Discusses the influence of modernism on contemporary art. The author notes that Clement Greenberg's definition of modernism referred to a tradition of artists from Raphael to Rothko, considers the misreading of Greenberg's work in Has Modernism Failed? by Suzi Gablik (1984), and relates her critique of spiritualism to the video The Holy Artwork (2001) by Christian Jankowski. He examines the effects of Homemade Aesthetics (1999) by Clement Greenberg and Farewell to an Idea (1999) by T. J. Clark on recent trends in modernism, situates these debates within the cultural framework suggested by A Singular Modernity (2002) by Frederic Jameson, and argues that debates about modernism continue to remain important to contemporary art

Reeve, Charles

OCAD University Open Research Repository

OCAD University Open Research RepositoryFaculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences2004 Still modern after all these yearsReeve, Charles Suggested citation: Reeve, Charles (2004) Still modern after all these years. Art Papers, 28 (4). 14 - 16. ISSN 1524-9581 Available at http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1093/Open Research is a publicly accessible, curated repository for the preservation and dissemination of scholarly and creative output of the OCAD University community. Material in Open Research is open access and made available via the consent of the author and/or rights holder on a non-exclusive basis. OCAD University Open Research Repository  Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences    2004 Still Modern After All These Years Charles Reeve OCAD University creeve@faculty.ocadu.ca      The following article originally appeared in Art Papers (http://www.artpapers.org/). It is reproduced here with permission.   Suggested citation: Reeve, Charles. “Still Modern after All These Years.” Art Papers July 2004: 14–16. Web.     __ mumStill Modern after all these YearsThe twentieth century has ended but its major artistic movement marches onBY CHARLES REEVEDespite its Monty Python-esque demise-protracted deaththroes, histrionics on all sides-the twentieth century's majorartistic movement turns out to be not quite dead yet. In fact,modernism-archaic name and all-already is experiencingresurgence, perhaps drawing strength from the perpetualdisagreement over what it is. Continuing argumentsnotwithstanding, consensus allows this much: modernismdominated the twentieth century's visual art; it emphasized awork's appearance (rather than philosophical or thematic issues);and its foremost proponent-as well as one of western art's mostprominent figures between 1939 and 1969-was not an artistbut a critic, Clement Greenberg.Some of the blame for the confusion around modernism lieswith Greenberg himself. For one thing, he often used words innovel or unexpected ways. Thus "modernism," for him, meantnot a break with the past, as you might expect, but rather along-standing tradition connecting Giotto and Raphael to MarkRothko, Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis. For another,Greenberg decried reading into or out of a painting, yet oftensaw what he wanted to see-fastening on the ambiguous depthcreated by the interplay between Pollock's webs of color, forinstance, but ignoring the cigarettes, insects and handfuls ofnails that the artist wove into those skeins.Most readers could have reached Greenberg's meaningdespite these obstacles had he not erected a third. Byseparating good art from bad with a decisiveness that smackedof arrogance, he provoked intense dislike. Wisps of thisantipathy started forming in the 1950s. Developing into anacrimonious haze by the mid-1 960s, they went on gathering intothe 1980s until they created a fog of hostility so thick that seeingGreenberg's argument at all-let alone clearly-became nearlyimpossible. Suzi Gablik's Has Modernism Failed?, first publishedin 1984, exemplifies this blindness. Released in a revised editionthis spring by Thames and Hudson-the revisions consistingmostly of a new preface and two new concluding chapters-thisvolume sets out to answer its title's question affirmatively butinstead catalogues the received misapprehensions ofGreenberg's arguments.Gablik's misfire is lamentable because her basic complainthas currency. The art market in our time emphasizes the marketover the art, she argues, giving sales skill priority over artistictalent. I'm not sure the market hasn't always had the upperhand, but certainly the artists who rise quickest today too oftenPostmodernism's differences from modernism are both decisive and subtle, as can be seen bycomparing Richter's recent painting about abstraction to Rothkos straightforward abstract paintingof 60 years ago. Gerhard Richter, Abstract Picture (873-5), 2001, oil on canvas, 79 by 71 inches(collection High Museum of Art; purchase with High Museum of Art Endowment Fund).are those with the most sales ability and the least to sell.However, Gablik wants to prove, not just assert, that the marketdominates contemporary art, and to assign blame for it, andthat's when the trouble starts.Our society is spiritually vacuous, Gablik believes, because ithas lost its shared values. And, she says, modernism, with itsdeliberate moral purposelessness, is at least partly responsible.Common among cultural conservatives (even those like Gablikwho would consider themselves anything but), this perspectivemakes little sense: when did revolution and revolt not regularlyconvulse Western societies?Moreover, after invoking Greenberg as modernism'sspokesman, Gablik characterizes it as a break with tradition14 ARTPAPERS.ORGIrthough Greenberg argued the opposite. And Gablik's claim thatmodernism's focus on form lacked morality overlooks that itsproponents withdrew into composition and color to resist thecolonization of the imagination that they believed followed-ordrove-industrialization.Gablik wants art to have a purpose: to fill the spiritualvacuum at contemporary society's heart. But, as should be clearfrom the avalanche of bathetic interpretations of identitypolitics, good intentions don't equal good art. Indeed,spirituality's recent influence on visual art already has attractedan all-too-predictable parade of banality (evidenced by theimages and essays in the catalogs for such exhibitions as"Cosmos + Chaos" and "Thresholds"). Obviously, identitypolitics didn't only generate bland art, and neither has nor willspirituality: Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece from thesixteenth century and Christian Jankowski's video The HolyArtwork of 2001 make that clear. But the poverty of HasModemism Failed? and of the current spate of "spiritual" artshows how insipid program-driven aesthetics often are.Difficulties aside, Gablik's book is interesting as a timelycriticism of the art market's inverted values and as part of thefirst wave of scholarly interest in modernism. Has ModernismFailed? initially belonged to a small swell of similar publicationsthat included Hans Belting's The End of the History of Art?(1987)-republished this spring by the University of Chicago asArt History after Modernism. However, while Gablik essentiallylets her argument stand, Belting changes his title, disavows hisfirst version and opens with a self-conscious genealogy thatexplains his thesis and his discomfort: modernism is a lensthrough which we view history rather than a historicalphenomenon, so modernism's implosion-if it is imploding-affects the discipline of art history rather than the making of art.This argument is familiar, but Belting gives it new weight bybackcing it with an impressive unraveling of his discipline'shistory and by guiding us through the intellectual significance ofsuch (unjustly) discarded works as Heinrich Wolfflin's Principlesof Art History (1915) and Erwin Panofsky's mid-twentieth centuryessays on iconography. By doing so, Belting demonstrates thatmodernism has several faces. For example, while Europeansthink of modernism as a fairly broad artistic tendency extendingback as far as the mid-nineteenth century, North Americans likeGreenberg see it as gaining momentum in the 1930s andclustering primarily around Picasso, the Abstract ExpressionistsMark Rothko, Untitled, 1940-1941, oil on canvas, 36 by 30 inches (collection High MuseumofArt; gift of he Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc).and a handful of Color Field painters from the 1960s. Byextension, postmodernism's much-discussed global pluralism(which Belting views skeptically) is not an event but aperspective of historians and critics, which is why Belting arguesthat the possibility of modernism's end affects art history morethan art.The first wave of scholarly interest in modernism generallyand Greenberg specifically petered out around the early 1990safter (though not because) John O'Brian anthologized the bulkof Greenberg's writings. However, in 1999, the release ofGreenberg's posthumous Homemade Esthetics and T.J. Clark'sFarewell to an Idea portended a widespread sense thatdiscussions of the twentieth century's cultural history-in any(Continued on page 16)JULY/AUGUST 2004 15aspect-overlook Greenberg's influence at their peril.A good example of how these ideas affect broadercultural analyses is Fredric Jameson's A Singular Modernity(Verso, 2002), the title of which conveys its central paradox.The word "modernity" conjures up the period that weconsider modern, characterized by the emergence andintensification of industrial economies, urban populationsand liberal democracies. Opinions differ on whether we'rein this era or beyond it, but agreement remains thatmodernity broke from everything before it and that thisrupture informs where we are now.By calling our modernity "singular," however, Jamesonthrows new light on the present. We characterize this era asmodern to distinguish it as radically new: never before hasso much changed so rapidly for so many. Yet this ideaappears repeatedly over the last 1500 years: our modernityis just one among many.A literature scholar by training and trade (and one ofthe most influential commentators on postmodern culture),Jameson grasps that being of the moment obsesses thearts community, so its theories inevitably address thatobsession. Thus, having shown that our experience of ourworld as uniquely new is decidedly old hat, Jameson usesaesthetics to illustrate his point, focusing on Greenberg inorder to unpack what is unique about the late twentiethcentury's modernity, namely the development of anaesthetic that cast withdrawal from a declining world asresistance to that world. It should be clear that Belting andJameson share an interest in modernism's intellectualhistory, but there's a further affinity: the former wastranslated from German, the latter reads like he was. Thisstylistic quirk is unfortunate because Jameson's argument iselusive enough without "itself" and "as such" punctuatingeach paragraph ("modernism itself," "the narrative processas such" etc.) and important enough that it ought to be asreadable as possible.In some ways, it has to be said, modernism is in thepast: Greenberg died a decade ago, and most of hisheroes long predeceased him. Yet the renewal in whichthese books participate shows that, in other ways,modernism and its questions remain directly relevant: whatis painting? what is a photograph? how does good artdiffer from bad? iECHARLES REEVE is editor-in-chief at Art Papers.Edd( a R enoufREVEALED STRUCTURESBrenau UniversityGalleriesJune 21 - Sept. 26* \ S j . .. . . . . , , ~~  ~. . ........  .. .. . ... . ... . ........ ......  ...'..Z.., i ..  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Still modern after all these years

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Still modern after all these years

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