For a Revival of Modernism, and Rejection of Postmodern Nihilism

The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured. —Jürgen Habermas

When it comes to the Arts, we are living in an age of diminished expectations and stunted imaginations-- in a soulless and vapid Postmodern age where “anything goes.”  Yet, paradoxically, we are told, by the purveyors of taste, everything has been done, and there is nothing new left to discover.  Everything has been exhausted and recycled and regurgitated (see John Barth’s 1967 essay, Literature of Exhaustion). The idea of creativity itself has been called into question, too. Unfortunately, this nihilistic posture has been embraced by many artists and writers over the last fifty years or so.  That pernicious line of argument also targets a perennial bugaboo: the foundering edifice of Modernism, as it encapsulates everything the purveyors of taste hate, and militate against. They insist: Modernism is dead!  Utopianism is dead! Stop living in the past!

What exactly is Modernism? And, more importantly, why is it still controversial, and why are the purveyors of taste obsessed with driving the final nail in its coffin? Moreover, if it is indeed a moribund ideology—why would it be necessary to kill off something that is apparently already dead? 

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Above all, Modernism is a very specific way of thinking and approaching the world. More to the point, it is a way of approaching a chaotic, disorienting world, of attempting to make sense out of chaos through the radical manipulation of form, and a devotion to unconventionality. It is a hatred of what is respectable and acceptable, especially in the guise of bourgeois values. Peter Gay calls it, “the lure of heresy.”  In our age, one kind of heresy, for example, might take the form of contempt for the ubiquitous “entrepreneur-artists” obsessed with money and status, but possessed of little or no intellectual rigor behind their edgy “art.”  We are told by the purveyors of taste that these are the creative people we should emulate, as they are successful at the game of art, and have legitimately earned status and fame within the right kinds of clubs. A dedicated Modernist would naturally push back against that, and would likely be the logical enemy of that kind of art. The existence of such a bold critique would also be a challenge to the establishment.  One immediately thinks of the art critic Robert Hughes, (ironically dubbed a conservative by the establishment, and an enemy of “progress”), who throughout his career railed against the cynical manipulations and vapidness of the Postmodern “artist-entrepreneurs,” while championing Modernist masters like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Jackson Pollock. 

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Yet were the old adherents of Modernism victims of their own success? Had they inadvertently helped pave the way for the vapid nihilism of Postmodernist reaction and the demise of the Modernist experiment itself?  Suzy Gablik writes: 

In our present state of freedom, there is no recognized means of prescribing or forbidding anything to anyone. We can see now, however, that rebellion and freedom are not enough: modernism has moved us too far in the direction of radical subjectivity and a destructive relativism. 

There is an element of truth to what she says, but only up to a certain point. As Jürgen Habermas argues, Modernism is a result of a historical process over many centuries, originating from the Enlightenment, and culminating in the twentieth century with Dada and the Surrealists.  It is a movement that does not reject wholesale the past or tradition, but “disposes those pasts which have been made available by the objectifying scholarship of historicism, but it opposes at the same time a neutralized history which is locked in the museum of historicism.” In other words, Modernism incorporates and synthesizes traditions of the past, and uses those traditions as a guide or schema to make new, innovative art.  There is obvious reverence for the Old Masters. Therefore, Modernism is not ahistorical or relativistic in the least, quite the opposite. 

On the other hand, Postmodern nihilists harbor no love for the accomplishments of the past, if they bother to study the past at all.  Postmodernism is not, and never has been, a tendency that incorporates tradition or history into its praxis. Postmodernism is a bastardization of Modernism, a profound mistake, if you will, a tendency wholly distinct and sui generis. Postmodernism is a heresy of Modernism and possesses none of the positive intellectual underpinnings, or humanism, of Modernism. Modernism is based upon a grand vision of the future; Postmodernism has no grand vision of the future.  Since Modernism has a grand vision of the future, and a clear purpose, it cannot be nihilistic; conversely, since Postmodernism has no grand vision of the future, or clear purpose, it is ipso facto nihilistic. 

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Undoubtedly, the issue before us is whether Modernism can be revived in the face of Postmodern onslaught and other destructive cultural influences. Peter Gay argues a revival is unlikely and Modernism will remain a relic of the past, because it is ultimately an undemocratic, elitist ideology, and has virtually no mass appeal. This comes into sharper relief as we lament the dumbing down of the general population due to the failures of the education system.  In addition, the myriad cultural forces that once supported Modernism in the 19th and 20th centuries no longer exist with the same intensity or passion.

With that in mind, I still believe there exists a small but passionate group of people committed to the cause of Modernism, and to the avant-garde principles it champions. This new iteration of Modernism may not take the form of a vanguard mass movement challenging conventional wisdom on a grand scale.  But as global warming progresses, and the breakdown of literate society intensifies, such a small cohort of true believers may ultimately emerge in small pockets and virtual redoubts, as “avant-garde monks” single-mindedly dedicating themselves to the making, dissemination and preservation of radical art, in the hope one day it may once again transform the world for the better.

References

Barth, J. (1967). The literature of exhaustion. The Atlantic Monthly, 220(2), 29–34.

Gablik, S. (1984). Has modernism failed? Thames and Hudson.

Gay, P. (2007). Modernism: The lure of heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and beyond. W. W. Norton & Company.

Habermas, J. (1981). Modernity—An incomplete project (S. Ben-Habib, Trans.). In H. Foster (Ed.), The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture (pp. 3–15). Bay Press.