04.30.08
Peter Gay and modernism
Modernism and the ‘lure of heresy’
Peter Gay’s authoritative and lively history of the modernists captures their personalities and heretical approach. But it fails to place them in their profound historical context.
by Tim Black
Modernism, beginning at some point in the past 250 years and ending for the past 70, is usually used to refer to that cultural historical period in which artists, writers, musicians and designers experimented ruthlessly, in which tradition ceased to be a source of authority, and in which aesthetic rules were violated and radicalised. Little wonder Picasso called modern art a ‘sum of destructions’. But modernism remains a vexed term – what exactly it designates, and consequently how it is periodised, is always being contested.
The great interest notwithstanding in the phenomenon referred to as ‘modernism’, the term itself is hopelessly confused. Since it is an issue of periodization, it might help to recalibrate in terms of the ‘master periodization’ of the eonic effect, putting the question of modern art in the context of world history.
Most of the problems disappear at once, although the study of the eonic effect is non-dogmatic and doesn’t presume to pass judgment on the complex social movements it braids into its coherent outline. But the sudden transformation of artistic styles is typical of eonic correlates. However, the phenomenon required the maturing of modernism, and we don’t see its action in the early modern as with the majority of eonic correlates. It is already producing a touch of the ‘postmodern’, another hopeless term.
Modern art is confusing because, although its revolutionary charcter corresponds exactly in timing and characteristics to the eonic sequence’s crescendo of innovation, a little bit late but still right on cue as it were, its thematic tends to be one long lament, viz. the chords of the Baudelaires, often a challenge to bourgeois society, a la Marx perhaps. But there is no contradiction to that. While the philosophical and scientific ‘emergent streams’ in the modern transition tend to ring the chords of innovation a close look at the Enlightenment shows the immediate emergence of the dialectical Enlightenment, witness the Romantic descant on the Enlightenment. A similar echo and lineage is thus par in the phenomenon of ‘art modernism’. The lineage of Romanticism is obvious.
Nonetheless the phenomena of the fine arts are somewhat different from those of general culture examined in light of the eonic phenomenon, and the slightly off-timing is the result.
The reason is that the eonic effect is about the evolutionary emergence of new powers and potentials in human culture. But the fine arts are already practically a species characteristic of man, a part of his nature and potentia: every generation of man and every culture at all times shows a realization of art in this spectrum. This is not true of the broader field of human cultural endeavors, where we see strong eonic correlation as new potentialities are coming into being. A good example is the phenomenon of literary tragedy, a rare and exotic novelty (relative to the Axial Age and onward) and one with very strong eonic correlation, a sign of the novelty of the form (clocked against the birth of civilization), reflecting the fact that the extreme difficulty of this art-form is still beyond the standard potential of most artists. We can’t replicate ‘tragedies on demand’ in every generation. Unlike the fine arts, the production of great tragedies appears with the Axial Greeks, and then briefly in the early modern. Not coincidence!!
It is and remains an enigma, and we tend to be confused even as we attempt to define the term ‘tragedy’.
In any case the phenomenon of ‘modernism’ in Gay’s sense is one of the last realizations, it would seem of the modern transformation as a whole, in the sense of the eonic effect, the three centuries, 1500 to 1800, and two post centuries 1800 to 2000 just after, that characterize that transition.
For more on this consider a long thorough look at the eonic effect, and the strong correlations shown with the major categories of historical evolution.
We are left wondering if there is any sense to Hegel’s ‘end of art’, a question one might consider later.
A closer and more intuitive example lies in the realm of classical music whose eonic correlation is almost uncanny, down to the half-century, and decade. More on that later, perhaps.