Re: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity? -a brief historical divertissement

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Actually, the remark Thomas is responding to, is from Lucio Agra -  I  
just forwarded it.

But this is interesting.  Modernity... isn't this an idea that goes  
back to the 'battle of the Ancients and the Moderns'   -- that
politically charged theme of Absolutist France, to the beginning of  
Romanticism?  The moderns were the Romantics: Gericault, The Raft of  
the Medusa. Or could someone (Thomas?) correct me?

And even further, we may imagine that modernity as a style of  
consciousness begins with the very Italian sense of time to which  
Thomas here alludes:  a sense of time as a series of feedback loops  
so that, for example, you, the artist in the Renaissance,  could  
'recapture' the greatness of the imagined "Ancients" and here I mean  
the dreamed of paintings of Praxiteles, the extant sculptures in the  
rubble of the Roman Forum: you could revive these formal gestures as  
a pure referent to the world of Antiquity, thought of as a pluralist,  
pagan, non heterogenous mash. Ironically you could revive them to  
glorify your patrons (Pope Clement, the Medicis, the Sforzas) within  
a superficially Christian visual dramatic narrative; ah, but all this  
becomes very convoluted with the coming of the Counterreformation in  
Italian painting so I should leave off here. Just thinking:  that we  
plunder "Modernity" as it were, as if, we were still among the greats  
of that distant past (Schwitters, Klee).--

also re English, by the way:  please feel free if you wish to post in  
French or other mainstream languages,  as -empyre- is very broad in  
elocution :-)

cm


On Mar 2, 2006, at 5:37 PM, Thomas Schmidt wrote:

> Hello List,
>
> This is my first post on the list, so i'll start by introducing  
> myself. My
> name is Thomas and I'm a graphic-designer based in Paris, so,  
> please excuse
> my English.
>
> Le 2/03/06 5:40, « Christina McPhee » <christina112@earthlink.net>  
> a écrit :
>
> > I've been sustaining - as a rather
> > personal point o view - that what separates modernity to
> > contemporaneity has to do with a kind of gap, established 'round the
> > 80's when something great was expected but never happened
>
> Doesn't it seem that the relationship we have to those words,  
> modernity and
> contemporaneity, is of a completely different nature?
>
> Modernity, as an art period (whether or not it has come to an end,  
> which is
> beyond my reasoning) can be thought of as bounded to the external
> socio-technological factors of its time, such as the great  
> technological
> discoveries of the late 19th century, marxism etc., whereas  
> contemporaneity
> can only be related to our own self, in that contemporaneity, for a  
> lack of
> proper wording "travels" with us.
>
> Best,
>
> Thomas.
> -
> thomaschmidt@gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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