Modernism Ep08 ⟩ “The Future That Was”

What is Modernism? The Final Chapter!

The Future That Was; or, When the Avant-Garde Became Official Culture

Comrades, we have reached the last Shock of the New, and with it the completion and assimilation of our new penetration-front into modernity’s semi-self-consciousness. We have already grown new mental organs from having dissected ourselves in the previous seven episodes.

What Happened to All the Genius Art Movements?

• Where are the serious tryers now?
• How did anti-art come to win by default?
• Those Modernist schools/cults were so inspiring and fun and world-enchanting. Why have they died out?
• Is there no hope for interesting art-based world-transforming cults today?
• Is the glut of shitart and the depth of cynicism past the tipping point?

Hughes Tackles Jameson’s Problem!

How can we build an art movement capable of effective collective-reality-tunnel reprogramming if “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally”? Being materially reproduced inside the same pipelines that animate the enemy does things.

Postmodernism’s formerly offensive features—including overt expressions of social and political defiance—“no longer scandalize anyone” and have instead “become institutionalized” within official Western culture. That’s already a much worse problem than censorship, as Foucault likes to always point out. The original manifesto-illuminated humanity-helping attack on shit-culture still survives perfectly well inside the art (as figure, style, attitude, etc.) but it doesn’t mess up the system! In fact, the system can circulate it and it even acts as fuel detergent.

Back when it was serious, Modernism understood its formal vocation as “the resistance to commodity form, not to be a commodity”—that is, as a kind of hard but catchy and psychedelic new aesthetic language that could resist commodification, instrumentalization, digestion-away into enemy fuel. But that solution is internally contradictory and historically incapable of collective realization. Isn’t it.

Late capitalism has a superpower: is metabolizes the antimatter designed to destroy it. Banning your revolutionary image or bible isn’t necessary. Preserve the image while changing its social function is evne better: print it on a T-shirt, detach it from the collective practice that gave it force, and sell the corpse back to you as lifestyle, identity, self-brand, or myth for serious fantasizing.

So the MAIN main puzzle in this SERIES CLIMAX is this:

• MAIN PUZZLE: How can we build an art movement capable of collective reality-reprogramming if, as Jameson says, even the forms of cultural resistance aimed against capitalism can be “secretly disarmed and reabsorbed” by it?

Peak Hughes is Here!

And that’s how Hughes begins! With the wonderful historical absurdity that Modernism won.

The avant-garde birthed itself by structuralist self-definition—as the rejected outsider or, when properly self-aware, as irritating prophet carrying news that bourgeois culture did not want to hear.

Consequently, by the 1970s, bourgeois culture cannot get enough of it. Modern art has museums, university departments, foundations, corporate patrons, government subsidy, rich collectors, an enormous explanatory bureaucracy, and a public trained to regard newness itself as evidence of seriousness. Modernism has become, as Hughes puts it, “our official culture.”

So what the hell is an avant-garde supposed to do now? This is the real subject of the episode.

Finally, a Practical Episode for Salt-of-the-Earth Folk Like Us

Hey wanna-be artists, this is the practical episode!

Why did the historical machine that had powered Modernism from Courbet onward, whose “logic” was:

• New form F1 → scandal S1 → changed sensibility C1 → eventual assimilation A1 → still newer form F2 → scandal S2 → …

Why, I say, why didn’t real art history work like that?

Surprise Answer #1: Lo and behold, the hostile bourgeois is not simply the antagonist of modern art but one of its enabling conditions.

And this gives us the mechanism behind the old story that yesterday’s obscenity becomes today’s masterpiece. The laming-out is not some accidental weakness peculiar to this or that manifesto-enriched movement. It is built into the social world that makes the avant-garde possible in the first place.

Hughes calls the idea of the avant-garde as permanent cultural guerrillas a misunderstanding. The real problem is capitalist modernity: the same society that produces the conditions for artistic revolt also becomes insanely great™ at metabolizing that revolt—first as scandal, then as novelty, then as culture, then as property.

Surprise Answer #2: Sometimes capital literally monetizes the ground out from beneath the warriors’ feet.

Hughes’ example: SoHo.

SoHo is a miniature political economy of modern culture. And look at hor ordinary the lifecycle: Artists move into unwanted industrial buildings because they are cheap. Galleries arrive. Then restaurants, boutiques, tourists, money, landlords, higher rents—and … goodbye artists!

Enjoy USDA prime Hughes moments like him watching the “peering hordes of dentists from New Jersey” walk their Gucci loafers through his old neighborhood. There, he dryly quips: “This process is known as urban renewal.” He saved the best for last!

So art isn’t just the superstructural mirror of the mode of production, as the paleo Marxists (unlike Marx him-better-self) would reduce. Art production alters land value, class composition, urban space, and eventually the conditions of its own existence. That old-fashioned change engine is right there, inside art itself.

“On the Museumish Question”

The museum presents the same problem at the level of meaning. MoMA’s great historical achievement was to take mutually hostile movements and preserve “everything and its opposite.” But the price of canonization is that the once-living and earnest antagonism is euthanized into chronology, for the sake of the historian’s (and our, as museum visitors) understanding. The museum, Hughes says, “diffused the tensions of all moments by rendering them historical.” Futurism no longer wants to burn down the museum once Futurism is hanging inside it.

Alright! So those are some great observations. They will make any reasonable person hopeful again.

Oh, Hughes catches the museum institution doing ontological work. So there’s real philosophy in this one. Hughes’ example: a Rodin dumped in a parking lot is still a badly misplaced Rodin; but Carl Andre’s bricks dumped there are just bricks.

Minimalism needs the museum to supply the background discourse that pumps the occult power that really does belong (like mass) to real artworks. “On the street,” Hughes says, “Minimalism doesn’t exist. There are only things.” That’s is a real ontological effect.

And there’s much more, and I enjoy working this out because my early-onset dementia means that I can only etch things into understanding by producing them under stress. So more will be pasted here for your enjoyment in 19 hours.

Update

Now comes the older and much bigger Modernist hope: Can art actually change society? Courbet thought it could. So did Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Hughes thinks most of the heroic claims are bullshit. Dada did not bring down capitalism; Constructivism did not manufacture the New Soviet Man; closing a Robert Morris exhibition did not persuade Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia.

But Hughes does not conclude that art is politically inert. He relocates its force from direct political causation to “style and feeling”: art can reorganize sensibility, estrange the ordinary and inherited, and provide “a model of dissent.”

The 1970s then start looking like a collection of escape attempts. Minimalism tries radical reduction. Conceptual art tries to make the commodity-object disappear into an idea. Body art retreats to the artist’s own flesh. Land art heads several hundred miles into the desert. Michael Heizer makes Complex One immovable and nearly inaccessible; Walter De Maria spreads The Lightning Field across a mile of New Mexico. Joseph Beuys, faced with the political impotence of the traditional artwork, simply blows up the definition of art until everybody is an artist and society itself becomes a “social sculpture.”

And then capital digested it all away.

The expanded book chapter (which you can download from THORR) makes the endpoint clearer than the 1980 film could. By the eighties, the Modernist commandment to MAKE IT NEW has curdled into what Hughes calls “dynamic obsolescence”: constant novelty (e.g., new iPhone models making perfectly good ones “old”) is just merchandising.

And, finally, postmodern appropriation arrives and instead of abolishing the museum, artists raid the art-historical image-bank. History becomes a warehouse of reproducible styles. The unprecedented gives way to the quotation, the replay, the simulacrum, sampling, and the knowing wink.

And this is where Hughes makes his most important break with the whole ideology of Modernism:

“In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.”

Nobody admires Cézanne because Cubism happened afterward. Medicine progresses; painting doesn’t. Rembrandt has not been superseded. Once that is admitted, the great Modernist temporal hierarchy—advanced/backward, progressive/reactionary, ahead-of-its-time/outmoded—can be discarded. The Future that had legitimated a century of aesthetic revolution has itself become historical. Hence the title: The Future That Was.

For us, I think the best question is slightly different from Hughes’: Did Modernism run out of formal inventions, or did the historical conditions that made an avant-garde possible disappear?

Once culture itself becomes industrially produced; once opposition, novelty, transgression, identity, rebellion, and “creativity” can all circulate as commodities; once museums preserve yesterday’s negations and markets prospect for tomorrow’s—what exactly would it mean for art to be historically ahead anymore?

Hughes ends by savaging the “rush towards insignificance in the name of the historical future”—plywood boxes, bricks, and some twit from the “University of Central Paranoia” sticking pins in himself—and then makes a surprisingly old-fashioned defense of art. Its job is not to win the historical horse race. It is to recover a direct, sensuous, complex relation to the world and somehow get from feeling to meaning.

That’s it! After eight episodes devoted to the invention of Modernism, we finally get to ask whether Modernism understood its own death.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.