Afterword

On 17 December 2016, I had the good fortune to see a video installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Written, directed, and produced by Julian Rosefeldt, largely in and around Berlin, Manifesto staged thirteen scenarios—simultaneously looped on massive screens in the cavernous armory—in which extracts from nearly seventy avant-garde manifestos were performed by Cate Blanchett, featured in thirteen strikingly different roles. Her virtuosity redeployed even the most emphatic manifesto rhetoric into monologues that seem spontaneously uttered in a series of vivid locales, ranging from a cemetery to a fertilizer factory, a film studio, a drab apartment block, a former Olympic village, a puppet workshop, a recycling facility, and more. Blanchett, in effect, perpetuates the spirit of Fernando Pessoa, as if she were embodying heteronyms, not playing roles. ...

Jazzbandism

A paramount example of “making it new” in the early twentieth century was the unprecedented global phenomenon of jazz. This chapter chronicles the impact of jazz, understood not strictly as music but as agent of American modernity as the implacable engine of the new. During the Twenties a reciprocity between modernism and jazz was taken for granted; jazz was lifestyle modernism. In Europe jazz was welcomed as a vehicle of postwar revitalization. In America it was denounced as a fad or craze, albeit defended by some as a new artform, along with film, comics, vaudeville, and other popular entertainments. Debates about folk authenticity versus commercial exploitation, primitivism versus the ultra-modern, as well as racial and cultural purity swarmed around jazz for more than a decade. It also became a surrogate subject for modernism in music, with Stravinsky held up as avatar of all things progressive and/or regressive—and, it was assumed, a spawn of jazz.

Luminous Sores

This chapter focuses on the transformative interface of modernity and modernism, with special attention to its visage as the “Machine Age.” The impact of modernization, combined with industrial warfare, recalibrated the sensory ratios of the human organism. The age of nerves it was called, registering the impact of speed and the imperative to apprehend the new order in flashes of instantaneous apperception. Practitioners across the arts learned to articulate disarticulation. The ensuing dissonance spawned by innovation, threatening inherited forms with obsolescence, was at once invigorating and dispiriting. Aesthetic transformation was felt with pathic sensitivity as a kind of artistic bereavement, as well as a necessary cleansing. Past and future grinding against each other like tectonic plates precipitated what the Surrealists called convulsive beauty.

Make It New

Ezra Pound’s oft-cited 1934 slogan “Make It New” has long served as an unofficial mantra of modernism. But exhortations to artistic renovation had provided a steady background to modern art and literature for several decades by then. For many it meant starting from scratch, an initiative notably prominent after the First World War as many envisioned a new world, a new order displacing nationalist predation with cosmopolitan internationalism. Paeans to the new accelerated after the war, tautological, euphoric, feeding on a momentary energy reflecting not only new forms but a new form of life. After 1929 that optimism was countered by rival applications, booster slogans like the New Deal and the New Germany, as the aesthetic avowal of the new came under assault from reactionary political tendencies.

Introduction

In his Preface to the catalogue of the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Éli Faure proposed that today’s revolutionaries are the classics of tomorrow (“le révolutionaire d’aujourd’hui est le classique de demain”). Lecturing at Cambridge and Oxford in June 1926, Gertrude Stein observed that “the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic,” a transition so instantaneous “there is hardly a moment in between.”...

The New Mythology

After the Great War, the emerging values in art were purification and organization. Furthermore, Constructivism emerged in the early USSR as a determined effort to rethink the role of art in the milieu of a social tabula rasa. Artistic attempts to reconstitute primal qualities were linked with the effort to revitalize art by vanquishing “Art” altogether. The quest for a new realism affirmed the primal qualities in art as abstract or concrete, the terms of which were recapitulated in the 1936 publication Circle. Contemporaneously, Finnegans Wake was being serialized in the journal Transition, and James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” came to exemplify a new mythology for all the arts. The chapter concludes with a look at the exponents of abstraction and Surrealism in their American exile during the Second World War, as these opposing initiatives began to merge in their quest for a new mythology.

Renaissance of the Archaic

The wartime scene in New York continues with Finnegans Wake once again setting a precedent, this time for the Abstract Expressionists. It was a moment when they—like the European exiles among them—were exploring the indigenous art of the Americas and the unfathomable scope of the archaic revealed by successive discoveries in Europe of Paleolithic caves, from Altamira to Lascaux. They—along with the European exiles—found these discoveries existentially chastening, inspiring the insistence of poet Charles Olson on the “post-modern” urgency of a post-humanist outlook, recoverable in prehistory. As figuration receded from art, the aura of the symbol was invested in the titles of paintings, which were abuzz with terms like “night” and “archaic.” But a palpable symbol did emerge, not as artifice but as semiotic index in the form of the human hand.

Multiplied Man

The title of this chapter comes from Marinetti’s uomo moltiplicato, a rallying cry for Italian Futurism. The artifice of optimism is here arrayed in a carnival procession or roll call of name changes, names in flux in the sprawl of pseudonyms endemic in modernism. The supreme instance of this phenomenon is Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa with his host of heteronyms, alternate identities with their own unique practices. The case of Pessoa illustrates and affirms Nietzsche’s hypothesis of the subject as multiple, appraised by William Butler Yeats as “the emotion of multitude.” The pseudonyms and heteronyms populate the modern arts as if “making it new” commenced with the proper name.

Gathering Hay in a Thunderstorm

Concentrating on two case histories—that of art historian Aby Warburg in a psychiatric institution, and poet H.D. in psychoanalysis with Freud—the war trauma of noncombatants provides insight into the curative properties of antiquity. These cases reveal an intermediate zone between pathos and pathology, or feeling and distress, as they are profiled against the backdrop of what Stefan Zweig identified as the “new pathos”—a phrase adopted as the title of an Expressionist journal in Germany. Urban modernity’s new rhythms provoked explorations of a new or transformed body, a visionary corporeal reanimation theorized by filmmaker Jean Epstein as the advent of a new health emerging from the collective pathogenesis of the Great War.

The Ache of Modernism

The “ache of modernism” registered convulsive social transformations of the process of modernity as they crested in the fin de siècle. Early in the twentieth century, artists began embracing the future as provocation to a new artistic reckoning. In the process they rejected inherited protocols of presentation and representation. At the same time, they responded affirmatively to the challenges of new media, particularly cinema. But recursions from the distant past, like the commedia dell’arte, proved equally influential. These combined sources of replenishment from past and future inspired modernists in all the arts to assume an acrobatic attitude, affirming art as athletic prerogative commensurate with such popular enterprises as vaudeville and slapstick comedy in cinema.