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What the Hell Was Modernism?

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Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#21

Post by pasabagi »

deogeo wrote: post #9
hestipod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but I know with age and I hope "maturity" I appreciate many more forms of art. Things I didn't have the life experience or emotional depth to grasp when I was younger can deeply impact me now. An example would be Mark Rothko's paintings. I would have said "pfft anyone can do that...just some stripes or blocks" when I was a kid, and probably did, but have recently rediscover…

> I really regret not having more openness and ability to grasp these things before. Ironic - modern art has such a lack of this same openness, that the classic techniques it despises were nearly lost. It was not enough for modern art to be accepted - classical art had to be driven out from contemporary galleries: The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguish…

As somebody who's done a lot of life drawing, and a lot of classical stuff in general, I see the reason why it's no longer central to the curriculum. Ultimately, drawing is just another tool, just like stonecarving, crochet, or dance, and life-drawing is a practice that is good training for a specific use of that tool - portraiture - that was the economic lifeblood of art until daguerreotypes came on the scene.

So really the odd thing is not that they stopped doing life drawing classes. The question is, why did they continue for so long? It would be rather like doing an engineering course where a core competence was the construction and maintenance of steam engines.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#22

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

remarkEon wrote: post #16
catalogia wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly is not true of everybody that appreciation of modern art comes with age. I'd wager the majority of people, young or old, consider it inaccessible or worse.

I remember going to the museums on field trips and we kids would all love seeing what would've been the "modern" pieces that were on the tour list (I had some somewhat eccentric teachers in middle school). Even in young adulthood (read: in college) I took many a date to MCA in the summers because, and maybe chalk this up to typical youth rebellion, I liked it. Only recently, because I can travel more now, have I gott…

The use of Abstract Expressionism as a deliberate propaganda tool to promote a politicised concept of "individual freedom" is well-documented.

If there's nothing of lasting value there, that would be - ironic.

I wouldn't go that far, but I also don't think you can recreate it with construction paper and Elmer's glue. As the OP says, a big element in Modernism is breaking (up) with the past, and you can only really do that once.

The thing that gets hung on a wall is a snapshot of a process, and in Modernism the process is more important than the snapshot.

What hasn't changed is the use of art as a status marker for the rich and powerful. Those glorious Classical and Renaissance pieces were painted for the same reason.

In Modernism the-thing-on-the-wall is more of a repository of intellectual, cultural, and historical and commercial associations as a thing to look at for its own sake. The obvious manual labour - the representational brushstrokes in traditional art - were replaced with the intellectual labour of commercial self-justification as a value in itself.

Essentially it's a semi-corporate sales exercise - which of course captures the culture around it much better than classical figurative painting would.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#23

Post by yk »

sings wrote: post #6

I feel like one reason we’re “stuck with modernism” is that it’s an umbrella term that points to many distinct forms which are reacting against some tradition. In this sense, it’s a pretty useless term, as distinct periods will always be reacting against what has come before, otherwise we wouldn’t note them as such.

The thing is, art historians have stopped demarcating ages. (A bit like anthropologists stopped making lists of the best African tribes, even though that would be great fodder for buzzfeed.)

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#24

Post by dagw »

hestipod wrote: post #10
whateveracct wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also helps to see some of these modern artworks in person. Rothkos are huge! And seeing the thickness of the paint on a Pollock really adds to it.

I would love to see some of his stuff up close. I live in rural nowhere middle Murica so it's not accessible. I have heard it's pretty amazing to see how big they truly are. Nothing is as good as in person. I recall seeing the Mona Lisa in person later in life and being shocked at how small it was, and turning around and seeing how massive The Wedding Feast at Cana was. It completely...sorry for this...reframes your…

I've often wondered if there wouldn't be value in creating a series of truly world class reproductions of the great pieces of art and distributing them around the world.

If you want to experience the great works of classical literature, you can get them from any library in the world. If you want to experience the great works of classical music you can again pick up a CD at your local library, and most mid sized cities in the world have halfway decent symphonic orchestra with a rotating reportoar. If you want to experience the great works of art you have to jet set off to a dozen+ cities around the world.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#25

Post by deltron3030 »

Modernism for me is systems, process and indirection between artist/designer and the work, where the effort is more put into designing those systems and tools and being able to control the consistency of the output by tweaking the parameters of the system, tool and process. A good and extreme example are fonts or vector/parametric design software.

Before that, in the classical era it was more about raw skills through practice and reaching some kind of wonderkid level of excellence measured by popular standards that were tied to complexity, e.g. the most realistic painting or most beautiful form of an object. One example, to stay in the realm of type would be script calligraphy, where letterers learn script styles and try to reproduce them as best as possible.

Postmodernism gets rid of the systems and indirection and is more about direct human expression and originality, without trying that hard to reach an ideal or make the most realistic like in the classical era. The example in type would be freestyle hand lettering or graffiti writing, or even normal handwriting, and accepting and embracing the imperfections that are generated by your own body which results in your own recognizable style.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#26

Post by steve19 »

pasabagi wrote: post #21
deogeo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really regret not having more openness and ability to grasp these things before. Ironic - modern art has such a lack of this same openness, that the classic techniques it despises were nearly lost. It was not enough for modern art to be accepted - classical art had to be driven out from contemporary galleries: The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguish…

As somebody who's done a lot of life drawing, and a lot of classical stuff in general, I see the reason why it's no longer central to the curriculum. Ultimately, drawing is just another tool, just like stonecarving, crochet, or dance, and life-drawing is a practice that is good training for a specific use of that tool - portraiture - that was the economic lifeblood of art until daguerreotypes came on the scene. So re…

Computer Science (usually at least in my experience) both teaches programming and expects proficiency in programming.

My friends who did mechanical engineering had to take classes on tool making.

Meanwhile nowadays you have metal sculpturers who cannot weld.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#27

Post by pierremenard »

> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters.

This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a necessary consequence of this idea of taking some simple axioms and carrying them to their extremes.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#28

Post by kkwteh »

Reading this piece reaffirmed a lot of what I had been feeling in the SFMoma my last couple of visits. The place just felt lifeless. All the art was really disconnected from the world, and the abstract stuff seemed especially pointless.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#29

Post by brazzy »

puranjay wrote: post #19
hestipod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but I know with age and I hope "maturity" I appreciate many more forms of art. Things I didn't have the life experience or emotional depth to grasp when I was younger can deeply impact me now. An example would be Mark Rothko's paintings. I would have said "pfft anyone can do that...just some stripes or blocks" when I was a kid, and probably did, but have recently rediscover…

I never really understood modern art until I a) saw it in person, and b) saw it in the context of its time. I was at the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg. I'd done museum tour after museum tour in both Moscow and Petersburg. Nearly all of this art was classical/neo-classical or romantic, rococo, etc. By the end of your 1000th neo-classical painting, you get exhausted of the sameness of the realistic style. The theme…

> Anyone can technically paint like Matisse. But they didn't.

That reminds me (in a rather postmodern way, I suspect) of an interview I recently read with a celebrity whose claim to fame is basically nudity:

Anyone can show their boobs. But they don't.

Re: What the Hell Was Modernism?

#30

Post by michaelscott »

pierremenard wrote: post #27

> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters. This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a…

Absolutely. It's also a reflection of the world it was created in (which is what all good art should be right?) since a lot of the Western-focused artists had to look at art in non-Western forms and what that meant for the definition of art (Picasso), as well as what the decomposition of the "building blocks" of art could mean for it (Mondriaan, Warhol).

I'm not a fan of postmodernism at all, but it's easy to see where it gets its ideals from and why it was the natural next "step".

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