The Brooklyn Rail

“Meaning sticks to man,” Roland Barthes once wrote, implying that humans were organisms hardwired to codify information. Friedrich Nietzsche had argued that humans generalize and classify to convert their observations to practical use—the condition to which the species had evolved for the sake of survival. Something else happened: humans came to differentiate their personal feelings—manifested as both sensations and thoughts—from the feelings attributed to others. Such a differential facilitates ordinary acts of communicative exchange.

As a codifier, I can use the divide between self and other to contrast two practices of art characteristic of the nineteenth century. The position eventually identified as modernist derived from a concentration on the potential of the self, the individual, to gain valid experience without following a collective code of instruction. Modernists claimed to bypass an academic period of institutionally organized learning based on classical models. To believe in the possibility of an unchanneled, uncoded input from the sensory environment (which includes dreams) may well be naïve, and few followed the theory religiously. But the modernists were at least consistent; they promoted psychologically alienated individuals and untrained “outsider” artists as privileged sources of inspiration. Outsider artists did what modernists wanted to do but usually could not.

Modernist and academic practices were mutually antagonistic. The latter derived from a concentration on the potential of the other, the polity. By the nineteenth century, the various European nation-states had founded academies of art dedicated to training a cadre of skilled practitioners of a standardized mode of imagery, readily comprehensible to the populace. Academic art served the interests of an organized state since it was efficient at promoting preferred values or, if you will, propaganda. By comparison, modernist art, though subject to trends, was unpredictable and introduced a touch of wildness. Modernist art violated the rules and standards of the academy, its reliance on a collective classical tradition. Whatever else they did with respect to alluding to philosophical debates, social issues, and political struggles, the various types of anti-academic artist—the Romantic (Caspar David Friedrich, Eugène Delacroix), the realist (Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet), the Impressionist (Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Rodin), the Symbolist (Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch)—stressed an element of self-expression in their work. In most cases, the sign of the independent self was an exaggerated marking or facture on the surfaces of representational paintings and sculptures. Even photographers indulged in a modernist look by intentionally blurring or otherwise distorting the focused image of their lens, introducing a bit of anamorphic marking. The artist’s mark, at once pronounced and reductive in a painting or sculpture, connoted speed in the execution of the work, a condensation of the experiential passage from impulsive feeling to resolved representation. The work remained closer to the self of the artist than it was to the external other that it depicted.

We all know that the modernist position gained the upper hand in the prevailing art-historical accounts of the so-called era of modernity (from the late eighteenth century to now, incorporating industrialism, republicanism, the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and its consumer economy, mass media, global exchange, the information age). Do I extend modernity too far? Are we no longer in the information age, but the disinformation age? The installation of authoritarian regimes within democracies raises this question. There was a time in the recent past that it was common to argue that modernism had ended by the 1960s or early 1970s (think of the postmodern architecture of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, with its emphasis on reading the referential signs of architectural forms); and, by the 1980s, the avant-garde had become the postmodern, at least among a number of dominant critical voices. From my historical perspective at the time, this development seemed ironic (and still does) because the usual examples of postmodernist practice (Cindy Sherman’s film stills, Richard Prince’s iconic cultural emblems, feminist artists’ celebration of “women’s work”) exhibited the readable referentiality that I knew from classical academic art. It doesn’t matter that the postmodern imagery may have been directed at a critique of contemporary culture; academic artists were also capable of this exercise in politics. What links the postmodern to the classical is its orientation to the other, that is, to a public meaning, readily accessible to an interpretive process. Modernist art, however rich its cultural references, preserves a core of private feeling that may remain undisclosed even to the creator. Advocates of the postmodern have cause to attribute mystification to modernism.

A modernist practice, by whatever means, aspires to eliminate ironic distance. And this entails, ultimately, a self-oriented work that eliminates the self (because the self, in relation to a being, constitutes an “other”). This is to say that personal identity, the existence of a self, is the necessary fiction that attributes self-awareness to consciousness. In advance of self-awareness, there is consciousness of an unarticulated kind. Modernism, if it were to achieve its theoretical aim, would put the art critic in a bind, unable to relate to the work without violating its principle of remaining independent of language. Let me imagine that I’m an artist thoroughly absorbed in the coloration of an image that I’m engaged in constructing—abstract or representational, it doesn’t matter. I’m so absorbed that I have no consciousness of my own agency while I’m producing the image. Once I stop to assess what I’ve done, once I say to myself, “this is good,” I’ve introduced a modicum of ironic distance. I’ve acknowledged myself as the other, the viewer as opposed to the participant. So, in theory, the ultimate modernist work would remain in its embryonic state, in process and flux, immune to a stabilizing evaluation from the outside, even its creator’s evaluation. A postmodernist—more pragmatic, less poetic—has no such aspiration to selfless nirvana.

The distinction between the postmodernist and the modernist could not last; it was already fading, as David Carrier suggests, by the 1990s. It was a club with no exclusive members. If its hallmark was ironic distance, there was already too much of that in acknowledged modernist icons (Manet’s ironic attitude toward political struggle, Cézanne’s ironic attitude toward the techniques of past masters). For every quality championed by the postmodernists of the 1980s, there was likely to be a modernist precedent. And if not a modernist precedent, then a classical one (classicists, from Jacques-Louis David to Marcel Duchamp, placed greater value on the concept than the execution).

During the most recent decades, the past thirty years or so—the period in which, as Carrier notes, a significant degree of attention has turned to the art of African Americans, Native Americans, and other minority groups—artists and art historians have continued to refer to theories of modernism, postmodernism, and the like, but without committing to the practice and extension of any one theory. Perhaps this jettisoning of established concepts of periodization has made it easier to appreciate the art of groups that clearly have a history, yet one never coordinated with canonical history. In our post-theory moment, we no longer believe that rejecting one ideological position only to assume another—say, abandoning the rigor of classicism for the affective ineffableness of modernism, then eventually trading modernism for postmodernism—results in more pertinent and beneficial forms of art, whether aesthetically or politically. We in the world of art now feel free (I hope) to discuss the sensory qualities of color in the art of Donald Judd or Dan Flavin without reverting to a theory of Minimalism, let alone the modernist tradition in which minimalist practice might be seen as the culmination of a sequence of reductive strategies of presentation. At the same time, we need to be able to view works by Jack Whitten, an African American, and works by Jeffrey Gibson, a Native American, as products that cannot be reduced to the racial or ethnic identity of the maker. Art is exploratory, while identity, which is a kind of meaning, sticks to man. The challenge for the modernist tradition was to generate art recognizable as such without relying on projecting a referential message. To be critical of this attempt, as many artists of the 1980s were, was easier than attempting to extend the effort. The non-canonical, exploratory art of a Whitten or a Gibson now shines a light in the right direction. Both artists have used eccentrically shaped canvases without concern for teleological arguments about the future of the format of paint on canvas. The effect of an eccentric shape is something to sense in its immediacy, not something to debate (let the debate come later, post-performance, if at all).

One of the best descriptions of modernist affect comes from painter Katharina Grosse who, upon seeing Cy Twombly’s “Lepanto” (2001) cycle in the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, said that she “immediately knew that something atrocious had happened here.” Yet she had no knowledge of where the “here” was, the sea battle to which the images, if only by title, refer. Apparently, they don’t actually refer, which would introduce a delay, an irony. They do something else, causing Grosse to be “able to experience myself as something apart from my own name.” In other words, she could feel the atrociousness without relating it to her sense of self, her identity, or her place in history, or the place of the event in the chronology of the world. The “Lepanto” paintings sparked feeling,—not a feeling or the feeling—feeling that Twombly’s aesthetic released from the historical context, allowing it to move freely through time and space like the ghost of an untethered event.

I suppose that I’m prejudiced by my own sense of history, my experience of mystery, and my tolerance for events that have no discernible causes. So, I prefer the a-logic of modernist practice to the logic of postmodernist practice. If now, we tend not to align with any one critical program, our collective attitude may, as Carrier suggests, derive from the need to extend our critical attention to areas of productivity that have largely escaped concerted analysis. If all our experience and learning, both sensory and conceptual, has brought us (the world) to its present situation, then will learning still more along the same lines lead to a remedy? Or should we learn in a different way, as if occupying a different self? This is where enlightenment might flow from the experience of the other—the ethnic group separate from one’s own and the life-force that can feel atrociousness but is not a judgmental self.

Feeling as another has been attempted many times. It may be worth trying again. But to do this, we must leave our fear of cultural appropriation behind. Everyone is a colonizer of someone or something. Societies are colonizing and agglomerative by their nature. Reread Nietzsche and Barthes. The structured social animal that we became eons ago now struggles to regain the amorphous wisdom, the intuitive potential, of consciousness unburdened by history.