A case for modern art as resistance to modernity
One need only to scroll briefly through any art-minded feed to uncover the tenuous relationship the internet has with modern art. A less enlightened editor of this paper has told me that he cannot stand anything after Warhol (why the line is drawn at him, I do not know). The painting Blue Monochrome by Yves Klein is perfect for these attacks. The painting is a solid, blue-pigment-covered canvas. Spoken in a unity of knowledge and humility that is characteristic of the online world, the commenters say, “I could do that.” Now, rather than offering the typical “then why didn’t you?” retort, I suggest that we leave aside concerns of the skill or formalistic modes involved in modern art. Rather, I will discuss modern art in terms of a societal need for art. The philosopher J. M. Bernstein discusses in his article, “Freedom from Nature? Post-Hegelian Reflections on the End of Art,” precisely how modern art manifests as a testament to the sociocultural need for art through a focus on medium.
In the late-19th century, the arts found themselves in a difficult place. On the one hand, the photograph threatened the authority of the arts’ claim to represent the world; painting and sculpture pale in comparison to the ability of a picture to capture its world. On the other, the increasingly universal market threatened to reduce all art to an abstraction in the form of price. Bernstein suggests that we read on the former a reduction of the world to rational mechanisms: cold and inhuman calculations meant to maximize efficiency. The camera is the mechanical-rational artform par excellence. And on the latter, the market reduces all differences between physical artworks to the homogeneity of exchange. The art markets are indifferent to the particularity of their commodities. Seen as but one manifestation of a larger tendency in modernity’s development, the threat of this two-fold encroachment upon the arts is a threat to the promises of modernity itself. The movement that had promised a free and flourishing society betrayed its promise. Rather, modernity brought upon itself the destitution of human activity in favour of mechanical processes and a homogeneity which masks itself as individual freedom. Bernstein finds in the arts a way to resist this encroachment of the coldly calculating modernity in favour of the modernity that was lost. By embodying the promises of modernity, the arts can stand in resistance to the perverted modernity which manifests in our ways of living together.
To become a testament to difference, heterogeneity, and the physical, art descends upon its own medium in defence against the attacks of modernism. Its first defence was novelty: works had to discover within their own medium what exactly that medium was. Painting moved away from depicting the world towards an exploration of two-dimensional space—pigment and canvas. We can look at Frank Stella’s The Marriage of Freedom and Squalor, II, which art critic Donald Judd notes in his essay, “Specific Objects,” has become an ordinary object through Stella’s rendering of painting as purely physical. In this sense, painting resists the homogenising impulse by leaning into its incomparable physicality, which cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in the Arcades Project, calls the “ultimate entrenchment of art.” Isolated within its medium, art becomes opaque as it latches to its physical qualities which cannot be reduced by the clean expressions of rational thought. There always remains something in it that can’t be captured by that same rationality which birthed the marketisation and rationalisation of the world. It is this absence of reducibility that allows art to become symbolic. Symbolism requires a distance between the object and that which it symbolizes. Art’s opacity maintains that distance by resisting its collapse into the analytics of thought. It is this symbolic capacity that allows art to enter the conceptual world. Art, then, signals to its own ideal. But the idea that art must represent is specific, as it derives from the artwork’s need to be novel as a resistance to the oncoming of modernity—the idea that we must create unique physical forms. The individuality of these artworks, as resistance, is a recognition of all the individualities that are lost in modernity’s project—those sensible particularities forgotten in the homogenising and rationalising functions of the modern world. Thus, in a self-reflective turn, the symbol found in modern art calls for our need of the symbolic itself. That is, the symbol as that which cannot be abstracted away by the functions of modern capitalism. Art becomes the symbolisation of the need for itself in the face of a world increasingly hostile to novelty, difference, and the individual.