 5. A clear demarcation between popular and elite forms of culture (e.g. intellectual distinctions made between atonal electronic music like Karlheinz Stockhausen's and modern jazz, or between modern jazz and rock, or between rock and `pop', etc.). 6. A gradual growth of interest in non-western forms of culture,