MODERNITY, MODERNISM AND THE

AVANT-GARDE.

The crazy race for the hazy future

The Value of the Past... The Latin term ‘Modo’. (From

Wiktionary ) only just recently, presently

At the end of the sixth century, Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman, writer and librarian used the term ‘modernus’ in the sense of contemporary, but wanted to conserve the knowledge and ideas of antiquity. (Both Christianity and Plato/Aristotle etc).

Past is Good, Now is Bad...

The Venerable Bede (672-735), wrote of ‘moderni’ and ‘antiqui’ in the eighth century. He called his present times ‘Tempus modernum’. The term ‘modernus’ came to have a negative connotation.

Alcuin of York, (730-805) thought of himself

and his contemporaries as ‘insignificant people of the end of the world’ warned of the dangers of decay, which could herald the coming of the Antichrist. Only a return of moral renewal and the ways of the ancients could save the world.

When Giants Ruled the World... In the 12th Century, William, the ageing

abbot of Saint-Thierry, when told that King David, when he was old, ruled the kingdom from his bed, concluded that in biblical times, the world was youthful and people had more strength and vitality.

Bernard of Chartres wrote about the

‘antiqui’ and ‘moderni’, saying in essence that modern scholars were dwarves who could see farther, but only because they stood on the shoulders of giants.

You are what you is... In the early 17th Century, Rene

Descartes argued for new ways of judging and seeking truth. He frequently set his views apart from those of his predecessors. He specifically rejected the ancients . He accounted for things by mechanical explanations. He began ideas which laid the groundwork for the scientific method. He said ‘I think, therefore I am’ (Cogito ergo sum)

A clean slate... In the 11th century, the theory of

tabula rasa, or clean slate, was developed by the Islamic philosopher, Ibn Sina. In the late 17th century. John Locke used this idea to argue against Augustine and the church who said that mankind was inherently sinful. Locke said that man was born with a clean slate. He also suggested that the people had the right to overthrow their leaders. He broke out of the ‘sacred circle’. His theory of mind is often seen as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self.

Meet the new boss... Locke’s ideas went into the

‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ of the French Revolution of 1789. This asserts that all men are equal and that there is no divine right of kings and no special privilege for the church. No mention, however, of the rights of women or slaves. The declaration is based on the principles of the Age of Enlightenment, such as individualism and the social contract of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The Sky at Night The Industrial Revolution

began in England in the late 18th Century. A hostility developed towards industrialisation. Romanticism grew. Members in England included artist and poet William Blake and poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley's novel ‘Frankenstein’ showed concerns that scientific progress might not be always be for the good.

Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801

Once more, with feeling...

The movement stressed the importance of "nature" in art, in contrast to "monstrous" machines and factories. The Romantics reacted against the mechanical and the controlled. In art, literature and music, they emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ Caspar David

Friedrich, 1818.

Land of Hope and Gloria...

The Victorian Era continued Enlightenment ideas. The wild, passionate, erotic, even destructive aspects of Romanticism continue in all the arts, (although not in the home). There is a longing for the Gothic and medieval past and at the same time, great scientific and technical progress. Photography takes off. Moving images are captured on film for the first time in 1888, in Leeds.

Fin de siècle French poets Baudelaire,

Mallarme, Rimbaud and Verlaine began ‘Symbolism’. They influenced artists. They shared an interest in mystical and spiritual expression in their art and a rebellion against realism that depicted the observable world. They expressed personal inner vision, idealization and fantasy and not just descriptions of reality.

“Women on the beach”, 1898 by Edvard Munch

Modernism is a response...

MODERNITY MODERNISM

Charles Darwin Einstein's Theory of

Relativity Sigmund Freud and

Psychoanalysis Communism Cars Airplanes Telephones Radios WWI

Cubism Futurism (and Vorticism) Abstraction(ism) Stream of Consciousness dada(ism) Surrealism? Expressionism Existentialism Pop art Celebration of Technology

We gotta get out of this place...Avant-Garde.

1. The advance group in any field, esp. in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods.

2. Of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material.

3. Belonging to the avant-garde: an avant-garde composer.

4. Unorthodox or daring; radical.

From dictionary.comPablo Picasso. The Two Saltimbanques

(Harlequin and his Companion), 1901

Let’s get Cubic... The world seen from

multiple viewpoints. Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’, 1907.

‘There's something anarchist and ruthless about it that contains dada and Marcel Duchamp and punk’.

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

Something is happening here... ''On or about December

1910 human character changed,'' Virginia Woolf observed. Relations between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children'' shifted, she wrote, ''and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.''

And in the 4th Dimension ‘Nude Descending a

Staircase, No. 2’ by Marcel Duchamp, 1912. Successive superimposed images – influenced by stop-motion images of Etienne Jules Marey. Criticised as ‘an explosion in a shingle factory’. Influence of scientific ideas – Einstein?

The future’s bright... Futurists were

fascinated with dynamism, speed, and restlessness of modern urban life. ‘We want no part in the past’ wrote Marinetti in Italy. Old art should be ‘heaved over the side of the steamship of modernity’ said Mayakovsky in Russia.

Umberto Boccioni – Elasticity 1912.

But War is wrong with you...

Hans Richter saw the beginnings of Dada in the outbreak of World War I. The movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity — in art and more broadly in society — that corresponded to the war. Dada protested against everything, a nonsensical, absurd world represented by slaughter and stupidity.

The fountain of life... Dada was nihilistic and anti

rational. Artists made nonsensical speeches, poets constructed poems by cutting random words from newspapers and picking them out of a sack).Marcel Duchamp exhibited 'found objects' out of context e.g. urinals. A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." ‘Fountain’ by Marcel

Duchamp, 1917

Going underground... The art of the Surrealist

movement was centred around the irrational and the subconscious. Surrealists were influenced by the 'untutored' art of children, madness and so called 'primitive art forms'. They wanted to create something more real than reality itself. Many Surrealists knew and interacted in various ways with Freud and Jung. ‘The Elephant Celebes’, Max

Ernst. 1921.

Do you want cheese with that? Surrealists wanted to change

society and perception of the world. They challenged reason and ‘modernity’ and favoured the magical and the mystical, the instinctive, the chance encounter, automatic writing etc. The Persistence of Memory is one of what Dalí called his “handpainted dream photographs” and can simultaneously be read as a landscape, a still-life, and a self-portrait.

‘The Persistence of Memory’, Salvador Dali, 1931

Modernism and the avant-garde

“Modernism has proposed a new kind of art for a new kind of social and perceptual world. The avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as a breakthrough to the future. It’s members were…the militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity”.

(Raymond Williams, ‘The Politics of Modernism’, 1989.

Avant-Garde Film Traditionally, the avant-

garde cinema is seen in opposition to Hollywood. Mid 20th century art critic Clement Greenberg attached aesthetic value to the avant-garde in painting as in cinema. He dismissed Hollywood as kitsch – the sentimental, the melodramatic and the banal.

In fact, this opposition is not so clear cut. Many avant-garde filmmakers worked in commercial film and some celebrated aspects of Hollywood – often the most tacky and the most kitsch. There arose a third category – commercial art films which incorporated radical ideas, perspectives and politics.

dada The Dadaists saw in film an opportunity to

assault traditional narrative verities, to ridicule “character,” “setting,” and “plot” as bourgeois conventions, to slaughter causality by using the innate dynamism of the film medium to overturn conventional Aristotelian notions of time and space. In so doing, they knew they would question the ideological underpinnings of the old era which had held the well-made story so dear’. Donald Faulkner, NYSU Writers Institute

The Bearded Heart Tristan Tzara organized a dada

event ‘The Bearded Heart’, and wanted to show Dada films. He commissioned Man Ray. He also showed his own play ‘Heart of Gas’. There was a riot afterwards and seats and lights were broken. One person had a broken arm. Hans Richter wrote that it was Dada’s swansong. “There was no point in continuing because nobody could any longer see any point.”

Salt, Pepper, Pins and Tacks

Man Ray writes “On some strips I sprinkled salt and pepper, like a cook preparing a roast, on other strips I threw pins and thumbtacks at random; then I turned on the white light for a second or two”. The anarchic arrangement of strips of Rayographs and filmed sequences expressed a spirit of spontaneity and chance, which were the dada strategies of disrupting logic and rational order. The title of the film, ‘Retour à la Raison’, is therefore highly ironic.

It’s shocking... ‘Un Chien Andalou’ was born when

Luis Bunuel told Salvador Dali of a dream he had in which a cloud sliced across the moon. Dali, too, had been having strange dreams. His consisted of ants crawling from inside his hand.

There was one rule when it came to writing the screenplay. The only thing the succession of images would have in common is the fact that they have nothing in common. Its purpose: to document desire and shock.

You Andalusian Dog you... "I suggested that we

burn the negative... something I would have done without hesitation had the group agreed. In fact I'd still do it today; I can imagine a huge pyre in my own little garden where all my negatives and all the copies of my own films go up in flames. It wouldn't make the slightest difference." Luis Bunuel.

Screenshot from ‘Le Chien Andalou’, 1929

And in the US of A... Precisionists were

American painters who painted mammoth urban structures devoid of human activity, standing in mute testament to the hardness and coldness of modern life. Precisionism was an American response to Cubism and Futurism, sometimes called ‘Cubist Realism’. Charles Demuth,

Aucassiu and Nicolette, 1921

It’s Precisely Inhuman... Charles Scheeler had

spent time in Paris, as did many American artists. He created Precisionist landscapes and cityscapes. He teamed up with Paul Strand, a photographer to make ‘Manhatta’ a city film celebrating New York. Skyscrapers, 1922

Taking a cold, hard look... Camera movement is

kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions. People are shown almost as automatons. Screenshot from ‘Manhatta’,

1921

Meanwhile, back in the USSR... In 1929, Dziga Vertov

made the film ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ which he wrote “Represents an experimentation in the cinematic transmission of visual phenomena without the use of intertitle (a film without intertitles) without the help of a script (a film without script)...

Someone’s watching closely... ...without the help of a

Theatre (a film without actors, without sets, etc.) This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – Absolute Kinography – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

In Paris, they get Cubed again... Tossing aside the

traditional notions of cinematic narratives (poignant love stories, sweeping historical accounts, spooky suspense flicks), Léger zoomed in on every day objects, like "a pipe, a chair, a typewriter, a hat, a foot." Finding visual likeness between shapes and movements, "Le Ballet Mécanique" divorces an object’s visual aspects from its function.

Screenshot from ‘Ballet Mécanique’ by painter Fernand

Leger and cinematographer/journalist

Dudley Murphy, 1924

Modernist Film Experiments. Closely aligned with

painting, photography Non-narrative, abstract

images Celebrating the city,

technology, energy Creating an effect,

including shock Experiments with

montage, form, close-ups Can be Romantic,

idealisticFernand Léger, ‘Le Grand

Dejeuner’ , 1920/21