tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/art-theory-10256/articlesArt theory – The Conversation2017-01-05T11:54:43Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/708312017-01-05T11:54:43Z2017-01-05T11:54:43ZHow John Berger changed our way of seeing art<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/151814/original/image-20170105-18662-f51mgw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Berger considered how through history and visual representation the male gaze has constrained women.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Berger's Ways of Seeing</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The opening to John Berger’s most famous written work, the 1972 book <a href="http://waysofseeingwaysofseeing.com/ways-of-seeing-john-berger-5.7.pdf">Ways of Seeing</a>, offered not just an idea but also an invitation to see and know the world differently: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” he wrote. </p>
<p>Berger, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/02/john-berger-art-critic-and-author-dies-aged-90">who died on January 2</a> at the age of 90, has had a profound influence on the popular understanding of art and the visual image. He was also a vibrant example of the public intellectual, using his position to speak out against social injustices and to lend his support to artists and activists across the world.</p>
<p>Berger’s approach to art came most directly into the public eye in four-part BBC TV series, Ways of Seeing in 1972, produced by Mike Dibb and which preceded the book. Yet his style of blending Marxist sensibility and art theory with attention to small gestures, scenes and personal stories developed much earlier, in essays for the independent, weekly magazine <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/">New Stateman</a> (between 1951 and 1961) and also in his first novel <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/682-a-painter-of-our-time">A Painter of Our Time</a>, published in 1958.</p>
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<p>The BBC programmes brought to life and democratised scholarly ideas and texts through dramatic, often witty, visual techniques that raised searching questions about how images – from European oil painting to photography and modern advertising – inform and seep into everyday life and help constitute its inequities. What do we see? How are we seen? Might we see differently?</p>
<p>“Berger’s theoretical legacy”, the Indian academic Rashmi Doraiswamy <a href="https://www.zedbooks.net/shop/book/a-jar-of-wild-flowers/">wrote recently</a>, “is in situating the look in the context of political otherness”. Berger’s idea that looking is a political act, perhaps even a historically constructed process – such that <em>where and when</em> we see something will affect <em>what</em> we see – comes across most powerfully in the second episode of Ways of Seeing – which focused on the male gaze. </p>
<p>Here Berger showed the continuities between post-Renaissance European paintings of women and imagery from latter-day posters and girly magazines, by juxtaposing the different images – showing how they similarly rendered women as objects. Berger argued that this continuity constrained how certain forms of femininity are understood, and therefore the terms on which women are able to live their lives. He identified a splitting of the European woman’s consciousness, in which she:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>How we see</h2>
<p>Historical context, scale, and how we see were recurring themes in Berger’s writing, films, performance and in his collaborative photographic essays with <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/another-way-of-telling-9781408864463/">Jean Mohr</a>, <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/john-berger-anne-michaels/railtracks">Anne Michaels</a>, <a href="https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-2-issue-9-autumn-winter-2005/john-berger-in-silence/">Tereza Stehliková</a> and others. </p>
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<span class="caption">Images need narratives to make sense.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Verso books</span></span>
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<p>Berger’s essays and books on the photograph worry at the political ambiguity of meaning in an image. He taught us that photographs always need language, and require a narrative of some sort, to make sense.</p>
<p>He also took care to differentiate how our reaction to photographs of loved ones depends on our relationship to the person portrayed. In <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/533-a-seventh-man">A Seventh Man</a>, a collaborative book with Jean Mohr on Turkish migrant workers to Germany in the 1970s, he put it simply:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A photograph of a boy in the rain, a boy unknown to you or me. Seen in the darkroom when making the print or seen in this book when reading it, the image conjures up the vivid presence of the unknown boy. To his father it would define the boy’s absence.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Under the skin</h2>
<p>Because he had been a painter, Berger was always a visual thinker and writer. In conversation with the novelist Michael Ondaatje he remarked that the capabilities of cinematographic editing had influenced his writing. He identified cinema’s ability to move from expansive vistas to close-up shots as that to which he most related and aspired. </p>
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<p>Certainly Berger’s work is infused with a sensitivity to how long views – the narratives of history – come alive only with the addition of “close-up” stories of human relationships, that retell the narrative but from a different angle. For instance, writing about Frida Kahlo’s compulsion to paint on smooth skin-like surfaces, Berger <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/2005-portraits">suggested</a> that it was Kahlo’s pain and disability (she had spina bifida and had gone through treatments following a bad road accident) that “made her aware of the skin of everything alive —- trees, fruit, water, birds, and naturally, other women and men”.</p>
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<span class="caption">Self portrait.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Frida Kahlo</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>The character in Ondaatje’s novel, In the Skin of a Lion, to whom he gave the name Caravaggio, was partly inspired by Berger’s <a href="http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/berger-caravaggio.pdf">essay on the painter</a>. In that essay, Berger wrote of a feeling of “complicity” with the Renaissance Italian artist Caravaggio, the “painter of life” who does not “depict the world for others: his vision is one that he shares with it”. </p>
<p>Berger’s writerly inclinations and sensitivities seem to echo something of the “overall intensity, the lack of proper distance” for which Caravaggio was so criticised – and which Berger so admired. This intensity was not a simple theatricality, nor a search for something truer to life, but a philosophical stance springing from his pursuit of equality. He gave us permission to dwell on those aspects of our research or our lives that capture us intensely, and to trust that sensitivity. His was an affirmative politics in this sense. It started with a trust in one’s intuitions, along with the imperative to open these up to explore ourselves as situated within wider social and historical processes. </p>
<p>Reflecting on his written work, Berger wrote in the recent Penguin collection <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/301519/confabulations/">Confabulations</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told and that, if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He knew very well that writing has its limitations. By itself, writing cannot rebalance the inequities of the present or establish new ways of seeing. Yet he wrote with hope. He showed us in his work and – by example – other possibilities for living a life that was committed to criticising inequality, while celebrating the beauty in the world, giving attention to its colour, rhythm and joyous surprises. We remain endowed and indebted to him.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70831/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vikki Bell receives funding from Economic and Social Research Council</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Yasmin Gunaratnam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Marxist philosopher, art critic and novelist popularised complex ideas and helped bring art into the mainstream.Yasmin Gunaratnam, Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of LondonVikki Bell, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/361232015-03-09T01:48:21Z2015-03-09T01:48:21ZA Tibetan monk walks into a bar … the future of creativity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69082/original/image-20150115-2993-1v711lu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Thangka painters have an entirely different conception of art to most Western painters. What should art do for us?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rosino/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Beyond questions of its value and its sources there is a question less frequently contested about creativity: its relationship to us.</p>
<p>One evening some time ago, I was walking down Chapel Street in Melbourne’s South Yarra with a Tibetan monk who had just arrived in Australia. Namgyel had been brought out from China by a Buddhist centre in Melbourne and it was one of a number of outings we made as he got a feel for the city he had been transplanted into.</p>
<p>Noticing a small gathering inside a brightly-lit shop across the road we went over to take a look. It was a small boutique-y gallery and there was an opening underway, people standing around inside the white cube holding glasses of chilled white wine. “You might find this interesting,” I said, knowing he was a painter. “Let’s go in.”</p>
<p>We didn’t take a glass of wine – he was a monk and we were interlopers anyway. We made our way around the wall. There were about 20 watercolours, seascapes, in a style usually described as “realistic” or “traditional painting” in Australia, as opposed to modern, abstract or contemporary. They were all of modest size, a little bigger than a laptop screen.</p>
<p>Back on the footpath he asked me, “What was that for?” </p>
<p>“It is the first night of the exhibition,” I explained. </p>
<p>“No, what are the paintings for?” “They’re for sale,” I said. </p>
<p>“I know that,” he replied, “but why? Why do people buy them?”</p>
<p>“They’re nice to look at, aren’t they?” I said. Namgyel is an artist, but he had never been in a gallery, and had never before come face-to-face with art that was not religious. His painting practice has a clear purpose, and it isn’t the reproduction of pretty scenery.</p>
<p>I recount this episode as a reminder of the many ways art is viewed across the range of contemporary publics – local, national or international. Where does that diversity leave us? </p>
<p>In answer we might want to head somewhere below any temptation to announce that it is simply a matter of “each to his or her own,” “let a hundred flowers bloom,” or the market logic of “sink or swim”. Familiar responses like these sidestep the question of our relationship to art.</p>
<h2>The three eras of art</h2>
<p>In the recent history of art in the West there have been, broadly speaking, three eras. </p>
<p>French philosopher Jacques Rancière <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/14/jacques-ranciere-the-aesthetic-revolution-and-its-outcomes">called</a> them “three regimes of art”: </p>
<ul>
<li>the ethical <br></li>
<li>the representational <br></li>
<li>the aesthetic</li>
</ul>
<p>We might take the art of the thangka painter Namgyel as an example of the ethical regime, where images are “questioned for their truth and for their effect on the ethos of individuals and the community”. The watercolour seascapes belong to the representational regime and its “sphere of imitation … subject to a set of intrinsic norms”. </p>
<p>With the aesthetic regime the previous norms are overthrown and a form of autonomy emerges that is not that of the work of art, but of a mode of experience.</p>
<p>In this latest mode we have left Namgyel and the water-colourist, the icon and the image, behind. We can understand historical forms of art as meaningful, but right now we want something else. We want, essentially, to be transformed. </p>
<p>According to Rancière, three further scenarios ensue. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Art can become life. Life can become art. Art and life can exchange their properties.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The exchange between life and art</h2>
<p>The question of the overlap between life and art can be understood in a number of ways. And it is a paradoxical question too, in that art had to be separated from life before it could return to the kind of relationship with life that Rancière identified.</p>
<p>Compartmentalised, religion went into Sunday, art went into museums.</p>
<p>A life lived as an artist means giving up the dominant norms of success that prevail around us. For those who are making the sacrifice it can seem very unromantic, particularly when curators and administrators are bringing in “highly desirable” salaries – but what about if it applied to all of us?</p>
<p>And so we turn to the surrealist economics of Georges Bataille and <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/accursed-share">The Accursed Share</a>, a theory of economics first published in 1949, in which he engages with the question of “excess energy, translated into the effervescence of life”.</p>
<p>A convoluted and lapidary argument, his reflections grow from a single realisation: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What does this have to do with the artist and creativity? </p>
<p>Throughout The Accursed Share Bataille is conscious of the co-option of the artist in service to a “traditional sovereign world” in which non-sovereign art produced the appearance of the splendour of the king, a splendour that was “the domain of the architects, painters, musicians and writers that surrounded him”. </p>
<p>Only a few artists glimpsed the possibility of art beyond appropriation, a sovereign art free of subjection.</p>
<p>The price for this? In Bataille’s words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In this world, the man of sovereign art occupies the most common position, that of destitution … [T]he sovereignty of art requires that anyone who bears that sovereignty within him comes down in the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is no other way of resisting what Bataille calls “the immense hypocrisy of the world of accumulation”.</p>
<p>Why does art appear to offer a solution? </p>
<p>Holding onto Bataille’s theme of sovereign art and non-appropriation, let’s finally turn to the place of poverty in Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22397">Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life</a> (2013). Agamben’s purpose is to challenge the absolute institutionalisation of production, consumption and instrumentality, taking the legacy of the Franciscan friars as a counter-model that invests in use over ownership, in form-of-life over alienation.</p>
<p>And art? </p>
<p>Agamben suggests that “the monastery is perhaps the first place in which life itself – and not only the ascetic techniques that form and regulate it – was presented as an art”. Use and form-of-life also reside in art.</p>
<p>Agamben’s pointing to the possibility of raising use over ownership, form-of-life over alienation, runs close to Bataille’s concern with art’s subversion of the usual relationship between labour and consumption, and also close to challenges we shall all face “when all the West’s forms of life have reached their historical consummation.” </p>
<p>This challenge is not upheld as the measure of the artist; the existence of the artist becomes a challenge to the way we each measure ourselves.</p>
<p><br>
<em>Read other articles in our creativity series <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/creativity-series">here</a>. The author will deliver a paper on “total artification” in Melbourne on March 11. Details <a href="http://communityidentity.com.au/?page_id=914">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36123/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Stevenson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What is art for? The answer to this question changes depending on who you ask – and ultimately, it will help us measure ourselves.Mark Stevenson, Senior Lecturer, College of Arts, Victoria UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/245342014-05-12T04:09:20Z2014-05-12T04:09:20ZExplainer: what is modernism?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47845/original/dhz6wsjh-1399343353.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Modernism is typified by a commitment to exploratory experimentation. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Edouard Manet (1862-63), Wikimedia Commons </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I first came across modernism through the lens of postmodernism in the early 1980s. At that time postmodernism – <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-postmodernism-20791">explained here</a> – was washing through the academy, promising to transform everything by placing art, the most sophisticated theory, rock music, and television on the same continuum of analysis. </p>
<p>One problem I soon noticed was that aspects characterised as “postmodern” in visual arts could often be identified in modernism.</p>
<p>For instance, postmodernism typically tells us that modernism sets up a rift between high and low culture. Yet modernism’s challenge initially stemmed from breaking down barriers between high and low culture. </p>
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<span class="caption">The Bottle of Anís del Mono, 1914, Queen Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those making <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/glossary#avant-garde">avant-garde</a> art departed from classical allegories, history painting and heroic portraiture in order to portray the immediate, everyday life in front of them. In Cubist works by artists such as Braque, Picasso and Gris, you won’t find nymphs in the glen, but café tables, music sheets, product packaging, newspapers, wine glasses and bowls of fruit. </p>
<p>Modernist art consciously engages with everyday life. The difference is that it focuses on processes of representation. Manet, in his infamous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edouard_Manet_-_Luncheon_on_the_Grass_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe</a> (main image), treats conventions of the nude as a form of pastiche, parodying its convention of conjoining various sources to evoke a perfection never attained in any one mortal. </p>
<p>Particularly after the first world war, one of the main aims was to make the latest aesthetic offerings available to all social classes. This is true of early modernist design and architecture. Many innovations drew from proletarian sources such as theatre by German playwright Bertolt Brecht or industrial production.</p>
<p>The modernist tactic of flattening perspective and techniques for rendering realistic representations are formal innovations that appear to make art more simplified and less skillful.</p>
<p>Modernism is typified by a general commitment to exploratory experimentation. Yet it also comprises a wider process that elevates challenge, critical autonomy and creative innovation. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47847/original/f2f8x43c-1399345037.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Igor Stravinsky as drawn by Pablo Picasso.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bibliothèque nationale de France</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This questioning mode sets it apart from traditional cultural imperatives, accepted conventions, or academic rules that ensured some form of recognisable cultural standards. </p>
<p>Implicit in modernism’s challenge is the idea that predetermined rules, cherished precedents or even shared parameters of understanding need not necessarily govern or guide future cultural expression. This is a new cultural horizon.</p>
<p>The most immediate impact of such transformed cultural expectations is that innovative modernist art is not always well understood or recognised when first produced. Famous examples include the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/12/rite-of-spring-stravinsky">bellicose initial reaction</a> to Russian composer Stravinsky’s ballet score for The Rite of Spring in 1913, now considered a 20th-century modernist classic.</p>
<h2>Ramifications</h2>
<p>There are other consequences that are not so readily obvious, but they help to explain the wider cultural ramifications of modernity.</p>
<p>First, modernism does not mean that the past is simply forgotten or eliminated.</p>
<p>Instead, works of the past are all treated as a type of archive of possibilities to be freely adopted, re-evaluated, or even ignored, as changing historical and social circumstances permit.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47853/original/5j7vpjxz-1399350869.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Visitors look at a projection of a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh in Tel Aviv, 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/ Oliver Weiken</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Second, if culture is historical, then it can also be transformed. The dictum “make it new!”, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/09/080609crbo_books_menand">issued</a> by American poet Erza Pound in 1934, is not only a cry for innovation as a core artistic goal, but also implicitly upholds the proposition that a culture can be remade and reworked according to changing circumstances.</p>
<p>Third, modernism is part of a wider inquiry of self-reflexive scrutiny of one’s practices and knowledge claims. </p>
<p>In science, <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/%7Eachaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Falsifiability.html">falsification</a> becomes pivotal. In the arts, modernism accentuates alertness to art’s own historical and stylistic conditions of possibility, and even questions what art is.</p>
<p>In the wake of modernism, it has become a commonplace assumption that art will test established ways of perceiving things or even the establishment itself. But that does not mean that such challenge is always welcomed. For more than 100 years, someone or other has complained that constant challenge risks tearing the social fabric apart, or <a href="https://theconversation.com/luca-belgiorno-nettis-should-just-buy-a-yacht-24355">artists have gone too far</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/dramaticworksofg01haup">The Weavers</a> (<em>Die Weber</em>) written by German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann in 1892 is a telling example of testing the boundaries of convention and socio-political acceptability. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47848/original/zczdzy47-1399345182.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 1897 poster for a performance of Die Weber by Emil Orlik.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prussian authorities imposed a ban on the play because it sympathetically portrayed the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1848. The Weavers became a popular success because it was able to reach broader audiences in the then emerging alternative, working-class theatre venues. In fact, the play’s major innovation was to feature the workers’ revolt as its central “character”. </p>
<p>There was also a utopian dimension to modernism that harboured grand ambitions of resolving all social-cultural tension and achieving a higher resolution in art as well as at the social level. </p>
<p>You can see this in Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s score for Mysterium which he started writing in 1903 – he envisioned it to be a <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-synesthesia/">synesthetic</a> experience performed over a week in the Himalayas. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mSWuUuySFyU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Alexander Nemtin’s realisation of Scriabin’s incomplete magnum opus.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The work culminates in the revelation of the final mystery in which humanity dissolves and wondrously transforms into a higher life form. The score remained incomplete at the time of Scriabin’s death in 1915.</p>
<h2>Is modernism over?</h2>
<p>Well, it is certainly an old term. But the term “contemporary” has been around for a long time too. Postmodernism seems to have been and gone. Yet, the focus on “creative innovation” is championed more than ever, but on a broader level that has extended well beyond the arts.</p>
<p>Modernist artists working nearly a century ago seem more optimistic in retrospect, but their hope was tinged with concern. In the wake of the first world war, there was widespread consternation in Europe that nothing so disastrous could happen again. </p>
<p>If the mood was more “utopian”, it often sprung from a perceived need to reinvigorate thinking and life in the aftermath of decayed aristocratic systems. </p>
<p>Of course, worse could and did happen.</p>
<p>But have we seen a complete cultural paradigm shift in recent decades? One difficulty is that the general modernist propositions of challenge, self-scrutiny, and dissent are difficult to overturn or exceed because critique necessarily confirms a commitment to them.</p>
<p>One definite change is that art today is more concerned with investigating society’s failures, or exploring often-unacknowledged tensions, particularly at the periphery of society – <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-2014-adelaide-biennial-contemporary-art-as-it-was-meant-to-be-23033">seen recently in Dark Heart</a> at the 2014 Adelaide Biennial.</p>
<p>This exploration may signal that one aspect of the modernist drive remains undiminished — its critical side — while the utopian side has waned.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/24534/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew McNamara does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>I first came across modernism through the lens of postmodernism in the early 1980s. At that time postmodernism – explained here – was washing through the academy, promising to transform everything by placing…Andrew McNamara, Professor, Head of Visual Arts, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.