What's really coming after Modernism
Here's my theory of art. I've someting in noticed in all sorts of arenas lately that I think can tell us what's going to come after Modernism. No, it's not Post-Modernism, although that's a good guess! It's something else. It has to do with telling universal human stories, connecting with universal human emotions, and being true and sincere about them.
Here's where I've noticed these things.
Howard Arkley exhibition
I described this before. Arkley's first, student works were non-figurative geometric explorations in black and white. His first, student works! He was born in 1951 and educated in the early 1970's, and Modernism had stripped painting down to its bare, abstract essentials. So that's what he did first, but then he started painting things that meant something to him, and now he's most known for his triumphal, very realistic but also kind of surreal neon-coloured airbrush paintings of Australian suburban houses. When you see the exhibition, you can see that he was very talented and clever in the beginning, but the houses really stand apart. They're quite emotional, when you stand and regard them. The tour guide said that he said his paintings were not abstractions but constructions. The abstract painters started with realistic subjects and stripped away until they were left with bare essentials - Mondrian, right, vertical and horizontal lines, primary colours blue red and yellow, and shades black and white. So, after that, what's left to paint? Well, emotional scenes that are meaningful given one's early life, right? Technique gives way to story and biography and heart.
Review of a show of abstract painting in the New Yorker
Peter Schjeldahl in the March 19 New Yorker reviews two shows, one by an abstract painter who was working in the 1950's but is still alive, Robert Ryman, and one of young contemporary artists called "Comic Abstraction". Schjeldahl appreciates Ryman's very subtle and sophisticated work, but sort of admits that it's esoteric, and for experts only. He says of the youngsters, "Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recetn vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes." He gives examples of Frank Stella, Pollack, and Mondrian too, and says they are now just décor, just images everyone knows on a par with Mickey Mouse. He says, "The best modern abstract artists (produced) jolting demonstrations of art's intrinsic powers, independent of worldly reference. But their project proved self-defeating..." The Modernist paradigm has worked itself out. Contemporary abstraction is just an academic exercise. "What's lost", he says, "is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention."
Peter Schjeldahl, "Abstraction Problem", The New Yorker March 19, 2007, p. 147.
Choreographer Matthew Bourne
This is from The New Yorker too. I hope they don't come after me for copyright violation - I think I've quoted about the amount you're allowed in an academic paper, so we should be okay. This is from a profile of Matthew Bourne, whose Swan Lake, with all male swans, just played in Sydney and has been a huge world-wide hit. Bourne got into theatre as a kid, and hung aruond the West End watching shows and getting autographs, and had grown up watching musical comedies with his parents and even staging his own. Once he became a professional, the article says that Bourne started dancing with a modernist troupe where dance was all about movement, and that's it. He joined the Laban Centre dance school, without experience but they were desparate for men so accepted him. The article says, "This was in 1982, when in England modern dance was a young firled, and puritanically 'contemporary'. Dances, as the Laban faculty saw it, should have no stories, and they didn't really need music, either. a dance should be a 'movement study,' an exploration of structure. Bourne respected this aesthetic: 'I wanted to emulate that. I did try and do that.' But it didn't really work, because it wasn't what he really wanted to do. He wanted to tell stories."
Joan Acocella, "Swan's Way", The New Yorker March 12, 2007, p. 41.
Opera Class
I'm listening to as many things as I can muster up from my CD collection, in the wake of the life-changing Opera class, but I'm finding that symphonies alone don't do it for me. What's great about opera is that is has a story. And the stories are raw with elemental and universal human emotion, because, as our teacher said, the story has to be about things that would move a person to sing. Love, death, sex, tragedy, betrayal. Magnificent! My favorite experience in the class was listening to an aria with the libretto up on the overhead projector in both the original language and in English. The story! Once I can invest in some box sets that come with all this text, I will sit in front of the stereo and study and recreate the experience. Opera is gripping because of the story.
Life Writing vs Philorum
Remember when I went to that one-hour sample class on writing memoirs in November? It was such a change from Philorum, where all the conversation is about lofty abstract things, and where no one ever divulges biographical details. The class was all about biographical details, and about how to capture them and process them and get them down in words so that they speak to other people, and reveal things about universal human emotions. We learned in that one small class that you can only evoke emotions with vivid, factual detail, not with descriptions of emotions. You have to tell the story specifically, with detail, as it was, as it seemed to you at the time, without commentary or abstraction or pontification or drawing conclusions. Specific stories from human lives speak to other humans and convey universal emotions and bind us all together.
Art Express
One of my favorite pieces in Art Express this year, the show of HSC graduates' final projects, was a set of little cute wire sculptures. They were like 3D cartoons. At first I thought they were just of little people, little anonymous characters, doing things. Two figures were in a very detailed camping caravan, playing cards (the little wire heart in a little wire square sat perfectly in the cute wire person's hand). The next piece was a round circus tent with a ringmaster and several dogs, and a figure just entering from behind a curtain hanging open at the back. Then I read the description, and all the people were Australian politicians, which you could then recognise when you looked, and the scenarios were all metaphors for struggles they were facing with political opponents. And knowing that made me like the piece much less. It was still very accomplished, and clever, and different from the others (about 9 out of 10 students had done pieces were images were in a series of squares - which was also a very big motif of the Biennale earlier this year - and how stupid would you feel if you had chosen squares as your theme? Already such a cliché. I love a good square as much as any former Modernist, but they're just done to death at the moment! Poor high school kiddies.), but it would have been so much better, as art you know, if they hadn't been Australian political figures, if the little sculptures hadn't been just 3D political cartoons, but if they had been just little tableaux of little specific humans representing scenes that evoke universal emotions.
I don't know what this new movement will be called. You never do, when you're in it and it's only just emerging. But in all these fields - painting, ballet, music - the abstract approach, Modernism's elementalism and stripping away to bare essentials of art's structure, the approach has reached the end of the road. There's nowhere else for it to go, no more basic it can get. So, we need something different. And so I predict, once again, our art will be like Shakespeare, our art will tell human stories and explore human emotions and universal characteristics of what it is to be human, and it will bind us all together once again.
You heard it here first.
Here's where I've noticed these things.
Howard Arkley exhibition
I described this before. Arkley's first, student works were non-figurative geometric explorations in black and white. His first, student works! He was born in 1951 and educated in the early 1970's, and Modernism had stripped painting down to its bare, abstract essentials. So that's what he did first, but then he started painting things that meant something to him, and now he's most known for his triumphal, very realistic but also kind of surreal neon-coloured airbrush paintings of Australian suburban houses. When you see the exhibition, you can see that he was very talented and clever in the beginning, but the houses really stand apart. They're quite emotional, when you stand and regard them. The tour guide said that he said his paintings were not abstractions but constructions. The abstract painters started with realistic subjects and stripped away until they were left with bare essentials - Mondrian, right, vertical and horizontal lines, primary colours blue red and yellow, and shades black and white. So, after that, what's left to paint? Well, emotional scenes that are meaningful given one's early life, right? Technique gives way to story and biography and heart.
Review of a show of abstract painting in the New Yorker
Peter Schjeldahl in the March 19 New Yorker reviews two shows, one by an abstract painter who was working in the 1950's but is still alive, Robert Ryman, and one of young contemporary artists called "Comic Abstraction". Schjeldahl appreciates Ryman's very subtle and sophisticated work, but sort of admits that it's esoteric, and for experts only. He says of the youngsters, "Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recetn vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes." He gives examples of Frank Stella, Pollack, and Mondrian too, and says they are now just décor, just images everyone knows on a par with Mickey Mouse. He says, "The best modern abstract artists (produced) jolting demonstrations of art's intrinsic powers, independent of worldly reference. But their project proved self-defeating..." The Modernist paradigm has worked itself out. Contemporary abstraction is just an academic exercise. "What's lost", he says, "is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention."
Peter Schjeldahl, "Abstraction Problem", The New Yorker March 19, 2007, p. 147.
Choreographer Matthew Bourne
This is from The New Yorker too. I hope they don't come after me for copyright violation - I think I've quoted about the amount you're allowed in an academic paper, so we should be okay. This is from a profile of Matthew Bourne, whose Swan Lake, with all male swans, just played in Sydney and has been a huge world-wide hit. Bourne got into theatre as a kid, and hung aruond the West End watching shows and getting autographs, and had grown up watching musical comedies with his parents and even staging his own. Once he became a professional, the article says that Bourne started dancing with a modernist troupe where dance was all about movement, and that's it. He joined the Laban Centre dance school, without experience but they were desparate for men so accepted him. The article says, "This was in 1982, when in England modern dance was a young firled, and puritanically 'contemporary'. Dances, as the Laban faculty saw it, should have no stories, and they didn't really need music, either. a dance should be a 'movement study,' an exploration of structure. Bourne respected this aesthetic: 'I wanted to emulate that. I did try and do that.' But it didn't really work, because it wasn't what he really wanted to do. He wanted to tell stories."
Joan Acocella, "Swan's Way", The New Yorker March 12, 2007, p. 41.
Opera Class
I'm listening to as many things as I can muster up from my CD collection, in the wake of the life-changing Opera class, but I'm finding that symphonies alone don't do it for me. What's great about opera is that is has a story. And the stories are raw with elemental and universal human emotion, because, as our teacher said, the story has to be about things that would move a person to sing. Love, death, sex, tragedy, betrayal. Magnificent! My favorite experience in the class was listening to an aria with the libretto up on the overhead projector in both the original language and in English. The story! Once I can invest in some box sets that come with all this text, I will sit in front of the stereo and study and recreate the experience. Opera is gripping because of the story.
Life Writing vs Philorum
Remember when I went to that one-hour sample class on writing memoirs in November? It was such a change from Philorum, where all the conversation is about lofty abstract things, and where no one ever divulges biographical details. The class was all about biographical details, and about how to capture them and process them and get them down in words so that they speak to other people, and reveal things about universal human emotions. We learned in that one small class that you can only evoke emotions with vivid, factual detail, not with descriptions of emotions. You have to tell the story specifically, with detail, as it was, as it seemed to you at the time, without commentary or abstraction or pontification or drawing conclusions. Specific stories from human lives speak to other humans and convey universal emotions and bind us all together.
Art Express
One of my favorite pieces in Art Express this year, the show of HSC graduates' final projects, was a set of little cute wire sculptures. They were like 3D cartoons. At first I thought they were just of little people, little anonymous characters, doing things. Two figures were in a very detailed camping caravan, playing cards (the little wire heart in a little wire square sat perfectly in the cute wire person's hand). The next piece was a round circus tent with a ringmaster and several dogs, and a figure just entering from behind a curtain hanging open at the back. Then I read the description, and all the people were Australian politicians, which you could then recognise when you looked, and the scenarios were all metaphors for struggles they were facing with political opponents. And knowing that made me like the piece much less. It was still very accomplished, and clever, and different from the others (about 9 out of 10 students had done pieces were images were in a series of squares - which was also a very big motif of the Biennale earlier this year - and how stupid would you feel if you had chosen squares as your theme? Already such a cliché. I love a good square as much as any former Modernist, but they're just done to death at the moment! Poor high school kiddies.), but it would have been so much better, as art you know, if they hadn't been Australian political figures, if the little sculptures hadn't been just 3D political cartoons, but if they had been just little tableaux of little specific humans representing scenes that evoke universal emotions.
I don't know what this new movement will be called. You never do, when you're in it and it's only just emerging. But in all these fields - painting, ballet, music - the abstract approach, Modernism's elementalism and stripping away to bare essentials of art's structure, the approach has reached the end of the road. There's nowhere else for it to go, no more basic it can get. So, we need something different. And so I predict, once again, our art will be like Shakespeare, our art will tell human stories and explore human emotions and universal characteristics of what it is to be human, and it will bind us all together once again.
You heard it here first.
posted by Ellen at 12:22 am
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