RE: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity? -a brief historicaldivertissement

"Dirk Vekemans" <dv@vilt.net> · Fri, 3 Mar 2006 15:09:10 +0100

Yes and welcome to the discussion Thomas, i think your remark is very
essential to an understanding of the questions as they are put to us,
because they refer primarily to modernity as an aspiration detectable within
our feeling of contemporaneity, asking whether we still acknowledge  the
promise of what is modern as leading to 'a common planetary horizon'. I
immediately took this to refer to questions of validation of Modernist art,
but there is no need to do so, although i think it would be hard to ignore
the accomplishments of Modernism and its continuing power to define the
field of modernity in our vision. 

So, without any irony,  you could also take an industrially designed tea-pot
from the sixties as a starting point, asking yourself whether we still want
to be modern like that tea-pot wanted to appeal to the aspirations of
modernity present in the individuals taken 'en masse' by the marketing
machine of that time. And, certainly in graphic design, you must be engaged
in a constant re-defining of your personal style, taking different positions
with regard to whether/how you want your design to express a feeling of the
contemporary, whether what makes your design look up-to-date is a
'modernist'projection or a nostalgic mirroring of a dissimulated past or a
crack in the surface of marketability or a replacement of all the 'or's'here
with an 'and'.
As such any question of modernity may be more of a design question, with or
without taking up the threads of the problematic status of the design/art
terms. The question reformulated to you as a designer would then perhaps
refer (again back to what wasn't immediately included) to the corpus of
modernist design as an 'antique' authority to be matched or emulated in your
present work. Thus, do you think of what you see from modernist design in
that way?

Back in the art reservoir, i very much agree with Lucio's claim
(strengthened by Christiane's doubt that present works can be analysed in
the suggested terms) that we are more interested in the methods of the
Moderns, recycling those as creative processes instead of attempting to dig
up and take up the thread of their motivations where post-modernism has
buried them, or trying to emulate their works like a capitalised Modernity/
Antiquity parallel would suggest. 

There wasn't any capitalisation in the original question though, more a
redoubling of the abstraction suggesting that we are riding the hypermodern
drive, referring to our modern aspirations as an antique body-of-movements
that we, hyping the hyperthing, attempt to surpass. I tend to agree with
Christiane here that such an incremental flight, a continuation of levelling
out to the limits of abstraction is hardly the umbrella used by most
contemporary artist. As such that remains to be discussed, along with other
lines initiated here.
dv

> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
> [mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] Namens Christina McPhee
> Verzonden: vrijdag 3 maart 2006 3:47
> Aan: soft_skinned_space
> Onderwerp: Re: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity? -a 
> brief historicaldivertissement
> 
> 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 
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