Account of a singular modernity

Pensamiento, 2017

In this article I propose a reflection on art as an expression of the redefinition of modern culture. Art, in effect, expresses the lines that define the world, but at the same time produces a dif- ferent form of truth. That is why a discourse on art cannot ignore an analysis of the world in which it originates and that somehow it tries to express. In this direction, three readings of the question of mo- dernity are considered: the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, Barbarism by Henry, and The End of Modernity by Vattimo. In the second part, the discourse focuses on the manifestation of the crisis in art, trying to offer other meanings, from different philosophical approaches, to the transition from modernity to postmodernity.

The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture , 2016

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and trans- form each other? What is modernism’s logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neoliberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism’s afterlives and reverberations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, tele- vision, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.

The history of art since 1945 is typically understood in terms of the ascendance, crisis, and transformation of modernism. In this account, a select group of 19th and early 20th-century European avant-gardes established the models by which subsequent advanced art would be produced and judged. The influence of centers like Paris, Berlin, and Moscow was disrupted by the events of World War II, after which New York City became the hub of an increasingly global art world, one in which modernist styles were the common language. However, the dominance of modernism, which began to be challenged in the 1950s, was gravely undermined in the 1960s as successive movements like Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art challenged its most basic assumptions. In the decades that followed, as these critical tendencies themselves became accepted wisdom, modernism was transcended (as in the case of postmodernism), recuperated (by artists like the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s), or transformed (as when contemporary artists use modernist histories as the basis for artistic research). In recent years, prominent critics and curators have even tested the idea that “modernism is our antiquity,” serving much the same role for us as the classical era did for the modernists. Like all “master narratives,” this one has its share of truth, and we will begin our survey of modern and contemporary art by studying its core features. We will evaluate some of the most influential critical accounts of modernism and modernity, viewing these categories from political, economic, and artistic perspectives. Surveying the development of the historic avant-gardes in Western and Central Europe, we will define and contrast two competing critical models: one based on a commitment to formalism, the other on the transformation of art’s social function. Turning to the postwar period, we will explore the moment of “high modernism,” when various forms of abstraction were thought to be the paragon of artistic achievement –– and when this consensus supported the new cultural politics of U.S. hegemony. Moving forward, we will examine the ways in which the dominance of modernism came into question, whether in new forms like Happenings and installations, or in locations outside the North Atlantic that were thought by many to be “peripheral.” We will pay close attention to the numerous forms that questioned modernist dogmas during the 1960s and 70s, including performance, actions, Arte Povera, Land Art, artists’ publications, social practice, and various modes of media art. The course will end by examining some of the many ways in which modernism has survived its supposed demise, whether on the art market, across the biennial circuit, or even in the experimental forms that would seem to have left it behind. However, even as we tell ourselves this story about modernism, we will also be critically attending to its oversights. In surveying the broad range of pre-war modernisms, we will ask how and why American critics like Clement Greenberg privileged a formalist modernism over other possible definitions, considering how these other models might allow us to better grasp the interplay between different media, or between art, technology, and mass culture. When possible, we will consider examples from fields that were often overlooked by modernist critics, including dance, textiles, and design. We will think critically about the role that exhibitions and museums have played in popularizing and historicizing art. The course will pay especially close attention to the ways in which the international hegemony of modernism was contested from its supposed margins, analyzing practices from Latin America, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it aims to revise our understanding of how this history might yet matter in the present and future.

Digital Modernism Heritage Lexicon, 2021

The architectural and cultural heritage built in the early decades of the twentieth century is often a critical and controversial topic. "History is always written by winners", and in the case of cultural conflicts, the narratives of the events support the prevalence of a thesis on the others that was overshadowed, denied and then forgotten. It is the case of the opposition between the two types of Modernism: the rigorous Modern Movement and the most decorative Modern Style. They are the two souls of Modernism: a democratic tendency focused on art-industry relationship, and "the other" aesthetic, elitist, decadent still tied to the handmade craft and the elitist production of luxury goods. These two opposite movements influenced each other until their competition has brought to stay out of history "the other modernity", blurred by the pervasiveness of the Modern Movement. In this article will be discussed the two souls of Modernism and the prevailing of the Modern Movement with the consequent forgetting of the Modern Style, highlighting their different aesthetics, social and ideological features.

modernism/modernity, Vol. 22, No. 2

Outlines a new, two-stage history of modernism, linked to a transition between 'heavy' and 'light' phases of modernity.

World Art 4: 1-5, 2014

The Postmodernism and the bygone era of " concept within context " let us live a " temporal adhocracy " in a virtual loop. Designed to emphasize the transformation, discourses had been on the rise up until the obituary of art. Parallel to the developments in the socioeconomic system under recurringly permanent transformations, the medium and the institutions of art have had its own share. My study is aimed to show the problems of contemporary art world, through various practices, and practically what has been changed in art and how it has been transformed is being questioned after a reckoning with modernism and the debate on context.

21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, 2024

As art history begins to take seriously the imperative to decolonize, one of the most vexing areas of resistance to change is the conventional periodization of art historical epochs. Even while acknowledging that spatial divisions like West and Non-West are deeply problematic, as are geographic divisions per se, we continue to honor the “history” in the discipline’s nomenclature by insisting on temporality as a primary organizing category. The period commonly designated as “modernist” (roughly 1860 to 1960) is particularly difficult to divorce from Western ideals of progress as defined both by technological “advances” and by the heroization of artistic “innovation”. When the modernist moment attempts to open itself up to global narratives, its structuring undercurrent is a particular vision of the art of the West. In this essay, I read the conventional narrative of modernism through a decolonial lens and revisit the reception of Impressionism in the 1910s and 1920s in Mexico to consider how an artistic idiom widely seen as retrograde at that moment became the basis for a radical rethinking around the democratization of art. My analysis exposes how, because of its championing of novelty and its inherent Eurocentrism, the category of modernism obscures and suppresses artists and narratives that fall outside of its limited purview.