WHAT IS MODERNISM?
Define by what is not:
o
Not a time (disagreement on dates
beginning, did it ever end?)
o
Not a place (international movement and criss-crossed influences)
So, what is it?
o
ATTITUDE, WAY OF BEING IN THE WORLD:
STRANGELY INSIDE & OUTSIDE CULTURE SIMULTANEOUSLY
o
Liken to a psychotic break with the past
o
Madness & Modernism (Louis Sass)
§
§
Akin
to schizophrenia
§
Break
in social bonds and certainty
MODERNISM seeks
self-referential autonomy.
Key element: Freedom to think for oneself.
o
(Gertrude Stein says artists aren’t ahead of their
time, everybody else is just about 100 years behind!)
o
Radical shift in
aesthetic and cultural norms & traditions
o
Break with
Victorian bourgeois value system
o
Shift from
kinship to globalism
o
Another round of femininism takes hold of Western World
o
Industrial
Revolution and Machine Age:
o
Vicious,
competitive, capitalistic, materialistic,
o
City life of
alienation, isolation, and exploitation
o
People actually
chained their children to the furniture to go to work
o
Hysteria rampant
(literally means, “wandering womb”)
o
Institutionalized
wives (Snake Pits until Dorothea Dix?)
o
Anarchists and
“isms” abound
o
Rejection of 19th
century optimism in favor of a profound despair and pessimism (Existentialism
vs. Nihilism)
o
Conservatives v.
Progressives
o
Conservatives: maintain institutions, gradual development
o
Progressives: critical of political and religious
institutions; radical change; draw attention to social ills
PERHAPS THE ONLY CONTINUITY IN MODERNISM IS
ITS LACK OF UNITY
SCIENCE
·
Boundary limits
are stretched in literature, just as in particle physics where
o
Max Planck posits quanta, discrete packages of
energy,
o
Heisenberg peers
into the subatomic world and finds that the object is necessarily changed by
the observation of it,
o
Einstein proposes
the mind boggling thought of a finite universe that is unbounded,
§
one in which mass increases and motion decreases as
approach speed of light.
·
Nature lies
beyond the boundaries of predictability and control
·
Add to that the
technology of the times:
o
telegraph &
telephones (how they change the nature of communication and make our finite
world practically boundless…shift from tribal to global),
o
tanks, bombs,
automatic weapons
o
vacuum cleaners,
refrigerators
o
cars and subway
systems
o
assembly lines
FREUD
o
theory of the
conscious and unconscious mind
o
What do women
want?
o
Id, ego, superego
WRITING: Gertrude Stein- Mother of
Modernism (post-narrative storytelling)
·
Writer who
intentionally interferes the means by which language communicates.
·
By caressing and
addressing nouns, through reiteration (she uses the term “insistence”) and
shifting contexts, she revitalizes and intensifies them
·
her theories on time, memory, history, and narrative, all
of which she considered pleasant human concerns, but ill-suited to the creation
of masterpieces.
·
Prevents the
corrosiveness of time from corrupting her writing by devising the
"continuous present"
o
a state in which each moment has its own emphasis and
each word lacks external reference.
o
fragmentation of
reality by destruction of the linear model was the ambition of the modern age
o
She, like many
Modernist and Postmodernist artists, rejects the historical narrative.
o
She displays
snapshots with her words that are like Polaroids. The reader or listener at first is clueless
as to the image, but then the image develops slowly with the final picture
emerging through a process of increasing intensity of color and shadow, light
and contrast.
VISUAL ART
·
3 currents of
attitudes:
o
Expressionism-concern
w/ human community
o
Abstraction-concern
with structure of reality
o
Fantasy-concerned
with labyrinth of the mind
(By 1930, distinctions break
down. By 1945, boundaries blur
altogether)
EXPRESSIONISM
o
Fauvesà rhythm and arrangement
o
German
Expressionismà broad, diverse: morbid neurotic
extremist lots of red
o
Kandinsky
o
Blue
Rider Group 1911
o
Mystical
o
Abandon reprentation
o
Non-objective
forms
o
Transforms rather
than reduces
o
Only important
reality is internal
o
Reanimate dream
spirit
o
Consumed with
color “Music of the Spheres for the eyes”
o
Antinaturalism
Munch
§
Vampire or Love
and Pain?
§
Woman as
stereotype or archetype?
§
Sex and death:
Freud’s 2 drives: eros & thanatos
ABSTRACTION
o
Process
of analyzing & reconfiguring observed reality
o
Geometric
reality truer in a mathematical sense (Einstein)
o
Cubism
o
Orphism
§
Delaunays
infuse color into cubism
§
Pure
color harmonies resembling music
·
Movements
·
Rhythms
· Influences: Duchamp, Franz Marc, Leger, Chagall, Klee
·
Futurism
o
Precision of
geometric form
o
Exalts machine
beauty
o
Energy of speed
o
New Physics
o
Danger
o
Suprematism
§
Symbolic
§
Philosophical
§
Geometric
§
Elegant
simplicity
§
Neoplasticism
§
Nonrepresentational
§
Balance
unequal but equivalent oppositions
FANTASY
o
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY—Freud & Jung
o
MYSTERIOUS & PROFOUND
o
INTROSPECTIVE
o
INFLUENCED BY ROMANTICISM (GOYA & FUSELI) &
NAÏVE & SYMBOLISM ( ROUSSEAU)
o
KLEE, DECHIRICO, DUCHAMP, DADA,
SURREALISM (ABSTRACT & REPRESENTATIONAL)
GENDER BENDERS AND SEX RELATIONS—more shifting
boundaries…