The paradox of modernism

• Robert Hughes twists himself into knots talking about modernism in The Guardian.

My first introduction to the concept of modernism came in a 10^th-grade social studies class, when the teacher cracked open a phone book in the middle of a description of Dadaism and started reading names at random; some in a dark, serious timbre, and others in a comic, singsong lilt. The idea appealed to me because it treated the rules -- such as they were -- as eminently flexible, if not altogether disposable.

Hughes’ piece is focused primarily on the influence of modernism on painting and sculpture, and bolsters the connection by linking the Industrial Revolution to the explosion of radical design work. Makes sense to me; what is most commonly referred to as “modernist” literature includes writers like Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, et al, all contemporaries of the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, and all of whom likely felt their work was a reaction against the threat of absolute technological perfection. (Thank you, Robert Hughes, for pointing that out to me. I read that and I was all like, duh.)

But here’s the most interesting part:

Either we throw out the vestiges of culture, all of them, dream romantic dreams of blank slates, reject everything that makes claim to humane and rational discourse, all that our parents called "adult", and call ourselves dadaists. The name "dada" parodied a child's first utterance; it was meant to symbolise the act of beginning again from nothing, having rejected the past in all its weighty totality - a cultural impossibility, but at least a challenge for disoriented self-made radicals in 1917.

Or we put our bets on transferring fantasies about the future back into the present, make enormously inflated claims about a technological millennium that hasn't arrived and isn't likely to appear just yet, and call ourselves futurists, a rhetorical stratagem that works best among the whimsical and operatic Italians.

Or else, we say that Europe, dire as its condition is, can actually be improved. So we must invent a new environment of buildings, cities, images and tools, whose end will be to create new societies of men and women. This engineering will get a name: modernism. It will be buoyed up by an immense and irrational hope shared, as cultural movements tend to be, by a small number of like-minded people who only have the haziest notion of, and generally rather despise, what the majorities around them want.

The appeal of modernistic techniques -- and remember, the exact definition of “modernism” is as fluid as language itself -- to those that embrace it is because it is so very different than anything else out there. But you can be packed to the eyeballs with all the artistic innovation the world has ever known and still get scuttled by the one thing that always gets in the way: the fear of the unknown that is inherent in every single person on this planet. Where some people fly from the unknown, others run straight into it, but there are never enough to turn the tide.

The hopeful rhetoric of modernism was always way, way out in front of its actual products. Modernists were always hoping that big business, big planning, big government would latch on to their designs and make them generally available to people (preferably workers) who would recognise their benefits and gratefully use them. Alas, it didn't happen that way. There was not enough demand for "radical" designs of common household things, let alone buildings or whole suburbs, to attract anything like a mass market... What ordinary people wanted was culture they could relax into - the middle-class comfort of the upholstered armchair, not the bracing, challenging austerities of chrome tubes and leather thongs... At the root, there was always something penitential about modernism, with its stern abjuration of the world's sensuous pleasures in the interest of higher ones. You were never left in any doubt that the monk's cell was a better place to be than the capitalist's study, let alone his wife's boudoir.

A pungent point; there is indeed something suffocating about experimental work of any kind, in its strict eschewing of normal guideposts, which is why people throw up their hands at movies from David Lynch or Guy Maddin, or shake their heads at a painting by Man Ray or Jackson Pollock and turn away. The great paradox of innovation is that a truly ingenious, revolutionary idea is rarely recognized as such when it first makes it out into the open. Some seeds take generations to bear fruit. But that shouldn’t stop anyone from trying to sow them.