Modernism Post-postmodernism: Art in the Era of Light Modernity

Abstract

In the wake of postmodernism has come a widespread inter- est in the art world in revisiting the fate of modernism in the visual arts, a trend that has resulted in two main appraisals of the movement's current fortunes. The first stems from authors who argue for its present-day persistence and the second from those who lodge a claim for its revival. A leading member of the first group is Nicolas Bourriaud, who has declared the onset of an age of altermodernism. As modern art goes global, Bourriaud suggests, so too does modernism, carrying its detraditionalizing impulses into a range of new geographies and climates. 1 Along- side Bourriaud is Terry Smith, whose mapping of the major modes of contemporary art includes a strand of practice he labels remodernism. Remodernist art perpetuates the modernist imperatives of reflexivity and avant-garde experimentality, but its practitioners no longer share the faith of early modernists that these initiatives might help spark social progress. 2 The members of the second group advocate for modernism's recrudescence. They include David Geers, who has lamented the resurgence of formalist and self-expressive tendencies in the New York art world, and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, who claim that a return to the commitment and sincerity of modernism has recently displaced the irony of postmodernism. 3 If these neomodern theories share a common focus, then they also share a common failing, namely a tendency to say too little about the movement that sustains them. Of the above-listed authors, Bourriaud, Geers, and Vermeulen and van den Akker choose to focus on discrete traits and tendencies of modernism,