Reverse Modernism

 

Reverse Modernism 

At a recent art event - a live video performance by Debora and Jason Bernagozzi of Signal Culture, at Visual Studies Workshop, using the software tools that they developed - renowned video artist Peer Bode (who had been their teacher) stood and spoke about how contemporary artists were not only making art, but also creating instruments for making art.  He also reminisced about a conversation with Nam June Paik in the 90s, in which Paik had said that he felt bad for painters, because painting was no longer the vanguard of art.  

But what this leaves out is that nowadays, people are not only making art, and they are not only making instruments for making art - they are making artists.  The production of artificial artists - coupled with the rapid adoption and permeation of the new artificial culture into both the highest strata of commercial society and the broader public - undebatably signals a new moment in the history of art, and artists will have to respond to it one way or another.  Who or what, at this point, represents the "vanguard"?  Or will we have to rethink the very concept of a vanguard?

I've argued before (see: "Why I am not a postmodernist") that modernism is an unfinished project, that the contradictions of modernism have not yet been overcome.  What if the role of the advance guard in such a historical terrain is to completely reinvent our relationship to time, and the relationship of time to history?  What if, instead of trying to overcome modernism, our goal is to preserve the modern, against all the forces that threaten to undermine or destroy it?  What if we have to fight to stay true to the spirit of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hemmings, Richard Huelsenbeck, Arnold Schoenberg, Emma Goldman, Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo, Guy Debord, Sun Ra, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Yamantaka Eye - not to mention Nam June Paik, Peer Bode, and the Bernagozzis - and thousands - billions - of others who are now contributing to the modernist project, against everything that would recouperate their work into a more palatable, commercially viable, popular product?  What a strange juncture, where we stand in awe and gratitude towards these icons of refusal, and we receive that refusal and must affirm refusal and reinvent refusal!

I recognize that this means being a cultural "conservative" in a way - not in a way that aligns at all with the "Conservative" political party, which has completely sold out all of its values to capitalism, which is always ready to destroy everything in the pursuit of profit - but conservative in a truer, more honest, more literal sense, the sense of conservation.  Our goal is now, in part, to conserve modernism and the revolutionary hope it embodies, against every kind of accelerationism, because accelerationists are now often the biggest reactionaries.  Paradoxically, the art of the Silicon Valley accelerationists tends to be bland, unthinkingly conformist, derivative, and aesthetically retrograde.  Those who wish to strive for something with greater creativity feel an almost instinctive desire to dive deeper into book arts and art books, photographic processing, cyanotype, tintype, videotape, 8mm, 16mm, vinyl records, cassettes, 8 tracks, tube amps, radio, modular synthesizers with patch cables, circuit boards, typewriters, clay, woodworking, marble, and yes, paint, paintbrushes and canvas.  Why?  We don't know why, and that's part of what draws us in.  

And also software.  And bio-glitch.  And every technology.  No prohibitions, no absolutes. 

Not preserved as a quaint, historical museum piece, but as a vibrant, living community, exploring completely unknown territory.  Not just looking back on modernism.  Not even just reviving modernism.  Starting modernism now, for the first time.

Enough with cynical postmodernism!  Bodies, physically touching and making.  People.

Obsolescence is now obsolete.  

Both directions, future and past.  No!  Not just two directions.  Millions of directions, out.

To demand, with angry fist held high, that nothing is obsolete and no one is obsolete.  For if anyone is obsolete, then everyone is - including our new AI neighbors.