Hayley Toth AHE3206 Modernism and The ArtsSummative One, David Rudrum

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them: Redefining what it is to be

The advent of Modernist art coincided with, and was an outward expression of, a growingly indistinct society. It is therefore most easily quantified through its production of multiple isms which generated novel concepts and styles, which incidentally outdated those prior, in order to sustain the modernist interest. In its acute correlation to social and philosophical concerns, Modernism offers new representational strategies and refutes prior fixation on art as mere mimicked actuality. More than that, Modernist art is offered, not primarily as a new way of representing the world, but a new way of being in the world. This paper will argue for the reevaluation of Modernism as a mode of existence rather than the aestheticism by which it is usually culturally referred. The principle of reimagining the boundary between subject and object, underlied the most successful modernist movements and possesses an explicit correlation to bodily and cognitive existence. Of interest in this paper are the disparate: Cubism and Surrealism.Preceding Impressionist, Czanne, claimed his greatest failing was not achieving the marriage of trompe-l'il and the laws of the medium (Greenberg, 1989: 56-7). The Impressionists, therefore, inadvertently generated an aim of Modernist painting: to fill the void of representation which Czanne presented. Picasso, Braque and Lger (amongst others) sought to achieve this multi-dimensional splendour and did so by producing multiple perspectives of the subject simultaneously: Cubism. As Foster (2011: 70) writes: Czannes death casts Postimpressionism as the historical past In actively seeking the realism Czanne failed to achieve, Picasso and his Cubist contemporaries intuitively established a new aim to go beyond imitation and arrive at a new way of seeing, and indeed depicting, the world.Foster (2011: 78) describes Pablo Picassos early painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon (June-July 1907) as a manifesto, a battlefield, a herald of modern art. It paid great contribution to the invention of Art as Modern and has commonly been described the first Cubist picture (Barr Jr 1975: 56). At the time, however, it was rejected for exhibition and criticised for its lack of unity (quoted in Foster 2011: 79). The painting starkly opposes the hegemonised artistic form of the body curved and palpable and unsettles notions of material depth and so, semantic poignancy of man. The flattening effect arises from his prioritising of straight lines and the formation of overlapping planes (Barr Jr, 1975: 54). To limit Cubism to its subversive representation, however, is to reduce art, once again to aestheticism. It is to Heideggers later writings that we owe this transition from art being of extraneous content; an accurate depiction of reality (things in the world), to a heuristically-invested moment empowered by a new prestige placed upon thought and feeling. As Heidegger encouraged of Modernist thought, we must engage with the world as if it were of our making: the self and the world are existentially inseparable (Lehan 2012: 4), and it is this sentiment which recurs in the work of Picasso. Heidegger talks of the way in which human experience is shaped by things rather than the sensory stimulations they provide; i.e. the noise a door makes is not acutely perceived as tonal or variegated but simply attributed to that things call. He states: In order to hear a pure noise, we must listen away from the things, pull our ears away from them, i.e. hear abstractly (Heidegger, 2006: 10). Translating this to a visual art medium, Picasso dislodges the taken-for-granted thingness of the body by removing those constituents which make it so. Instead, the body appears fragmentary; it is not a thing which only occupies spatio-temporality, it is unfixed subject to spatio-temporality and subjective acuity. McLuhan (1964: 5) confirms: Cubist painting drops the illusion of perspective in favour of instant sensory awareness of the whole.Picassos use of colour is indexical of a departure from univeralist perception and moves toward the heightened subjectivity of Analytic Cubism. The painting epitomises the way he and his contemporaries reduce[d] shading to a mere component of surface design and color scheme (Greenberg 1989: 82). His use of tertiary coral against the more appropriate flesh tone is not an acknowledgement of light, and its effect upon the contour of the body, rather, Picasso creates his own contours through stylised linearity and colour choice, carving the subject into new constituents of his own making/thinking. Its portrayal is a harmony of lights and shadesindependent of the subject depicted in the picture. (Apollinaire [1912] quoted in Danchev 2011).Interestingly, the faces of the right-hand side of composition have undergone a more grotesque metamorphosis. He has heavily shaded the faces of the female figures (an incongruous shade of green lengthens and pulls apart the face in the upper quadrant) to a level somewhat surreal and mask-like. In addition, the bodies of the two women appear more distorted as the background becomes more intrusive and effectively halts limb completion. Such apparent nonchalance around representation was a conscious strategy which Picasso employed (Foster 2011: 80). The body is, thus, no longer formed stuff (Heidegger, 2006: 14). It is, then, a question of precedenting form over substance by producing an introspective into the immateriality of bodily components. As McLuhan (1964: 5) writes: Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. It appears more than a denunciation of former artistic practice. Prior conception dictated the importance of harmony between background and foreground composition, desired a perception of light akin to the collective eyes, bounded colour to the entity which contained it and, above all, demanded meaning to be conveyed by content. Cubism reenvigorates sensory awareness, a recognition of human idiosyncracy and the potential for an undisclosed nature of things. As Greenberg (1989: 58) affirms, the primary aim of the Cubist was to analyze every part of every motif into its smallest negotiable plane.And so, Les Demoiselles dAvignon exhibits a disengagement with the primacy of realism and the stoicism of an object as singular in purpose, intent and form and, instead, participates in a rethinking of the object, paying close attention the multiplicity of form, shape, colour, quality and presence. Through transposure of shape upon the body and the translation of the body into shape, the accurate or real is no longer the aim. As Apollinaire ([1912] quoted in Danchev 2011) puts it: Verisimilitude no longer has any importanceThis creation of a microcosmic depiction through the subjective eye is further evident in the work of collaborator in the Cubist movement, Georges Braque. As Greenberg (1989: 70) identifies: Braque and Picasso were concerned...with holding on to a painting as an art of representation and illusion. It therefore becomes the task of the Cubist painter to transgress the enacted boundaries between art and life, the real and the represented. It is precisely that theme that we see so somatically addressed in Braque and Picassos collages (a medium invented by the Cubist movement). In a similar way to the Avant-Gardes Ready-Mades, Cubist collage made use of the ordinary, everyday, found object objet trouv (Kachur 2009) and reinscribed them with a significance reserved for art during a process of assemblage (Kachur 2009). While being a highly novel means of representation, during the process of collage, Braque and fellow Cubists were able to challenge codifed thingness by presenting objects which could not pertain to an empirical system and so could exist outside of forceably-acquired judgement. Pre-conceived understanding of the thing is, then, undermined.In Fruit Dish and Glass (1912), Braques was able to establish the three-dimensionality Cubists craved from the two-dimensional medium of the canvas. In doing so, it could be suggested that he further discouraged pure aestheticism of the arts in favour of a more dynamic and affecting rhetoric. He pasted textured wallpaper directly onto the canvas, defying its limitations of representation and creating a dialogue between previous binaries of imagined and depicted. Heidegger (2006: 21) reiterates: the traditional concepts of thing [which were already flawed] do not suffice in artwork. The objets trouves, then, must be reflected upon as they singularly appear in the artwork and not suffer the depreciation by way of a confining signification system.There is a certain translatory and frenetic quality created by the disjuncture of its shaded right angles and the font which appears to be falling, not in correlation to but extraneous to the compositions geometry. One therefore might call it quasi-geometric as the contradictory lines and shapes fail to contain or direct its conflicting subjects. Braque (1917) commands of artists: "One must not imitate what one wants to create" (Braques, Reflections on Painting 1917). Such a statement reveals Braques feelings upon the imitatative nature of art prior, and the expectation of proceeding art which Cubists established. He thus reinvents the genre of art as not one of pure mimicry of the real but an invention of a new, self-contained reality.The surrealist movement, arguably, distorted the domain of representation further. Of Surrealist collage, Max Ernst suggested it was the systematic exploitation of the fortuitous or engineered encounter of two or more intrinsically incompatible realities on a surface which is manifestly inappropriate for the purpose (Ernst, quoted in Danchev, 2011: 242). To extricate Ernsts claims, it is the concurrence of two parallel and discordant realities which confront codified significance. Similar themes are then present between the distinct movements to make communal semiotics vulnerable therefore making clear the importance of not simply modernising the Arts, but modernisning sensibility.It is no accident that Foster (2011: 15, 52) chooses to foreground the publishing of Sigmund Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams as indexical of a transition into Modern Art. His psychoanalytic work demanded a rejection of codifed human subjectivity and the precendence of thought; it required an acknowledgement of an internal psyche over which we have no control: a locus of incarceration: repressed instincts and unconscious desires (Foster, 2011: 52). Fundamentally, it was an acknowledgement of waking-reality providing much of the material for the dream (Hildebrandt, quoted in Freud, 1991: 68) and the way in which standard semiosis between realities conjured in the dream were external to the conscious mind in a process of unconscious dreamwork (Freud, 1991: 264). It appears then that the Surrealist aim was to enhance Freudian dream theory by visually reproducing the incongruity of the manifest dream. Unlike Cubism, which, it has been argued, is a prioritisation of individual consciousness in seeing and being, Surrealism exceeds cognisance and portrays that which goes beyond both collective significance and singular awareness. For Surrealists, consciousness becomes synonymous with constraint.In Andre Bretons Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) he proclaims freedom is the only [word] that still excites me (quoted in Danchev, 2011: 243). He alludes to Freuds concept of repressed desires the madness that one locks up (Danchev, 2011: 243) and the Surrealists fundamental practice of underminining conscious signification emerged from Freudian interest (Danchev, 2011: 242). In his Surrealist poem, Ascendant Sign, Breton condemns the pervasive logic and rationality imposed upon thought to which he equates the parasitic undercurrent of spiritualism, which weakens or even cripples [consciousness] potentialities (Breton, quoted in Caws, 2001: 136). The Surrealist movement, therefore, set about releasing the potential of the unconscious mind in order to depart from a collective understanding of the world and reveal the arbitrary process of representation. Breton sought to solv[e] all the principal problems of life (Breton quoted in Danchev, 2011: 247-8).In his oil painting, Men Shall Know Nothing of This (1923), Ernst harvests the incontainable, free representation of dreams. He, first, assembles a highly tonal background which appeals to viewers perception of how a painting works: create an eye-line, sit items atop it (as in still-lifes and landscapes). Instead, two pairs of dismembered legs which form an irregular octagon are the focal point and, though they cannot be said to directly connote intercourse, the sexual impression remains. At this point, the signifier challenges its enclitic signified and the legs begin to be more easily intelligible if allowed to signify scales and balance able to steady the horizontal moon. The exchange of potency between celestial bodies and the human body is just one of the ways communal passivity is undermined in favour of an active engagement with the making of an object by a similar process as dreamwork. As Freud (1991: 71) writes: dreams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life In Ernsts work, entitled so as to propose its relation to something out of a human realm of sentience, he exploits aestheticism by painting comprehensible entities but omitting an unintelligible discourse with which to process them. The viewer is thus confronted with the idea that narratives occur outside even subjective interpretation the unconscious. Herald of Surrealism, Andr Breton, identifies the way dreams are subjugated by waking events and proposes occupying the hiatus between states of dream and reality: surreality (Breton quoted in Danchev 2011: 245-7). In terms of representation, in his role as the artist, Ernst enables a transcendence from pictoral art and/or an artists quality being qualified by his perfect simulation of reality. More than that, Ernst introduces a dimension outside our understanding of agency.In Ascendant Sign (quoted in Caws, 2001: 134) Breton declares: the only manifest truth in the world is governed by the spontaneous, clairvoyant, insolent connection established under certain conditions between two things whose conjunction would not be permitted by common sense. Categorically, Breton defines the dream. For the Surrealists, even subjectivity was not distant enough from the universalist-thinking proposed. It was only in accessing something other-worldly, so out of human experience; irrational, could they begin to find reason, untainted by the infected mind.A more prosaic poem by Breton reveals the Surrealist aim. He creates unintelligible conditions and spheres in which conflicting trajectories can exist as an attempt to create the fantastical; that which is lack in lived experience.You don't know this man? It's Mr. Same. May I introduce Madam Madam? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps turn back too, but I don't know exactly what on.(Breton, Less Time, in Caws, 2001)Here, he juxtaposes endorsed means of introduction with non-sequitur declaratives. The reader is left as confounded as the poetic voice by the incongruity and implausibilities proposed: the name, Madam Madam does not differentiate the subject; how can inanimate steps decide and act? As the poem continues it becomes clear that such a recollection can only be a product of the unconscious mind; an attempt to depict the actual function of thoughtin the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern (Breton quoted in Danchev, 2011: 247). And so, he denounces the real for its unfaithfulness to lived experience (both conscious and unconscious) and, instead, Surrealism explores the unconceived for [o]nly the marvellous is beautiful (Breton quoted in Danchev, 2011: 247).To conclude, while the Modernist era will continue to be quantified by the diverse representational strategies it offered in opposition to monological perception, it has been argued that it chiefly provided novel ways of being. The Cubism movement displaced the materiality of things by releasing the heuristic potential of the senses. Surrealists, meanwhile, engaged with an altogether different understanding of what it means to be human, acknowledging a part of existence outside conscious living. Though vastly different in the work they produced, both movements then, address the incompetency of universalism in that it can never access the latent potency of human experience. More than simply meeting the demands of the Modernist era, they craved an exploratory means of being artistic novelty was purely a by-product. As Modernist director and philosopher, Bertolt Brecht, declares: Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it (quoted in McLaren and Leonard 1993: 80).

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