Telling the Story of Modern Art

In an interview published recently here at Ethika Politika, the critic Gregory Wolfe derided authors who lament the present state of culture and literature, dismissing their concerns as so much “ideology,” an attachment to what he called “declinism” and the simplistic moral reasoning underlying it.  As a full-fledged declinist myself, and someone who is as pessimistic about the state of contemporary culture as one could be, I have to say that Wolfe’s dismissals reveal a startling lack of acquaintance with the historical developments that formed (or more properly, deformed) modern art and culture.

Modern art cannot be understood apart from the historical narrative that many of its works are meant to embody.  Uniquely among artistic periods, the styles and forms (such as they are) of the modernist era arise from a certain story about man’s spiritual history, and receive their justification only from that narrative.  What one makes of much modern art, therefore, will have a great deal to do with how much credence one lends to that narrative.

One of the best retellings of the story of modern art can be found in Karsten Harries’s The Meaning of Modern Art, a book that deserves far more attention than it has received to this point.  For Harries, the story of modern art is unquestionably the story of what happens to a culture when it loses faith in a God-centered cosmology:

Art too expresses an ideal image of man, and an essential part of understanding the meaning of a work of art is understanding this image … When this ideal image changes, art, too, must change.  It is thus possible to look at the emergence of modern art as a function of the disintegration of the Platonic-Christian conception of man.

The initial stage in this disintegration, one in its incipience as early as the late Middle Ages, takes the form of a subjectivism emerging from “a distinction … between the world as it is in itself and as it reveals itself to man,” Harries writes. For the first time, “The world which man faces is no longer the world but his world, and this world is one which is fundamentally dependent on the knower.  Man has constituted his world.”  A “negative sublime” emerges, which:

presents the world in its nothingness, but not to reveal a meaningful reality beyond or behind the finite.  The only transcendence revealed is that of man himself … A new ideal image of man has emerged which does not acknowledge a measure beyond man.

Over time, this conviction in the autonomy of man’s intellect would give rise to an “aesthetics of subjectivity,” which enshrined the freedom of the artist—his ability to constitute his own world—as the highest value.  Whatever was inimical to the exercise of that freedom, whatever claimed, in any way, some precedence over that freedom, was to be rejected by the artist.  Hence, as Harries notes, “a first and key determination of such art is its negativity.  It is anti-: anti-religion, anti-morality, anti-nature, and in the end even anti-art.”

One manifestation of this fundamentally negative orientation can be found in the preoccupation of many 19^th-century artists with “satan, hell, witches’ Sabbaths, and black masses,” as well as in those later, systematic deformations of nature that arise in modernism, wherein “familiar objects are taken out of context, distorted, fractured, or dismembered.”  But the subjectivism of modern art manifests itself in subtler ways too, such as in the “hermetism” of a great deal of modern poetry, which often abandons the norms of discursive communication altogether, on the assumption that “definite meaning is thought to be incompatible with artistic freedom.”  All of these stylistic eccentricities arise as so many expressions of the conviction, stated by the cubist painter Georges Braques, that “things in themselves do not exist at all.  They exist only through us.”

Of course, there must be a limit to this pursuit of absolute freedom:

[T]he artist creates works which are as free as possible from all that reflects man’s dependence on the world with its cares and concerns.  And yet, what does such negation lead to?  As long as the underlying conception of freedom is fundamentally negative there can be only one answer: silence.

Harries believed that western art had pretty much reached that limit by mid-century, citing the “white square” of the painter Malevich as a point beyond which the destructive subjectivism of the modern artist cannot proceed.  “Destruction having done its work,” Harries writes, “a new positive is demanded.”

Harries regards this state of affairs in a tragic light, the consequence of a descent into self-consciousness that could not be avoided, which was modern man’s “fate rather than his choice.”  This is why he describes complaints about the obscurity or difficulty of modern art as fundamentally mistaken; they stem from a desire to measure art by a “standard of communicability” that emerged from a traditional worldview, a worldview no longer given credence.  “The hermetism of much modern art is an inevitable outcome of the idealization of freedom.  As long as this emphasis is retained a truly public art is unattainable.”  The loss of the ancient cosmology calls into question whether we even possess a standard sufficient to speak about the health or sickness of our culture: “is it still possible today to take man for granted?  Do we still have a conception of what constitutes health adequate enough to make it possible to diagnose the sickness which finds expression in modern art?”

This faint sketch hardly begins to do justice to the compelling narrative that Harries presents, but even from this brief summary, several salient points come into focus.  The significance accorded to the notion of “self-consciousness” is paramount; the “aesthetics of subjectivity” that come to shape modern art are said to have their origin in an increased awareness of the ways in which we create, rather than simply apprehend, the world around us.  The unmistakable note of determinism is crucial too, the contention that the direction of modern art was something dictated by “fate rather than choice.”  But above all, Harries’s story demonstrates how the bizarre, and often ugly, repertoire of modern architecture, painting, music, theater, and poetry developed as a way of expressing a certain interpretation of Western spiritual history, rather than from a reflection on the intrinsic ends of art itself.

One consequence of this fact is that no fundamental departure from prevalent artistic styles and forms can be effected until that narrative is adequately challenged.  We are stuck at the “white square” until someone can explain why the historical narrative that led us there is fundamentally misguided.  Artists and critics wishing to produce a “new positive” must take this task seriously.  They must realize that any progress in technique at this stage of history is contingent upon the possibility of seeing through the metaphysical self-images that modernity has constructed for itself.

More importantly, though, Harries’s book ought to show us why we should consider the dominant modernist narrative to be misguided in the first place.  For his is a story about the desuetude of rational judgment under the imperatives of history, about how the “fated” unfolding of Western spiritual history has simply rendered it impossible, once and for always, to erect viable standards for the guidance of artistic creation.  But the reality is that we are still moved by art as much as men ever were; still enraptured by music written certain ways, and not others; still at home in a built environment constructed according to certain methods, and not others.  The moment we realize this, we realize too that we are as fully capable of reflecting on our aesthetic experience, and applying rational judgment to it, as any of our predecessors.  We find that a discourse of artistic standards is as possible—and as difficult—for us as it has ever been.  The legend of historical determinism abolishing these faculties forever should strike us as a preposterous superstition, alleging the impossibility of feats that we still have very much in our own power.

The veracity of Harries’s whole story grows suspect in light of these reflections.  We see, for instance, that the increase in self-consciousness at the center of that story may be interpreted in a radically different way.  Rather than understanding this increase as a movement toward enlightenment—a rise towards greater self-understanding—we can interpret it as a precipitous descent into forgetfulness, a spiraling mindlessness of the “measure beyond man” from which we truly derive our greatest insight into our own natures.  The attempt to locate “the self” by delving into ever greater depths of interiority—a search wonderfully instantiated in the prose of a Joyce or a Proust—can be seen as a chimerical enterprise, a turning away from the transcendent realities that are something other than “man himself,” and according to which selves are made, not discovered.  The “pursuit of absolute freedom,” a pursuit that follows directly from the rejection of a “measure beyond man,” can be considered as disastrous a chase for the modern artist as it has been for the modern moral and political actor.

Toward the end of his book, Harries maintains that “if the truth is there is no transcendent meaning, man will live without the truth … If honesty must lead to nihilism, man will be dishonest.”  His assumption that modernity’s movement toward nihilism has been a movement toward truth, and that in expressing that nihilism, modern art has been offering us a glimpse of the truth—these are assumptions common to most stories about the rise of modern art.  We can, however, tell a different story about how the Western mind has slid into terrible ignorance—an ignorance of first origins and ultimate ends—and how, as a result, man’s art began to instantiate false images of himself and his world—a story that, as I have argued before, is adjunct to broader narratives about the avalanching philosophical and spiritual confusion of modernity.

A rival account of modern art is one that tells the story of how modern artists, in losing sight of the genuine nature of man, eventually lost sight of the true ends of their disciplines; how the deterioration of technique evident throughout the modernist era betrays a loss of wisdom; and how the “aesthetics of subjectivity” at its heart stems from the grandest lie ever told.  In short, it is a story about a decline. 

The possibility of cultural renewal depends on our capacity to tell that story—a story about how man’s spiritual blindness divorced him from beauty and truth, and how beauty and truth, embodied in a new kind of art, will open his eyes once more to the “measure beyond man” by which alone he comes to know himself.