Modernist Works Of Art Research Articles

Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism ed. by Patrick M. Bray

Reviewed by: Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism ed. by Patrick M. Bray Haythem Guesmi Patrick M. Bray, ed. Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 288 pp. The abundance of recent work produced by the French theorist Jacques Rancière, the relevance of his study of the relation between literature, philosophy, and politics, and his refreshing critical attitude toward modernity and modernism suggest the need for continuous engagement with Rancierian scholarship. Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to his writings on modernism and its iterations. [End Page 301] As part of the Bloomsbury Academic series “Understanding philosophy, Understanding modernism,” and after the first two volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, this volume, edited by Patrick M. Bray and conventionally divided into three main sections, engages with “the multiplicity of Rancière though close readings of his texts, through comparative readings with other philosophers, and through an engagement with modernist works of art and literature” (7). And yet, Bray’s volume offers much more than that, especially in bringing together of some of the most insightful critics of Rancière’s thought and in its attention to the theoretical blind spots in his writings. Part I, titled “Conceptualizing Rancière,” features seven essays on Rancière’s principal works such as Nights of Labor, The Emancipated Spectator, and Le fil perdu, and presents the central concepts that inform his thought and theory. Emily Apter’s study of Rancière’s micropolitics in The Hatred of Democracy, Margaret Flinn’s analysis of Rancière’s writings on film in Film Fables, and Giuseppina Mecchia’s chapter on Rancière’s politics of aesthetics in Mute Speech uncover the relationships between discourses of knowledge, fragmentation, and emancipation in Rancière’s radical thought. The volume’s second part, “Rancière and Aesthetics,” provides a concise, hands-on discussion of Rancière’s argument, polemical at times, on aesthetics as a concept and as a mode of emancipatory action that challenges all discourses of hegemony and exclusion. Alison Ross’s excellent discussion of Rancière’s criticism of modernism and his view on the suspension of the will within the aesthetic regime, Suzanne Guerlac’s chapter on Rancière’s analysis of Proust, and Marina van Zuylen’s weighing in on Rancière’s polemical reading of Bourdieu’s sociology, especially the notion of “habitus,” provide important insights into the tensions in Rancièrian thought. Indeed, Tina Chanter, in her chapter “Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police,” convincingly engages with what I consider one of the most enduring blind spots in Rancière’s thought, that of feminist politics, by “explicitly opening up his aesthetic considerations to a feminist sensibility” (159). Part III offers a concise glossary of the five main terms—“Distribution of the Sensible,” “Fable,” “Intellectual Equality,” “Mute Speech,” and “Regimes of Art”— that are common threads to which Rancière continuously returns to rethink their configurations in modernity and modernism. The last section of the book presents a new interview with Rancière conducted by the volume editor. Bray’s volume successfully engages with one of the most distinctive elements of Rancière’s radical and multiple ideas through the attention to [End Page 302] repetition. Although Bray often tries to contextualize the repetitive use of such concepts as distribution of the sensible, equality, and dissensus as “echoes,” I consider these echoes to be a highly effective pedagogy that helps the reader delve into the complexity of Rancière’s thought and become mindful of the use of overlapping and crisscrossing as distinctive tools in his writings. Despite its noteworthy exploration of some of the tensions and blind spots in Rancière’s theories, this volume would have benefitted from a further exploration of the adaptation of his work in non-Western contexts, as well as of how his thinking might provide new ways of reexamining the global spatial divisions and exploding the borders, especially when we read that Rancière acknowledges that “forms of sensibility are created from the ‘peripheries,’ East Asia or Latin America for example, and then take over the English-speaking world” (288, my emphasis). All in...

Between the Product and the Work of Art: Aesthetic Fetishism and the Financialization of Art

This paper focuses on the ideological transformation of modernistic aesthetic fetishism into what Professor Rastko Močnik has termed “aesthetic imperialism” in contemporary art. Our hypothesis is that this transformation is an effect of the overdetermination of artistic production to fictitious capital. In order to examine this hypothesis, we shall explore the transformation of the simple, modernist work of art into the twofold, contemporary work of art (which must first be a claim to aesthetic evaluation and only then a work of art). We do not suggest that modernism did not know the term “artwork,” as applying to those art products that were not recognized as works of art, but rather that there was a change in the very process of aesthetic evaluation. We believe that, unlike the unitary modernist recognition of products as works by the institution of art, there is twofold recognition in the contemporary age. Here the claim to aesthetic evaluation is allowed to every product, but confirmed only to those that successfully reproduce the ruling “aesthetic imperialism.” Even though ideologists of contemporary art present this change as a result of progressivism that is inherent to the institution of art, we would like to argue that it is an effect of the abovementioned overdetermination of artistic production by fictitious capital, that is, its effects in aesthetic and legal fetishism. This hypothesis will be examined in two relatively autonomous instances: economic and ideological (artistic).

Cathedra : A Modernist Reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

Cathedra:A Modernist Reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations W. P. Grundy (bio) When reaching for an image expressive of the complex challenges that Wittgenstein faces in Philosophical Investigations, Stephen Mulhall chooses as the cover illustration to his Inheritance and Originality Barnett Newman’s Canto II.1 When reaching for a painter emblematic of the condition of modernism in painting, Michael Fried also turns to Newman’s work.2 We might think of both choices as reflecting Stanley Cavell’s insistence that a work of human creativity, such as a painting or a philosophical discussion, has a scene and that the demarcating of such a scene, a process rendered highly self-aware in Newman’s paintings, is essential to understanding the particular kind of work that it is. Cavell urges us to think of philosophy as having not only a scene but also scenes of various types and to think of an accounting or demarcating of those scenes as essential to a full accounting of what philosophy is and of what the people who participate in those scenes aim to do and to become.3 Philosophy is also self-reflexive. As Mulhall writes in exploring these ideas, “For Cavell, what a distinctively philosophical problem might be is itself a philosophical problem, and one of its most fundamental ones.”4 These two questions—the question of how and when philosophy is staged and the question of how the scenes of philosophy acquire their distinctively philosophical character—are unavoidable, for both Mulhall and Cavell, in the condition of modernism. Similarly, what they call the “burden of modernism” refers to the challenge that artists and philosophers in the condition of modernism shoulder as they [End Page 177] investigate the mechanisms through which art and philosophy are able to establish their distinctive identities. Mulhall’s interpretations of Wittgenstein and Cavell in Inheritance and Originality foreground this challenge: “The work of the writing of [Wittgenstein’s] Investigations and [Cavell’s] The Claim of Reason,” he claims, “appears as essentially modernist” (12). For many other theorists of modernism, such challenges primarily afflict the arts. Michael Fried, for example, describes the ways in which modernism presents problems for painting and sculpture. Fried highlights the means by which modernist painters and sculptors strive to protect their works from pressures external to them, pressures such as the blurring of boundaries between art forms or the leveling and commodifying effects of the entertainment industry. In exploring those challenges, he emphasizes the dialectic between the interior and the exterior of a work of art. In his essay “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella,” Fried characterizes Barnett Newman’s Cathedra, for instance, as a staged interaction between the inner content of the painting—the space on the canvas on which the paint is applied—and the outer framing, which serves to demarcate the painting from the surrounding environment. Fried builds on Clement Greenberg’s sense of modernism as the distillation of properties definitive of the various arts—the properties capable of demarcating one field of art from another. In his essay “The New Sculpture,” Greenberg argues that “a modernist work of art must try, in principle, to avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given in the most essentially construed nature of its medium. This means, among other things, renouncing illusion and explicitness. The arts are to achieve concreteness, ‘purity,’ by acting solely in terms of their separate and irreducible selves.”5 Following Greenberg and Fried, we see that Cathedra asks in its composition the very question of what a painting is, both by reflecting on the properties of its own medium and by challenging conventions for determining where the content of a painting begins and ends.6 Cavell himself claims to feel the burden of modernism most acutely in musical composition. The burden is expressed in two ways, first, as a threatened loss of established conventions for composing and for listening (“serious composers have, and feel they have, all but lost their audience”), and, second, as a set of anxieties about the properties and processes that are definitive of musical composition (“crises in the internal, and apparently irreversible, developments within their own artistic procedures”).7 Strangely, in...

Review: Silent Revolutions in Ornament: Studies in Applied Arts and Crafts from 1880–1930, by Lada Hubatová-Vacková and Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture, by Joseph Masheck

Silent Revolutions in Ornament: Studies in Applied Arts and Crafts from 1880–1930 Prague: Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, 2011, 288 pp., 256 color and 112 b/w illus. $38.00 (cloth), ISBN 9788086863184, by Lada Hubatova-Vackova. Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013, 290 pp., 52 b/w illus. $29.00 (paper), ISBN 9781780764238, by Joseph Masheck. In a short autobiography from 1915, Adolf Loos (writing in the third person) described his great struggle against ornament: “Adolf Loos is the philosopher of the architects of our time, and through his declaration of a vendetta against the proliferation of ornament has assumed a special place among [all] artists. … Already seventeen years ago, [he] preached in favor of simplicity, truth to materials, and quality work, and today he can savor the triumph that his opponents have largely accepted his demands.”1 Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Loos depicted himself as a solitary crusader against the evils of ornament, a lone knight errant bent on its eradication. But Loos was only one of a number of figures at the time pondering the problem of ornament, questioning whether it still had meaning, purpose, and validity. In the period just before Loos wrote his famed assault “Ornament and Crime,” in late 1909 or early 1910, the German-language design press was filled with pieces decrying or defending ornament. Loos, far from being a single voice, in fact, had a great deal of company.2 The issue of ornament and its relation to modern architecture and design, though, had a much longer history, extending back some three decades. It is a story that until now has been strangely neglected or passed over in silence. Recently, a young architectural historian in Prague, Lada Hubatova-Vackova, who teaches modern art and design history at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design, cast a scholarly eye on the history of ornamental theory and practices during the early years of modernism. Her excellent and thoroughgoing book in Czech, Tiche revoluce uvnitř ornamentu: Studie z dějin uměleckeho průmyslu a dekorativniho uměni v letech 1880–1930 , has now been translated into English as Silent Revolutions in Ornament: Studies in …

Aesthetic judgement beyond good and evil: Of morality, taste, common sense, and critique

The expulsion of the notion of literary value from literary theory in late modernity belies the connection between morality and art, morality and beauty, morality and aesthetic judgement that has been formative and transformative of aesthetic theory in the wake of reflexive modernity. In this paper, I would like to trace the formations and transformations wrought in the relations between notions of taste, morality, and aesthetic judgement. And I will attempt to show how literary value is integrally bound up with aesthetic judgement and critique, not only at the inception of the practice of literary criticism in the eighteenth century, but at the point of its expulsion in the mid-twentieth century. The expulsion of literary and artistic value, I will argue, coincides with the inclusion of the negation of art in the definition of the modernist work of art itself, which thereby becomes assimilated to philosophical inquiry.

Modernism and the Popular: Eliot's Music Halls

Perhaps no question has proved as vexing as the troubled relationship between modernism and popular culture. It is a commonplace to note that modernist works of art were tireless in citing items drawn from the popular, whether it was Picasso's inclusion of popular song titles (e.g., Ma jolie), Joyce's complex reworkings of music hall in Ulysses, or Weill's adaptations of contemporary jazz in Die Dreigroschenoper. This essay considers the context of T.S. Eliot's 1923 memorial essay for music-hall singer Marie Lloyd, the most celebrated performer of English variety entertainment, and attempts to unpack the specific meanings compressed in Eliot's invocation of the popular. His use of that term cannot be properly interpreted, nor can relations between English modernism and the popular be fully grasped, unless we situate these phenomena within the larger context of the processes which constitute authority in modernity.

Getting Modern: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

With The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , Gertrude Stein radically alters the history of autobiography. Stein effects the shift to modernist autobiography by eschewing the romantic conception of the self—a set of feelings and internal motives—to construct herself as a modernist work of art, a collage of multiple identities, a multi-perspectival "Master-piece."

From Dream to Machine: Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, and the Contemporary Shakespearean Director as (Post) Modernist

From Dream to Machine: Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, and the Contemporary Shakespearean Director as (Post)Modernist Richard Paul Knowles (bio) This essay considers the cultural work done by the role of the Shakespearean director, locates the discourses and practices of contemporary Shakespearean directing within the appropriative discourses and practices of high modernist formalism, and traces continuities between modernist and postmodernist manifestations of the directing of Shakespeare, focusing on Peter Brook and his 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and on two Shakespearean productions by Quebec’s Robert Lepage. It begins with a story. In the weeks leading up to the last referendum on Quebec sovereignty (30 October 1995) there was a campaign across Canada involving bumper stickers that read, in French or English, “My Canada includes Quebec.” In the French version, “include” was rendered “comprend”—which of course also means “understands.” The campaign was mounted by well-meaning, liberal-minded Canadians who wished to distance themselves from the anti-Quebec sentiments of many Anglophone Canadians. Few among the Anglophone federalists, it seems, considered the implied positionings of one group’s claims to “include” and “understand” another, particularly an “other” within the differential power relationships that obtain historically and currently within the Canadian confederation. I tell this story not only because it locates my essay within contemporary Canada and Quebec, framing an argument that culminates in a discussion of the work of a Quebec director who is at the same time positioned among the internationalist avant-garde, but also in order to clarify the ways in which I understand the workings of [End Page 189] modernist and postmodernist appropriations of various kinds of otherness. These appropriations circulate, I suggest, not merely around audience reading or around a supposedly communicative and enfranchising postmodern globalism. 1 Rather they involve a number of related strategies of assimilation, of “understanding,” and of inclusion: my west includes your east; my masculine includes your feminine; my high culture your mass culture; my psychological and individualist your social; my capital your labour; my civilization your primitivism; my imperial centre your colonial margin; my modern your Early Modern. Ultimately, my formalist, inscrutable, unchanging work of art includes—comprend—your messy, fluid, corporal, feminized, social, and otherwise threatening life: my shaping understanding kills you into art. 2 And that art involves a particularly modernist form of closure, in which form is not considered to be a social or public forum, but a structuralist end in itself. For the high modernist artist and critic, art is non-referential, functioning within its own separate realm and satisfying internal standards of clarity, integrity and autonomy. Canadian structuralist critic Northrop Frye has famously asserted, of course, that Shakespeare, as transhistorical and transcultural exemplar of the artist, “has no values, no philosophy, no principles of anything except dramatic form.” 3 The modernist work of art, then, exists and must be read as a product, a kind of “in-itself,” that creates a realm of experience either indifferent to life, or a substitute for it, but in either case self-contained and, by external standards, inscrutable. The modernist artist as visionary individual struggles heroically to achieve and maintain oedipal resolutions that are constitutive of unified dramatic form (not to mention masculinity) by containing the threat, sweat, subjectivity and du- or multi-plicities of a slippery pre- or a-symbolic “other” (typically gendered female), or of an unruly and disruptively upstart collectivity (or “mob”), within the unchanging realm of pure (spatial, and therefore timeless) form. 4 But, as Leonard Cohen reminds us, “there is a crack in everything”—or in Terry [End Page 190] Eagleton’s version, “the body can never be fully present in discourse”—including, I suggest the embodied discourses of the theatre. 5 And there, for the modernist, is the rub. In terms of the cultural work it performs, the retreat from application and social reference—together with the retreat from theatre as collaborative work, in the social and historical realms, into the individualist/universalist realm of the director as auteur and controlling consciousness—can be seen as a retreat from artistic responsibility into the realm of “pure” aesthetics, where the work is potentially dehumanized and left open to appropriation by other...

On the ruins of the historical avant‐garde: The institution of art and its contemporary exigencies

The focus of this theoretical paper is the analysis of the European historical avant‐garde as an excess of modernism. As such, its goal was two‐fold. First, it tried to transcend the institution of autonomous art and second, it attempted to integrate art into everyday life. In this light, the paper presents the contingencies of the genesis and main features of the historical avant‐garde's doctrine and practice. It further argues that the historical avant‐garde ended in a collapse of the aesthetic and practical dimension without corresponding emancipation. This failure, in turn, laid down the groundwork for the post‐modern art which appropriated the stylistic and formal innovations of historical avant‐garde while comfortably remaining within the institution of art. Thus, the post‐modern betrayal of the values embedded in avant‐garde and modernist works of art appears to be a necessity.

Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock)

'A modernist work of art is by definition 'incomprehensible'; it functions as a shock, as the irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being integrated. What postmodernism does, however, is the very opposite: it objects par excellence are products with mass appeal; the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to estrange their initial homeliness: 'you think what you see is a simple melodrama your granny would have no difficulty in following? Yet without taking into account the difference between symptom and sinthom/the structure of the Borromean knot/the fact that Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father ...you've totally missed the point!' if there is an author whose name epitomises this interpretive pleasure of 'estranging' the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitchcock (and - useless to deny it - this book partakes unrestrainedly in this madness).' Hitchcock is placed on the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies, as its contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Window to Psycho, as an exemplar of 'postmodern' defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning', the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into 'serious' Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies. Contributors: Frederic Jameson, Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bozovic, Michel Chion, Mlladen Dolar, Stojan Pellko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek.

Two Forms of Montage in Babel's Konarmija

The cycle Konarmija, written by Isaak Babel' in the first half of the 192Os, is undoubtedly a modernist w-ork of art. It can be seen as an episodic novel in the Modernist tradition (cf. Mendelson 1983:114). The cycle involves thirty-five separate stories ('chapterepisodes', ibid.), each of which in its turn contains a series of loosely connected episodes. Konarmija is a fragmentary work full of thematic divergences and dissonances. The action pattern of the military campaign which provides a spatial and temporal skeleton to the cycle is but remotely visible. Facts are presented in an incomplete manner, frequently not in accordance with the order of tim.e. Effects of deletion, creating puzzling gaps of information, demand the full attention and cooperation of the reader. Indeed, at many points, a supplementary knowledge of the facts to which the work alludes is needed by the reader in order to reach a satisfactory interpretation. The thematic heterogeneity of the stories is not balanced by uniformity in narrative point of view. On the contrary, the narrative structure of Konarmija can well be defined as polyphonic.' The central point of view of the first person narrator, Ljutov, is broken down into contradictory emotional and evaluative positions. Moreover, Ljutov's multifaceted perspective is in turn opposed to a multitude of external points of view expressed by characters. Every evaluative position in the cycle becomes a separate voice. Due to the hiqhly ambiguous structure of Konarmija, the reader is prevented from taking conventional moral and ideological sides.