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

[Thomas Schmidt <thomaschmidt@gmail.com>]

Hello List,

Le 3/03/06 3:46, « Christina McPhee » <christina112@earthlink.net> a écrit :

> 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

Le 3/03/06 15:09, « Dirk Vekemans » <dv@vilt.net> a écrit :

> 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.


Yes, i think it's about right. I'd say that it means that it all would boil
down to the fact that this sense of time is essentially relative to where
you stand and what your perspective is towards history of art.

That said, to me -and that is a very personal opinion- as weak a terminology
post-modernism is, i would think that, to reverse this commonly accepted
term, we are finding ourselves in a transient state, somewhat more of a
"pre" something than a "post" something. Only the problem is, we can't
properly qualify that "pre" just yet. Pre-impressionism comes to mind in
this regard.

So, well, i would say that i still think we are still living in a society
that is integral to modernism in the sense that most of the time we are
basing our understanding on modernism as a 'stable' platform to base our
judgement on whether it is to deny or attack it or to praise it, , and that
the problem we are facing in trying to qualify our time may be due to the
lack of a seminal event or signal  allowing us to finally relegate modernism
to an integrated past period.

Still, my understanding of it is that, while we are still in a modernist
era, we have pretty much exhausted its potential as a mean of understanding
the world we are living in, but still trapped in it. (may that have to do
with the fact that society is moving faster than ideas ?)


Le 3/03/06 17:38, « Lucio Agra » <lucioagra@gmail.com> a écrit :
> My idea was to really suggest that this word
> (contemporary/contemporaneity) could be a better name for what we - in
> 70's/80's, having no label to use - called post-modernism.

I would really tend to disagree with you, again based on the fact that
contemporaneity is the 'now', and should be used as a reserved word. It's
all a matter of labeling anyway, but what word are we going to come up with
after that? Post-contemporaneity?


Best,

T.

--
Thomas
thomaschmidt@gmail.com