Modernist Machines Edition
Robert Hughes excavates the Modernist weltanschauung; new McCarthy; new-old architecture; RIP Peter Schjeldahl; John Berger; happy feast days.
Welcome to the monthly roundup. Happy November. Happy Feasts of All Saints and All Souls!
How does technology change consciousness and thus artistic expression?
This is the question posed at the beginning of Robert Hughes’ classic documentary series on modern art in the 20th Century, “The Shock of the New.” The first several installments offer a fascinating introduction to the relationship between technological progress, ideology, and art.
Despite their reputations as charlatans, intentionally cultivated as a proof of anti-bourgeois bona fides, the most earnest of the modernists were searching out answers to important and unprecedented questions. Watching Hughes review them from his vantage point in 1980 makes me wonder, what does it mean that they were never satisfactorily answered and perhaps never can be?
Earlier the Impressionists had shocked their elders by earnestly asking the question, What if I take these newfangled tube paints and go outside and just paint the actual light and color shapes that I see? The answer: it will be awesome.
The modernists a couple generations later were trying to answer questions like, How do we represent the extremes of sound, speed, and industrial dynamism on canvas. How do we express the principle of transformation in a static image. How do we incorporate the phenomenologically-disruptive discoveries of particle physics into our representations of what we once naively assumed to be stable objects. What is the relevance of representations of the human body in an age of machines. How do we deal, aesthetically speaking, with the advent of mass mechanized slaughter turning classical ideals of beauty, order, harmony, and balance into some sort of sick joke.
For some, the answer involved radical political commitment, either communist or fascist. For others, a withdrawal from the very idea of public life and a retreat into self-referential games, abstractions, despair. If the Dadaists turned art into a literal joke, played on the public and in some sense on the universe itself, perhaps they were just being the most direct and straightforward of them all.
Cubism, as the first bridge from Impressionism, drew on advances in mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry, and the elaboration of special relativity to argue for a radical expansion of visual perspective, mirroring the earlier evolutions from one- to two- to three-point perspective.1 The asymptote to approach was now infinite-point perspective. Objects seen from all possible angles, simultaneously, space and time compressed together, ideally, into a new synthesis.
The shattered, deconstructed forms of Picasso, Metzinger, and Braque were an attempt to describe in 2D visual language the interior subjective cognition of sight, in which our mind creates the relationships of 3D objects in space and situates them in the 4D flow of time. How many angles would the canvas hold, how far could they push it?
The Futurists took the premises of the technological society even further. They believed that all previous art forms had been made utterly obsolete—not to mention all existing social forms, religious forms, and political forms. This was fantastic news. Everything could be remade from the ground up, finally, as a well-designed machine rather than the slow knotted growth of our crooked timber. Humanity would be freed from its limitations, emancipated from the tyranny of biology through a union with machine-ness in an explosion of pent-up fossil energy. They frothed themselves into ecstasy with cyborg visions.
They worshipped the machine, especially the car, and its attributes: noise, energy, power, torque, destruction of distance, and, above all, speed, speed, speed. Unfettered speed as an expression of man’s2 newly-sovereign will-to-power was their long-awaited eschaton. Their manifesto included this banger: “We already live in the Absolute for we have already created the omnipresent eternal speed.”
In seeking to bring forward all the potentialities seeded in the age of oil, the Futurists were what we might today call accelerationists avant le lettre. They were camped-up chickenhawk-militarist Mad Max antagonists. They were also co-founders and Comms department of Italian fascism. Indeed fascism was born not as a reactionary movement but one radically avant-garde, utopian, and transhumanist. In art, politics, and the human body it saw all society as a machine and longed to make it roar down the highway.
And accelerate things did. By the time WWI had left its smoking craters, its bullet-riddled generations, its wafting legacy of poison gas, the infernal side of mechanized power was much clearer than it had been in 1909 when the Futurist manifesto was splashed across Europe’s leading newspapers.
As Hughes points out, the modernists evolved too, their work becoming suffused with a newfound ambivalence. By the 20s, the triumphalist worship of the machine as an instrument of man’s glorious Will was already curdling into something approaching cynicism, disgust, and resignation in the face of the mechanization of life.
Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, for instance. Here instead of the glory of rationalism and progress there is the bitter sundering of the erotic union of man and woman into uncommunicative fragments, an allegory of reproduction as an industrial process abstracted into its constituent scaffolding of wires, cylinders, wheels, pistons and rods. The mechanization of human sexuality is no longer presented as powerful and efficient but as isolated, melancholy, dysfunctional, and frustrated. Likewise Francis Picabia’s sexualized machines3 were rooted in his view of technology as a parodic inversion of the Virgin Birth—“a daughter born without mother.”
The puerile Futurist worship of the “race-automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents” was soon to be discredited by the trenches and the gas chambers. By the 50s, Dadaists like Jean Tinguely were in full on critique mode with sculptures of absurd and self-destructive contraptions satirizing a mechanized society. But the implicit framework of humans as ersatz machines didn’t go anywhere. Much to the contrary. Just as to Duchamp it was obvious that sex was a matter of pistons firing, we take it for granted with our updated terminology that the mind is “software” and the body “hardware.”
We have an even greater faith than the Futurists—that the hardware may one day be made totally obsolete. Or at least traded out for a new model. One no longer subject to the nuisances of suffering, sickness, death, or resurrection.
Vonnegut in Mother Night warns that “We are what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be.” Likewise the world takes shape for us according to the shape of our metaphors, so be careful which metaphors you allow to structure your thought and speech. The modernists had the good excuse of being giddily blindsided by the visions of possibility unleashed by the sheer unprecedented disruptive power unlocked by cheap and limitless liquid petroleum, the greatest technological shock in human history. What’s ours? Are we really just “slaves of some defunct artist”?
The really tricky question, which Hughes only grazes, is how artists should incorporate the material and metaphysical bases of their society into their work without imbibing and transmitting what is worst and most inhuman in its worldview. How to balance protective ironic distance and passionate experimentation? Is balance a meaningful responsibility at all, or is the only duty exploration? Can I get still rich from NFTs or did I miss the window?
Links.
Sonya’s long-bubbling God Post. (Great line: space-time as a “contour of God’s cognition.”)
Cormac McCarthy, 89, is releasing two new novels this year, his first in sixteen years. Here’s an excerpt from the first, The Passenger. Enjoy—I haven’t read it and will hold off for now as the gravitational pull of his cadence is just too easy to succumb to.
Semi-legendary critic Peter Schjeldahl has died. I didn’t know much about him but in my catch-up reading find myself very taken by his ethos, one of humble openness sharpened by passionate judgment. His motto: “What would I like about this if I liked it?”
I have written obscurely when I could get away with it…Writing clearly is immensely hard work that feels faintly insane, like painting the brightest possible target on my chest. To write clearly is to give oneself away.
And this is quite an affecting read: Schjeldahl’s 2019 reflections on a life of art, addiction, and coming to grips with dying.
The industrial portraiture of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Caught a bit of this at the Met last month but now wishing I had spent more time in the exhibit. “Like serious birders, they were always on the lookout for fresh industrial specimens.”
There are lots of poems about paintings. Why aren’t there more paintings about poems?
Autumn Christian on what the arrival of her baby girl taught her about unlived futures:
I had many glittering alternative futures once. They all had their own special, shiny gloss. A life in Paris as a feminine flaneur, with a rotating cast of lovers, nights spent drinking wine and smoking cigarettes with fascinating strangers. A life in a bayou town, living in a shack by myself, miles away from anyway else so I could write in heated, green seclusion. A life in Los Angeles, writing by day and working as an exotic dancer at night, shivery high on cocaine and tequila as I strutted in clear lucite heels. They all died. The shimmer faded. It revealed the laughing skull underneath.
Architecture.
This is not a sixth century Romanesque basilica in Ravenna but the new church of St. Michael’s Abbey in the hills outside Los Angeles. It was completed in 2021. The design is such that the evening light strikes the altar precisely on the feast day of the Abbey’s patron saint, as you see here.
Here is a lovely short video introducing the architect, France’s Jean-Louis Pagès:
“We do not reject anything in the new that is good, but we hold on to all that is good in the old…The question came up of, how do you build a new abbey in a classical style in this day and age?”
It turns out you can just…do it. Time to build!
“Shelf of a field, green, within easy reach, the grass on it not yet high, papered with blue sky through which yellow has grown to make pure green, the surface colour of what the basin of the world contains, attendent field, shelf between sky and sea, fronted with a curtain of printed trees, friable at its edges, the corners of it rounded, answering the sun with heat, shelf on a wall through which from time to time a cuckoo is audible, shelf on which she keeps the invisible and intangible jars of her pleasure, field that I have always known, I am lying raised up on one elbow wondering whether in any direction I can see beyond where you stop…”
—John Berger, “Field”
Poetry.
Are you still here? Are you standing in some corner?
You knew so much of all this, you were able
to do so much; you passed through life so open
to all things, like an early morning. I know:
women suffer; for love means being alone;
and artists in their work sometimes intuit
that they must keep transforming, where they love.
—excerpt of “Requiem for a Friend,” R.M. Rilke
Rilke wrote “Requiem” for the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, dead at 31. He concluded the elegy with a lament: “Somewhere there is an ancient enmity / between our daily life and the great work.” May God grant us both the strength and the suppleness we require for our transformations.
As ever,
J
“If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann’s theorems.” On Cubism, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, 1912.
“We will glorify…the scorn of women.” Futurist Manifesto, point 9.
“Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed upon me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression… The machine has become more than a mere adjunct of human life. It is really a part of human life—perhaps the very soul.” Francis Picabia, 1915.
Honored to be included!