via www.yankeemagazine.com andhttp://piercework.typepad.com
I’m piecing some ideas together on modernism and modernity as well as secularism and secularity. It sounds like writing a piece about the difference between blue and azure as someone wittily (or sneeringly–it’s hard to tell) claimed I was doing in a debate, but it’s just one of my things, you know. Just like I like to watch Little House and the Prairie and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in reruns, I like to make fine distinctions between things that might appear to be the same but are really not. Or, conversely, between things that seem like they are opposites when really, they are more alike than they are divergent. When we think in short hand that’s what happens. We start to group like things together for expedience, or we begin to put unlike things together for even greater expedience–it’s necessary for thought, but it’s also necessary when the amount of information being thrown at us needs to be rapidly organized in order to be able to act or think at all. It also happens to be what some people have described as the primary function of the devil: binding those things together which should never be together and dividing what is, in fact, a unity, but I digress. Perhaps.
At any rate, while making sloppy categories in thought may be, to a certain degree necessary and understandable–we all do it–it leads to perpetual confusion on some important issues, even in people charged with delivering clarity. It also leads to the most damnable illogic. The self-referential tautology. This is bad and this is good. How do we know what is bad and what is good? Well if I like it, it is good, and if I don’t it is bad. Again, we all do it. The trick is to think–and that is how we turn reflex into critical thinking. And be willing to hold our own biases toward this or that up to scrutiny, and to realize when we are being reactionary in thinking rather than simply active.
Occasionally you have to stop and realize, for example, secularity and secularism are two completely different things; or in a related mode, that modernity the aesthetic and modernism the heresy are two different things. In both cases, one is descriptive and the other is prescriptive, a difference that might not seem to be much, except when it means the difference between acknowledging, for another example, that spiritual ecstasy has a concordant neurological state and saying that the spiritual ecstasy IS that neurological state, and nothing more.
The above links to a great piece in Yankee Magazine about the Georges Rouault exhibit at Boston College.
If you suppress something it usually goes underground and re-germinates, becomes stronger, and changes flavor and character until it again pushes through the earth and seeks light. It’s the irony of totalitarianism. That which you try to suppress will usually become strengthened by your action. Communist Poland produced Karol Wojtyla. Go figure. Rouault seems to be a little like that.
Georges Rouault— a Catholic artist usually thought of as part of fauvism or expressionism--sank into obscurity during the post WW II modern era when, as article author Edgar Allen Beem writes, art took a turn toward “the abstract, the secular, and the ironic.” This is an understandable, even predictable turn in European art after enduring two world wars, and man’s inhumanity to man, right under their noses, even in the streets of their home towns. Religion could at times suppress the normal response to such things, questions that came up even for Christ: why have you forsaken us? Some even came to explain the travesties of the war as a divine retribution, as something God and not man had wrought. While this error in thought is natural, it is also natural that the human spirit would rebel and seek release in creative expression. It is as predictable as it is understandable. There are two sins against hope, as the Catechism tells us, presumption and despair. Both exist inside the Church and outside of it, there are wolves within and sheep without. Presumption is the Pharisee, and despair is the definition of faithlessness. I think it was Kierkegaard who said that it was the very character of despair that those in it don’t recognize it as despair; they simply recognize it as surviving. It is likely to be the mark of the presumer that he doesn’t realize he presumes; he simply thinks he is righteous. I imagine that in the face of two world wars, legless young men, and childless mothers, that despair could begin to look like sanity while belief could begin to look like presumption; not properly grounded, it would be just that, as in the case of explaining air raids and nuclear explosions as divine retribution and not man-made horror.
In any event, what is even more predictable but less understandable is something that repeats itself over and over again in history; Schopenhauer is famously quoted as saying: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I agree with that except for the truth part. Schopenhauer, who occasionally said some interesting things, could be thought of as the progenitor of modern cynicism and nihilism, and also may be the father of modern error: mistaking a mood for a truth. Modernism in art didn’t really deliver a truth–but expressed the felt absence of truth in a post-traumatized world. Picasso’s “Guernica” is neither propositionally true nor false–it expressed a mood, a permanent horror etched into the eyes that see war all around them. Predominantly, it was a truth in feeling rather than truth in intellectual content. It is Good Friday without Easter Sunday.
Like the way animals seem to be able to predict a storm before even meteorologists can, artists and thinkers seem to anticipate shifts before they arrive. (You may think it uncharitable of me to compare the artist to an animal, but I hope you are assured that it is only in comparison to the animal’s obvious superiority in skill to a meteorologist.) The Armory Show of 1911, where modern art was born, demonstrated the first inkling of traditional rupture between the European past and what was very soon to come. The disjuncture between the modern and what came before was first mocked; then deemed scandalous; and it is now taken to be a self-evident aesthetic. (And it is probably good to understand this: there is nothing truly post-modern: the post-modern is merely the modern becoming tired of and hence cannibalizing and caricaturing itself.)
Louis Sass, in Madness and Modernism, has identified–along with several others–that the aesthetic of modern art bears some uncanny resemblances to pathological psychic and neurologic states. The shattered vision of women’s faces in Picasso are very similar to schizophrenic vision disturbances as described by patients experiencing them. What we have in modernist art is the expression of existential madness. It does no good, however, to sneer at it and call it mad. In a world gone insane, I can think of nothing more sane to have in your art.
In any event, the perpetual error of mankind to which I have been referring is his tendency to first resist the new but then to over-compensate in absorbing it. The new is really a collaboration with the past–but it is frequently mistaken as a replacement for it. (You remember, right? I did not come to break the law but to fulfill it? It seems that people mistook even Christ’s intent and purpose while He was here.) Soon, the cry to heaven escaping the walls of the Church, began to be mistaken as a replacement for the Church. Secularity–the legitimate domain of people living on earth–became secularism. Ironically, secularism in Europe has now become more stifling than even its supposed more authoritarian religious forebear.
It is this suppression-cum-over-compensation, I think, that explains why an artist like Rouault would inevitably resurface not as a forgotten obscure element of the modern era but as a revelation. Rouault reminds us that secular irony and religious piety can co-exist in one heart; that the homo religiosos can grieve along with modernity–to not grieve would be presumptuous, after all, to say we understand the will of God in allowing us to fall in sin, and can see the full power and glory before it has actually arrived–but fall short of despair.
If you take a look at his paintings, whether you like the paintings themselves or not, which is really a matter of taste, you will see that he is a reverent modernist, who recognizes the felt truth in modernity, without succumbing to the dogma of modernism; he, in a certain sense, redeems the despair of those who see presumption as false, in recognizing both the felt absence of God in a world gone insane, and believing that his grace, is nonetheless present within it, even beyond our capacity to understand that it somehow remains so, despite our greatest, most tragic sins.
Not familiar at all with Rouault, so these are naive observations:
– he’s an artist. Not being stupid, just acknowledging that there’s something there. There’s meaning lurking, often unnameable, at least by me.
– a key part of his art is stripping away. His faces are infinitely evocative, even while whittled free from any obvious craft. it takes a deft touch to do that.
– it’s easy to speculate that many of his works come from a place of pain tempered through faith. His choice of subjects, his almost brutal use of color, the depth in the eyes of faces that could have otherwise been denigrated as finger paintings, his omission or obscuring of faces – yet he refuses to fall into insanity or despair – the images and compositions are in many ways as clear as icons. But I don’t know, speculation and mind reading.
Without a background in modern art, don’t have much to offer re: modernism vrs modernity. The ‘heresy’ is incoherent to me and tends (as you are perhaps too aware) to get my dander up, and the aesthetic is not one I find refreshing or particularly enlightening, even where I can appreciate the craftsmanship and brilliance of the artists. (I’m the guy arguing for appreciating works I don’t like – awkward, but I hate it when people dismiss stuff that is real art even because they don’t like it – which I guess is your point after all.)
In a weird way, we Americans suffer, if that’s word, from a distortion in appreciation by having NOT been a battleground. We’re still scarred by the Civil War, that’s something, but we don’t know what it’s like to live cheek to jowl with enemies, as the French, Germans, Poles, and so on have – and to have concrete examples of their enmity all around you. It’s a difference I suspect no amount of talking about it can even touch.
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for your comments, which are, as always insightful.
To be honest, my knowledge of Rouault is also limited but I came across and article about him in Yankee magazine as I perused all the local art shows and events I was missing while staying at home gestating.
He was at Boston College recently, and it seems he’s been enjoying quite a Renaissance since I’ve been reading about him everywhere since there.
What I’m really most interested in is the phenomenon of Georges Rouault rather than his particular style itself, because something I never really understood is why an expressive aesthetic should become so attached to one particular ideology, as it did in Modernism. There was a certain sense in which it did in Weimar as well, and certainly, ideologues have always tried to bring art into service of ideology. But at heart, I’ve always thought that art and literature RESISTS a monolithic ideology since it is the best way to express paradox, ambiguities, and contradictions.
Art that tries to denote a singular message is not quite of the same level as art that is dedicated to the connotations of reality. (If you look at the art of Adolph Hitler for, example, there are some startling issues within his style that connect to his reductive and oppressively singular vision of reality. And then of course in literature and drama, what’s worse than agit prop or the ABC After School Special? )
We shouldn’t the aesthetic of modernism which has some evocative and appealing qualities have a variety of ideas and orientations within it?
Certainly, for example, JRR Tolkien can be said to have employed some modernist techniques in his literature, and they have been identified by several scholars. He was not of course a modernIST–and his ideology was anti-Modern in many ways–but being a man of his time, he can’t really escape some of the trappings of modernist technique. (Tom Shippey has catalogued this quite well, I think.) People resist and rail because they can’t quite separate the aesthetic from the ideology.
Then, there is TS Eliot–the ultimate in Conservative Anglo-Catholicism (eventually) and he is the father of modernism in poetry. The Wasteland–the modernist mood if every it was captured in a snapshot–doesn’t contradict his later conversion. In fact, reading Ash Wednesday we can see that that mood was the very source of it, in a lot of ways.
Similarly, today, Christian fans of Rowling become very shrill if you suggest she uses all of the typical patterns of late Capitalist post-Modernism as identified by Frederic Jameson. It’s quite simple really–genre slippage, stylized pastiche, a sort of pot-pourri of styles, techniques, and the infamous free and indirect narrative point of view. It’s there. What people are resisting is that she is expressing post-Modern IDEOLOGY, which is separate than post-Modern technique. (I happen to think post-Modern is a false term and that its just modernism cannabalizing itself but that’s another story.)
I didn’t really have an example of it in painting–a person who uses a contemporary aesthetic, divorced from its supposed ideology–until Rouault.
I think the break down of craft that you identify is spot on–it’s a return to primitive devotional art, as one might see, in early Celtic or even Byzantine iconography–and it reminds us how little we actually need in terms of technical craft to be evocative.
In the further break down we start to get the argument reductio ad absurdum when we arrive at Mondrian.
What Rouault reminds is two things–that the modernist aesthetic stands alone as an expression of mood divorced from an ideology. And by using it in the religious fashion that he did–he reminds us of something else really interesting. The drive to depart from tradition actually marked a return to it—many mdoernists were obsessed with “flatness” removing the sense of dimension. Gauguin and Van Gogh obsessed over getting their canvasses flat at certain periods.
This was an obsession in the early days of Catholic devotional art as well–I was just reading the same thing about the Ghent Altar Piece as well. So just seedling thoughts on the issue.
Thanks for responding!