AAE 5104 Lesson III (26.09.05) 現代主義在西方(On Modern West)

主講：梁寶山

這堂課以一小時半的極短速勾勒了現代性與現代主義在西方的主要發展，並不是一個完整的歷史敘述。透過這次課堂，我希望同學能把握相關的基本概念外，還學會如何在堂上進行思辯，並閱讀原典。

On Modernity & Modernism:

modern 現代/ 摩登- Litan- contemporary - division in time; in against to the past, directed to future

-1789 French Revolution; 1841 Opium War to 1949 establishment of the PRC

-Modernity is in terms of technology advancement; while Modernism is the critical responds of modern wo/men to this new human condition.

-City- urban- metropolis- born in the drastic economical and demographical changes in European cities (Paris 3 m; London 5m; Berlin 2m by WW I)

-modernism is an evolutionist notion of human civilization; critique to anti-traditionalism (復古)

Modernism (Charles Harrison 1992)

-In history of art: 1860s French Paintings (or early 19^th century) -1960s American Paintings

1. Urbanization and Industrialization: the transformation of human experience/ Georg Simmel: “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces. (The Metropolis and Modern Life ,1902-03)” > the call for painter to capture the modern condition: “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable ” (Baudelaire 1863) e.g. private space as marker place in Manat’s Olympia (~ realism?)
2. High art distinguished from classical, academic, the conservatives, the popular and mass culture (~ Avant Grade vs. kitsch): (anesthetization of the moral challenge, i.e. the modernist)- “the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself- not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” (Greenberge 1960).- self-critical, self-referential and original/ e.g. Manat’s Olympia: from pictorial illusion to decorated surface/~ disinterested (Kantain aesthetics)> devoicing from the “concern of society”
3. As a critical tradition: Clive Bell, Roger Fry, R. H. Wilenski, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried / (modernist theory formulated in criticism and art history , art that subservient to)/ the talks of artistic autonomy, artistic quality, aesthetic value…/ formalism and abstraction/

Urbanization and Industrialization:

1. Compacted space experience in a new time frame.
2. Haussmann’s Paris:
1. Second Empire capitalism took firmer grip: Napolean III’s economic planning.
2. Demolishment of quarter and the building of standardized avenues and boulevards, 85 miles long straight with planned trees. All built in the heart of the old city. Civil facilities on the British model.
3. Emerge of the bourgeoisie, middle class, and commoditization of leisure life
3. Baudelaire: the painter should capture “the ephemeral, the figurative, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”

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T. J. Clark, The Painter of the Modern Life (1985)

- social history of art

View from Notre-Dome

-City rendered as a broken image, spectacle (yet not in the 1860s): city of Europe (not France)

-The final triumph of the bourgeoisie: public space and the bourgeoisie modesty, business and sociability,

-Re-definition of public and private domain

-Spectacle: “seeing” as a leisure activity; to be “seen” as Parisian, Exposition Universelle de 1867, shop window, side walks cafe

-Modernity not yet found its image

Olympia’s Choice

- class disguised by deployment of empty signifier; identity become a performance: the fears come from “the fact of her own falsity”

-nude and nakedness (also see John Berger); challenged to the myth of courtisane (eroticism in an unembarrassed way); nude as “abstract being”

-female representation: separation of sexuality from her body, the object being looked at (~ more to explore on psychoanalysis, e.g. “lack of the phallus” and “fetish” )

-commoditization: courtisane/ prostitute – the subject mixed up money and sexuality, on the edge of the new social order

-linear and flatness (in high visual certainty) vs. the “painterly” tradition

-materiality of paint-ing (modernism)

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Perspectives:

-from window to wall

-rational rendering of time and space on a single plane

-the looking subject

-the power to look and possession of the art object

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Reference:

Charles Harrison, “Modernism”, Francis Frascina & Jonathan Harris ed., Art in Modern Culture: an anthology of critical text, New York : Icon Editions, Harper Collins, 1992, pp142-155.

John Berger, Chapter II, Ways of Seeing (1974).

T. J. Clark, The Painter of the Modern Life (1985)

Please also see very useful teaching material:

Frascina, Francis, Manet and modernism, Milton Keynes : Open University Press, 1983.

Frascina, Francis, Abstract expressionism and Jackson Pollock ,Milton Keynes : Open University Press, 1983.