Part I: The Regime of Authenticity

Abstract

ion. Even though different sciences could provide a diversity of viewpoints in the analysis of modernity, in many cases this involved the taking for granted of certain categories and premises in the transfer between different disciplines. In order to focus on the ambivalences of modernity and modernism in this context, fault lines have to be made visible that, in many ways, run entirely counter to the values and identities that are reproduced within the modern. It is, therefore, of crucial importance that any such interpretation should encompass a description of not only what modernity means, but also of how and in which contexts its normative values have been produced. True and False Modernity The analogy drawn by Marshall Berman between modernity and modernism may appear both more specific and more normative than an unconsidered view of the relationship as being obvious or unproblematic (modernism as a conscious form of reflection or a systematic evaluation of modernity). And yet both these viewpoints are actually embedded within each other to the extent that the explicitly formulated notion is simply a codification of something that would otherwise be taken for granted. However, when manifestos, specialist studies, monographs, essays, surveys and other texts are read anew with this relationship in mind, a particular pattern emerges that makes the analogy manifest, albeit in various ways and with dissimilar aims. And if it is the origins of the analogy that are being sought, they can also be discovered in some of the manifestos, programmatic writings and statements of the avant-garde. The most celebrated are, of course, the Futurist paeans to the speed, harshness and mutability of the modern age. Or as the ‘Manifesto dei pittori futuristi’ of 1910, devised by Umberto Boccioni and signed by Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Giovanni Severini, has it, Comrades! We declare that the triumphant progress of science has brought about changes in humanity so profound as to dig an abyss between the docile slaves of the past and us who are confident in The Modernity of Modernism 17 the shining splendor of the future. . . . The only living art is that which finds its distinctive features within the environment that surrounds it. Just as our forbears took the subject of art from the religious atmosphere that enveloped them, so we must draw inspiration from the tangible miracles of contemporary life, from the iron network of speed which winds around the earth. . . . Waiting to contribute to the necessary renovation of all artistic expression, we resolutely declare war on all those artists and institutions that, even when disguised with a false costume of modernity, remain trapped in tradition, academicism, and above all a repugnant mental laziness.21 Even though all these ideas may be familiar from the modernist canon—the notion that there is an absolute gulf separating the present and the past—the phrase referring to a false modernity is noteworthy. This can only be taken to mean that these Futurist painters were claiming to be creating in their art a true modernity, a language and a value that have their origins in the changes occurring in the contemporary world and are, therefore, authentically in relation to the essence of modernity. The bombast and self-glorifying rhetoric of the Futurists might appear to be a rather facile example, an unintended parody almost of the attempts by the avant-garde to legitimize their art to their contemporaries. But if one disregards the rhetorical façade, an intellectual construct becomes apparent that recurs in a range of similar contexts and in which the modernity of a particular artist’s work is presented as the ultimate criterion of its legitimacy: why something appears as it does and why it has to look that way as a matter of necessity. While it would of course be possible to stick to the old ways, art that is striving for authenticity and to be in harmony with its own age must embody the changes of the modern age. And yet it is striking how seldom explicit analogies were formulated in the discourse of the historical avant-garde between the work of a particular artist and the modernity of his or her contemporary world. The main reason presumably being that the analogy runs counter to one of the key tropes of the avant-garde: the individuality and autonomy of art and the artist. Instead, the key argument in the avant-garde manifestos was the formulation 18 Modernism as Institution and legitimation of the modernity of new art by means of negations. This was reflected in a continually recurring antagonism toward the art of previous ages, the dominant culture of the contemporary world and tradition as such. It also involved, as Theodor Adorno put it, establishing more or less specific registers of taboos that could not be transgressed. As a result, the definition of the art a particular artist practised was, equally, a definition of what was no longer possible: Art is modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has developed under the given relations of production. This involves a negative canon, a set of prohibitions against what the modern has disavowed in terms of experience and technique; and such determinate negation is virtually the canon of what is to be done. That this modernity is more than a vague Zeitgeist or being cleverly up to date depends on the liberation of the forces of production.22 The cultural identity of the avant-garde is expressed here through a demarcation of the limits of aesthetic and social autonomy in relation to the bourgeois normality of the modern age. Adorno, indeed, asserts that modernism, unlike previous artistic practice, not only negates preceding aesthetic forms, but also the very tradition per se, which serves to integrate, in a manner of speaking, the pursuit of change by bourgeois modernity within artistic practice.23 Modernism could be seen in this context as a mainly negative trend, which—like Walter Benjamin’s angel—observes and illuminates the misery of modernity and whose form of representation could even be described as a kind of anti-modernity.24 But this negative dialectic should be interpreted, rather, as a form of antagonism towards the aspects of bourgeois culture, which failed to keep pace with the dynamic changes of the modern age. It is in this sense that Boccioni’s remark about false modernity becomes so important: it marks the point at which a descriptive statement is transformed into a normative identification. Instead, it is in the historical interpretation and legitimation of avant-garde art that the analogy between modernity and modernism has come to play a crucial role. Its practitioners, in The Modernity of Modernism 19 contrast, were more preoccupied with the detail of describing and explaining their aesthetic starting points and artistic devices and, above all, with their contempt for the conventions of bourgeois modernity. Both the use of the term modernity and the need it fulfilled may be seen as a symptom of the shift in the status of the avant-garde: from marginalisation, autonomy and antagonism to acceptance, historicisation and institutionalisation. Two general phenomena can be distinguished in relation to the changing circumstances in the Western democracies during the twentieth century. On the one hand, the 1920s and the 1930s witnessed the gradual acceptance and institutionalisation of various avant-garde movements (when the notion of the avant-garde began to be formulated in terms of modernism); on the other, modernism became a more or less standard way of describing modern art per se in the decade following the end of the Second World War. A particular paradigmatic image of the nature of modernism and modern art is thus being constituted during this period. Although this image obviously encompassed a number of divergent interpretations, it would nevertheless define a distinct horizon for what was both possible and legitimate. And it is as part of this process that the analogy becomes necessary. What this also demonstrates is the necessity of making a distinction between the concepts of the avant-garde and modernism. Although not (as some have done) in order to distinguish a different essential content, but because the use and meaning of both terms have different histories. While the concepts may not be considered synonymous, there is a tangible proximity, historically speaking, between the phenomena both terms are usually associated with.25 When this closeness is borne in mind, the history of modernism and the avant-garde emerges as a perpetual conflict or crisis within the modern. The most esoteric movements within the avant-garde and those most critical of civilisation may also be understood in this light—as a utopian pursuit of a different form of modernity: a new order and a new human being which could transcend the established culture of the West.26 Here were have the contours of a specific historical process: a concept is introduced at a certain point because it meets a particular need; the concept is then widely disseminated through 20 Modernism as Institution various institutions; certain interpretations are privileged and a somewhat simplified image of a complex historical situation becomes established (essential developmental perspectives and analogies, canonical selections and collections of examples, a process of exclusion and inclusions). The temporal (historical) change in function and value must also, of course, be taken into account, because it marks a number of different historical positions that determine the relevance and significance of both the aesthetic criteria and the theoretical legitimacy of a particular interpretation. Seen from an art historical perspective, the establishment of a discursive and epistemological boundary between the modern and the postmodern is of particular relevance here as