Modernism And Post

I just finished a book which challenged or re-framed some cherished beliefs. I love being sent back to remedial education classes. The book is Art and Discontent by Thomas McEvilley.

It is a heady read which lost me for pages at a time with many references to Plato and his buddies along with Hegel, Kant and Hume. The subject is aesthetics and by extension how we stand in relation to the world around us.

First I had to overcome my phobia to toga'd Greeks and Romans with their abstract language and references. Then there was my scant conversancy with art history. Yet enough bubbles got through to light a few bulbs.

I first recognized his materialistic approach as faintly Marxist which is something I was happy to shed many years ago. By the end of the book, however, I was won over by both his common sense and erudition. McEvilley fills the space between formalism and social realism, between the metaphysical and propagandistic. He grounds art, removing it from a worldly beyond while still retaining its inexplicable mystery.

The author comes down on the Art for Art's Sake movement which tended to isolate writers and artists at considerable remove. He argues for content and context being inherent in any art work. Even if the artist sets out to make a statement against realism, as many Abstract Expressionists did, that too becomes a kind of content. Pollock’s drips and Sam Francis’ splatters may be seen as acts against figurative art as well as a rendering of representational concepts.

He denounces the notion that art can attain some sort of spirituality through transcendence. The post-Modern eye refuses to see words or any visual art de-contextualized. Everything exists in a given time and place. The Bushmen of Australia have a way of seeing unlike ours and their art reveals that. We don't see what they see. They live in what Marshall McLuhan called, acoustical space rather than a visual one. As such, pre-literate people can leap into the cyberworld more easily than literate people like us who measure intelligence by print technology.

McEvilley makes the case that the era we call Modernism which began its slow death about 30 years ago followed by Post-Modernism, is not a phenomena new to our time. The Greeks had theirs and the Romans. The Renaissance was another era of Modernism followed by a period of retrenchment. The notion of vertical progress up to an Omega point is replaced by a more cyclical, repetitive paradigm.

Though written twenty years ago the book confronts a vital question for today: how does this post-colonial world change our perceptions. Deconstructing literature and all art reinvigorates language and our entire value system. What we called voyages of discovery from Europe to the Americas can now be seen as voyages of plunder and conquest.

So much of the psychic dislocation experienced by Americans in terms of lost values, is the sense that old terms are no longer relevant. An analogy might be how heavy weaponry is irrelevant in guerrilla warfare.

We become less judgmental and more inclusive as we allow otherness into our lives. In time the grotesque no longer seems grotesque. Art criticism will become a study of cultures much like anthropology dependent on the vectors of time and place.

Museum Guard

Out of luck. out of town and on the bus from outside Des Moines headed to the big city. Destination, the Art Institute of Chicago, hoping to land a job. The man sitting across from you the past few miles gets off also. He says you need to know somebody and he becomes that person whose name you can drop.

You’re thinking how all this fell into place twenty-seven years ago. You’ve seen them come and go; other guards and daily viewers. You patrol two rooms on the second floor containing the most treasured artworks. Two paintings in particular you have claimed as your own, as steward. You possess them as much as anyone can ever possess a work of art; Hopper’s Nighthawks and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. They have followed you from flatland to city street.

The farm couple with pitchfork faces are well-known to you….and you to them. You greet them in the morning like your no-nonsense, taciturn parents. You know their story; you’ve done some homework.

As the artist tells it he was in the chair braced with a few shots of whiskey waiting for the Novacaine to do its numbing, studying Doc McKeeby’s face. He remembers thinking how his dentist must stare into teeth all day the way his neighbors stare down rows of corn all behaving themselves. Folks do a lot of staring here in Iowa. Byron McKeeby says to relax, then yanks out the misbehaving tooth.

Tell you what, Doc, the artist says, what if I cover the bill by painting you? Suits me fine, says McKeeby. That’s how it all started he recalled. Then Grant Wood persuaded his sister, Nan, to pose. He aged her thirty years and gave her a face that could make milk sour. The dentist was already pinched and dour.

You know all this but to you they are American icons, hard work, stern and church-like with their gothic look in front of the gothic window. A museum guard can know too much or more than he wants to hear. You disregard what you have heard; that Wood, even toothless, had an ironic bite. It could be that the icon is a parody of who we think we no longer are. But for you it remains a time gone and austerity left behind.

In the other room you alone have found the portal into Hopper’s late-night café, this human still-life, gloomy for all its illumination. Even in the morning it is always near closing time. You take your place on a stool and stare into coffee, black and bitter. These night owls can’t afford to give a hoot. They are hawks scavenging for their lives.

You know these people from the resident hotel; the salesman down the hall, the redhead in the lobby waiting for a return call. Sometimes you are willing the counterman to catch your eye and be that man on the bus who lent you his name.

There is no one on the street, no easy chatter for the lost; only you, in your uniform, moving in and out of the frame rescuing yourself from this dead-end street where now and then you can almost spot the moon yellowing the wall like some sudden hundred-watt bright idea.

How We Got To Be US

About 35,000 years ago, give or take a week, there was a softball game between the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. The latter, Homo-Sapiens, (that’s us) won in extra innings when the rounded rock, called ball, rolled into a nearby cave where one of us was painting on the wall. This was not the official scorer; this was an artist who hid the ball, saved the day and still does.

It’s a good thing we won that day because Neanderthals could never adapt to hitting a curve ball. Nor did they ever think of a wheel, sliced bread or Saran Wrap. We have proved ourselves technologically. We even knew enough not to have invented the Yellow Pages or answering machines until we had the telephone.

But there must be other measures of our distinction. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll think of something…..

Love comes to mind, in all its many permutations; and perhaps by extension we have learned trust and community. Of course, the opposite is also part of our being. We can remember and forget, just like our computers. But unlike them we can imagine and transcend ourselves. Art, I submit, is a necessary function

Think of it this way. The artist / composer / writer sits in his room late at night by lamplight. Down below a commercial ship is trying to navigate along the river. Commerce requires illumination from the desk of the creator.

Artists stand outside the circle banished by Plato, dangerous as they are, or at least straddle it to get a better view. They push and pull us along and around the corner.

I don’t mean to consign that role to a designated few. All of us have the stuff to transport ourselves and others. Only in some does that impulse survive childhood. Society resists change and has ways of crushing the creative life out of us through intimidation, censorship or indifference, in a variety of ways, particularly if it isn't utilitarian.

We are good at that too. A vestigial fear of the unknown still clings to us since that first softball game and it also inhibits us. We need to make room for the mystery and maybe we’ll recognize it as our disowned selves.