Distinction of ‘postmodernist’ from ‘modernist’ E-Book

Melissa Grönebaum

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - History of Literature, Eras, grade: 2,0, National University of Ireland, Galway, language: English, abstract: The distinction of modern and postmodern artists sometimes seems to be a bit challenging, do to a lack of chronological boundaries, between modernism and postmodernism which are, additionally, extremely blurred. To determine artists by the dates of their works is not necessarily possible, since the epoch of postmodern art did not entered every country at the same time. Although Charles Jencks sets the ‘death’ of architectural modernism on July 15th, 1972 at 3:32pm, modernism in general is said to end with World War II. In North America, however, it rather ends with the Great Depression. Thus, the broad agreement on the period of Modernism is from 1885-1935. Modernists continued writing even after 1945 but did not earn much attention any longer. The period of postmodernism must have begun some when between then and 1960. Obviously, the passage of modernism and postmodernism is fluent. Postmodernism is said to be nostalgia and retrospective. Collages and imitation are regarded as being postmodern, as well as any rejection of modernism. Modernism in contrast would display the avant-garde forms of expression and the ‘shock of the new’. But those definitions are general and just give a hint to what could be the distinction of modernism and postmodernism. Because of this, in the present essay I will elaborate and compare the ways that 'postmodernist' might be distinguished from 'modernist' and solve the question of the differences between these epochs. To do so, I will focus on terms of literature, visual arts, and architecture, which are regarded as being characteristically for modernism or postmodernism.

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The distinction of modern and postmodern artists sometimes seems to be a bit challenging, do to a lack of chronological boundaries, between modernism and postmodernism which are, additionally, extremely blurred. To determine artists by the dates of their works is not necessarily possible, since the epoch of postmodern art did not entered every country at the same time. Although Charles Jencks sets the ‘death’ of architectural modernism on July 15th, 1972 at 3:32pm, modernism in general is said to end with World War II. In North America, however, it rather ends with the Great Depression. Thus, the broad agreement on the period of Modernism is from 1885-1935. Modernists continued writing even after 1945 but did not earn much attention any longer.  The period of postmodernism must have begun some when between then and 1960. Obviously, the passage of modernism and postmodernism is fluent. Postmodernism is said to be nostalgia and retrospective. Collages and imitation are regarded as being postmodern, as well as any rejection of modernism. Modernism in contrast would display the avant-garde forms of expression and the ‘shock of the new’. But those definitions are general and just give a hint to what could be the distinction of modernism and postmodernism. Because of this, in the present essay I will elaborate and compare the ways that 'postmodernist' might be distinguished from 'modernist' and solve the question of the differences between these epochs. To do so, I will focus on terms of literature,visual arts, and architecture, which are regarded as being characteristically for modernism or postmodernism.  The “Notion of modernism is very indefinite” (Sheppard 1). First of all, one has to clarify the difference of modernism and modernity. While the one displays an aesthetic category the other describes a historical period. There are two senses of modernity, the time since Renaissance (1500) and the time since 1750. Modernism describes the awareness of modernization of the 20th century. Thus, modernism is the reaction of the ongoing change of modernization and describes collected impressions and experiences. It is an articulation of the new sense of world and subject that arises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which (usually) criticizes the modern life, the collapse of traditional social structures and cultural borders, and report about experiences of World War I.  In other words, modernism itself is just a small part of the modern age in general. One cannot just define one coherent movement called modernism; it can rather be noticed different kinds of modernism associated with different groups (futurists, expressionists, imagists, etc.) or individual authors. Furthermore, modernism involves all kinds of art, not only literature, but also visual arts, architecture, and music. Several modernists emigrated to other countries. The Armory Show in 1913 is regarded as being the first event confronting public with modernist art, such as paintings of Picasso. Pablo Picasso was one of the most famous modernist painters. His painting, such as Les demoiselles d’Avinong, present characteristics typically for modernist artists. Les demoiselles d’Avinong shows five nude prostitutes in an abstract way. Picasso states that “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” Thus,none of them seem to be real and female and some do have faces like African masks.

“Picasso’s Le Demoiselles d’avignon was riven by a conflict that derived from ‘an internal psychological division between attraction and repulsion, classical superego and primitive libido, and results in an aggressive attack on the image of women which may disguise a deep fear.’ (…) the same painting denotes as crises of phallocentric culture.’ But whichever one reads the painting, its violent and shock derive to a considerable extent from Picasso’s experience of the loss of tradition within he had previously been able to work but which a part of him was trying unsuccessfully, to retain. (Sheppard 28)

Against modernist elitism and more positive stance toward popular culture are the works of postmodernists. “The postmodern would be that, (…) which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable”. A typical postmodern painting would be Andy Warhol’s Marilyn prints. Andy Warhol, the key figure in the movement of Pop Art, took a picture of Marilyn Monroe’s face and changed the colors to non-representational colors. Those colors were by no mean of the painter’s mood, or were meant to criticize anything since “Postmodernism and post modernity tend to be understood as constitutions of or breaks with whatever is constructed as the dominant of Modernism or modernity. (Waugh 99) As characteristically postmodernist, Warhol combined something old with something new. The chosen colors are not about letting the painting look like real; they just refer to the popular culture and represent the unrepresentable, which is attuned to mass production.

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reaction toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin motive. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. (Benjamin 47)

To preserve old tradition, it is common for modernist’s literature to lay a high focus on form and a high degree of intertextuality. „The major modernists have an extremely respectful relationship to tradition. None of them begin their career as confrontational or avant-grade.” (Sheppard 25) An ‘economic’ use of language due to the attempt to cleanse and rejuvenate language and strip it of conventions is also typical for modernists. The texts should be ambivalent and complex to do justice to the confusion and fragmentation of modern life and insisted on the autonomy of the work of art and construct a radical opposition between art and life. By translation of social experience into textual form, art was meant to act as steward in the chaos. However, the texts also did show a rejection of romantic subjectivity, since “modernism has also been viewed as both the antecedent of postmodernism and as the phenomenon forms the reactive contrast (…) as a reaction in its extreme avant-grade forms, against Naturalism” (Sheppard 5). This tendency cannot only be detected in literature but also in the works of Picasso. He states:  “Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”T.S. Eliot can be named as the most important theorist of modernism. He was one of those writers who emigrated from his home country (USA) and even became British citizen in 1927. His major woks are The Waste Land (1922) and Ash Wednesday (1938). The mentioned Rejection of the Romantic Subject becomes, according to Stearns,  obvious is works like “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919):

“What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. […] Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

And also in “Hamlet and His Problem” (1921):

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

Additionally, the concept of using art to reconstruct the order which has gotten lost in modernity becomes obvious: “The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.” (Stearns 21)The modernist works are to represent the chaos that is brought by modern existence by being without any traditional structures. Although by doing so, the modernists’ texts appear a bit chaotic themselves; the texts often follow a higher kind of order, one that acquires a careful interpretation and a close reading. In Eliot’s work one also detects, characteristic for a modernist writer, a frequently use of intertextuality. In The Waste Land for example, Eliot presents a collage of quotations from the Western literary tradition and some Eastern sources, such as Buddha, presents Shakespeare, cites Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde and includes the myth of the Fisher King, whose land is laying waste due to his illness into his poem. This high degree of intertextuality in modernist art is said to be a consequence of the incorporation of tradition and the recourse to myths and legends: more than most others texts before, modernist texts constantly quote other texts. Modernist texts thus situate themselves in a history of representations. Hardly any text is more suited to demonstrate these features of modernism than Eliot’s The Waste Land. The Waste land, whichtitle derives from medieval legend of ‘Holy Grail’ (comp. Lecture slides),consists of 433 lines, which are written in free verse, and arranged in five parts subdivided into several units. Described are different scenes or different little stories, told by various voices, which at first view seems to be just loosely related but actually in a way refer to each other.

Eliot’s The Wasted Land (1921-22) culminates, if that is the right word, in an assemble of fragmentary quotations (accompanied by extensive and possibly ironic footnotes to help reader’s understanding) and at least one Sanscrit word, which, to the innocent English ear, suggests rollicking ricketness rather than ‘the peace which passeth all understanding.’ (Sheppard 29)

The author writes about the failure of relationship and marriage, the failure of religion, and the failure in general, about the loss of roots, about water, sleep, death and fear, abortion and the modern change, sterility in many levels, loveless sex, and loss of history, the shame of modern spirituality, and the decay of culture. He describes unreal, modern cities and pictures the apocalyptic vision of new cities with falling towers. At the end of the first part, the author describes a modern city as purgatory to hell. He shows madness and displays the images of death.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over  London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!

‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

‘You! Hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!

The poem is an impersonal and symbolic commentary on human life, a bleak evaluation of the sterility of existence under the impression of World War I that projects a devastating image of the state of human relationship. It shows the western civilization as a spiritual “waste land”.“Meaning is seen to be constructed primarily through internal linguistic relationships and the poem thus achieves a verbal autonomy, a spatial form.” (Waugh 103) In using a myth, Eliot creates a parallelism between contemporaneity and antiquity and displays a way of controlling and ordering the chaos. Consequently, this proves another feature of modernist writing, namely the high degree of self-reflexivity. About his own works Eliot states that:

We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’[T.S. Eliot, from ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, 1921; comp. Lecture]

In a nutshell, one can hold that the features used of modernist artists in general theattempt to cleanse and rejuvenate language, the rejection of Romantic subjectivity, art as a means to reconstruct the order lost in modernity, a high degree of intertextuality and self-reflexivity as well as the insistence on the perceptivity of all perception. Postmodernists in contrast tend to work in rebellion against conventionalized modernism and keep an avant-garde tradition. Playfulness replaces modernist seriousness by an extremely high degree of self-reflexivity. Postmodernists belong to the post-industrial society, where the focus has shifted from production to consumption and globalization. The visual has become primary important, as well as digital media such as television and later the Internet. Postmodernists describes a radicalization of but also a break with the conventions of modernism; the ‘post’ means both ‘beyond’ and ‘against’.

“Postmodernism, more radical in its perceptions [than Modernism], derives instead from a vision of randomness, multiplicity, and contingency: in short, a world in need of mending [what Modernism attempted] is superseded by one beyond repair” (Wilde 25)

Like modernism, postmodernism is a transmedial phenomenon and concerns literature, art, and architecture. But what exactly defines being a postmodernist?

“I have read that under the name Postmodernism architects are getting rid of the Bauhaus project, throwing out the baby of experimentation with the bathwater of functionalism(…) I have read that an art critic who packages and sells ‘Transavantgarnism’ in the marketplace of paintring. (…) I have read from the pen of a reputable historian that writers and thinkers of the 160 and 1970 avant-gardes spread a reign of terror in the use of language, and that the conditions for all fruitful exchange must be that of the historians.” (Lyotard 140/141)

However, a clear distinction of modern art and postmodern art in case of literature can be detected by comparing the characteristic modern’ poem above to a characteristic postmodern text, namelyA Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. Tom Phillips, a British artist, took an old Victorian Novel – a second-hand, three pence book- named A Human Document and created a completely new version of it. He “alter(ed) every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques”[1] on them. The title A Human Document in this way became A Humument (by covering ‘an’ and ‘Doc’). Phillips explains:

“I took a forgotten novel found by chance. I mined, and undermined its text to make it yield alternative stories, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which lurked within its wall of words. I replaced with visual images the text I’d stripped away. It began to tell, amongst other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.”(Website)

The first version of A Humument was published in 1973. Version two till five were published in 1986, 1998, 2004, and 2012. The Beginning of the following passage of A Humument precisely describes the aim of Phillip’s work:

make it new

make it you

make it true

Metamorphoses;

changing now now;

As Ovid turned in

like a flower turning

in my mind, I shape

my silence of the night;

I can just hear the darkness

Yes, (…)

The postmodern idea that all meaning is constructed through language and other form of representation is demonstrated by this work and also the idea that there is no experience that is not mediated through representations. Postmodern literature usually presents a high degree of intertextuality (but usually other references than in modernism)and thetexts are often mixture of styles and citations. In Postmodernism there is no originality. Phillip, as well as Warhol, took something old and combined it with something new to create postmodern art.

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the texts he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. (Lyotard 149)

When modernism brought several new materials, such assteel, concrete, and glassinto the architectural world, thisled to utopian and progressive visions by the architects. The era of modern architecture began with the beginning of the 20th century.  Instead of criticizing the growth of modernisation, the aim of architecture was the representation of the modern and urban society.  The new and modern life was demanding for a new kind of houses and a new kind of cities. “We must create the mass-production spirit” stated Le Corbusier in‘Towards a New Architecture’. “A great epoch has begun. There exists new spirit. Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style.” (Le Corbusier 202)According to him,the great problems of modern constructions had to have a geometrical solution, a house has to be a machine for living:

“we shall arrive at the ‘House-Machine’, the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful . . . Beautiful also with all the animation that the artist’s sensibility can add to severe and pure functioning elements.”

The opinion here stated by Le Corbusier was the general opinion of the architects of modernism. By this manner, tall buildings were build, dimensioned for masses, “enormous constructions of 60 storeys high” (Le Corbusier 208) were the favored concept of modernism. “Reinforce concrete and steel allow of this audacity and lend themselves in particular to a certain development of the facade by means of which all the windows have an uninterrupted view.” (Le Corbusier 208/209) Le Corbusier fancies of high building in a futuristic city, with towers connected by bridges placed high above the streets and parks that would stretch at the foot of the towers. “In architecture the old bases of constructions are dead” (Le Corbusier 211). Buildings characteristically for modernism are therefore high buildings with a lot of glass and steel, such as theBauhausbuilding. In 1966Venturi published the most important work (Complexity and Contradiction) on architecture since Le Corbusier 1966. Here he claimed that "Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture.” (Venturi 326) He elaborates that, “There are no fixed laws in architecture, but not everything will work in a building or a city.” (Venturi 330) Instead of following the either-or tradition, he requests to change the tradition in terms of a both-and concept and ban the orthodox modern architecture, which he says was insufficiently or inconsistently. “Some of the vivid lessons of Pop Art, involving contradictions of scale and context, should have awakened architects from prim dreams of pure order (...)” (Venturi 335) he claims and adds that ”The difficult whole (...) includes multiplicity and diversity of elements in relationship that inconsists or among the weaker kinds perceptually...” (Venturi 333) Venturi paves the way to postmodern architecture. The first architect to actual use the term post-modernism in architecture, however, was Charles Jencks who officially declared the ‘Death of architectural modernism’ was on July 15th, 1972. In contrast to architects of modernism, postmodern architects act by the concept of double code, meaning the “combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects.” (Jencks 472) A characteristically example of a postmodern building would be the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany.

As seen in art and literature, the concept of mapping something old with something new in order to create a new, post-modern style, runs like a golden thread through postmodernism. Although the transition from modernism to postmodernism is not sudden but gradual and although there are authors, artists, and movements situated in-between (e.g., Beat Generation, Confessional Poets), there can still several characteristics be detected which distinguish the 'postmodernist' from the 'modernist'. There are ways in literature, art, and architecture to relatively precisely distinguish characteristic modernists from postmodernists. However, one should keep in mind, that the exact definition of postmodernism and modernism is problematic and that the boundaries of them are blurry, why there might also be some transition elements which have not been regarded in this essay.

Bibiography:

Benjamin, W.: From The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: Brooker, P. (1992) Modernism/Postmodernism. Longman Group UK Limited. Harlow. pp 45-49.

Eliot, T.S. (1922) The Waste Land.  

Eliot, T.S. (1919) Tradition and the Individual Talent.

Eliot, T.S. (1921) Hamlet and his Problem.

Jencks, C. (1977) The Death of Modern Architecture. In: Cahoone, L.E. (1996) From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Blackwell Publisher. Cambridge, Massachusetts.pp. 469-471.