“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted January 13th, 2009)

The illustration is by W. David Shaw, from a 1955 automobile ad. Again I am very grateful to Leif Peng's blog, Today's Inspiration.

I can't even quite make out the brand of the automobile; but the picture draws its energy from the photographic (or near-photographic, I can't tell which) image of the car, which is contrasted with the distinctively modernistic background image of a bay with (I think) a wharf and boats.

If ever there was an encapsulation of what Thomas Hine called "populuxe" in a single work of art, this must be it . (I strongly recommend Hine's wonderful book, Populuxe (1987, New York; ISBN 0394740149). Shaw's work illustrates perfectly the careful (yet seemingly casual) abstraction of line and surface to give life to a whole that conveys a substantial vision. This last phrase, "to give life to a whole that conveys a substantial vision" is one I use with no little thought. One of the great tragedies of post-modern art is its complete failure to provide the artist with a way to express such comprehensive, integrated ideas about the World - what it means, what it is, how we can approach it. Post-modernism is the gospel of despair, of surrender to meaninglessness.

Occasionally one reads a critique of modernism that sounds similar. But to acknowledge such a critique is, above all, to judge from a narrow sample of modernist work. There are, of course, highly abstract, seemingly meaningless exemplars of modern art - one can think only of the paintings of Rothko, Hoffmann, Pollock, or even Yves Klein. I would argue that these are not at all meaningless works - many of them are both profound and beautiful, but there is no doubt that they are controversial. To me, the central agenda of art moderne was to capture the World by means of well-chosen abstractions. This is a far cry from the post -modernist agenda, which abandoned the hope of such portraiture; the post-modern artist was confined to constructing a "narrative" that was viewed as inevitably fragmentary, doomed always to pacing back and forth in a cage of despair.

No such despair is evident in Shaw's work above. Far from it; the art is profoundly optimistic , even cheerful. As Hine pointed out, much of the world of art moderne was not only optimistic about the ability of art to portray, to be meaningful, but also about the general future of human beings. Indeed, many modern artists saw the abstraction of their work as intimately related to another contemporary belief, the exaltation of science as a bright new path to a wonderful future. Just as the equations and theories of science were abstractions that captured part of reality and enabled human beings to manipulate the World, so also the abstractions of art moderne were abstractions that similarly held out the hope of finding meaning in the vast avalanche of information we receive about the World.

A short digression is in order: when I use the term "art moderne" I mean the principal stream of Western art that lasted from roughly 1920 to 1970, a span of about two generations. This vast and extremely productive tradition of artistic growth really ought to be called "art moderniste," for its central commitments were not so much devoted to the "modern" as to a specific vision of what ought to be modern - and, indeed, was modern for a very long time.

Perhaps partly provoked by the despair that engulfed America (and thus the rest of the World) in the wake of the assassinations of 1968 and the advent of the Nixon era in American politics, art moderne lost most of its momentum as the second great generation of its artists ended their careers. What came next was what we might call "post-modern art." Although "post-modern art" is not the same thing as "post-modernism" (a school of more broadly philosophical thought), post-modernism in both senses (art and philosophy) did share certain common ground. Above all, they shared a fundamental despair over the ability of human beings to move comfortably in the World; perhaps this accounts for much of the deep despair that shaped American culture during the period from roughly 1970 onwards. It is even possible to see political implications in these cultural phenomena - perhaps the seeming supremacy of "conservatism" is, more than anything else, a testament to how much many people feared not the modernist future, but the post-modernist future.

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