Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (review)

Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Ed. Lynda Jessup. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 223. $85.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

This book is the end product of a process begun with a weekend symposium held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in April 1996. The symposium (organized by the book's editor), was part of a larger series of programs helping to frame "The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation," a major exhibition circulated by the National Gallery of Canada to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first exhibition of the most well-known group of Canadian artists in the twentieth century. As is the case with many books of essays arising from such a process, this collection is a stimulating, provocative group of papers of uneven quality. Its critical analysis contains valuable insights into the relationship between modernity and Canadian culture, which has not received adequate attention from scholars outside of Canada. That said, I found myself constantly irritated by the gap that seems to exist between the intention of the editor and those of many of the contributors. While this should not deter scholars from reading this very exciting compilation, I found the book to be mired in a one-sided emphasis on the modernism- postmodernism debates of the last several decades, and its uncritical bias towards postmodern cultural history to be particularly dated.

The list of impressive essays is quite extensive but what I found particularly valuable were the opening essays of the book's three major sections, all of which helped to locate and contextualize the essays within larger theoretical debates on modernity, cultural politics, and postcolonial theory. These essays, written by Fred R. Meyers, Benedict Anderson, and Kim Sawchuk, frame each section by giving the reader an overview of the major issues that individual authors explore in more particular detail. For example, Anderson's "Staging Antimodernism in the Ages of High Capitalist Nationalism" wonderfully describes the tensions experienced within a twentieth-century Canadian society caught between the technological imperatives of modernity and the desire to frame a nationalist identity around the myth of "untouched wilderness" that developed in nineteenth-century Romantic efforts to bond national identity with landscape painting. The essays that follow, by Lora Carney, Ian McKay, and Lynda Jessup, are crucial additions to the growing critical discourse on Canadian nationalism, and are noteworthy because it is extremely rare to find Canadian culture and its relationship foregrounded in such a collection.

On a critical note, however, I find myself returning to Jessup's introduction, in which the discipline of art history is subject to a particularly harsh critique. Antimodernism, as Jessup notes, has been defined by historian Jackson Lears as the recoil from an "overcivilized" modern experience to more intense forms of physical or spiritual existence (3). We are reminded that art history has been negligent in participating in the broader critiques of representation and discourse that are highlighted in disciplines such as anthropology, history, sociology, and cultural studies. Attention is drawn to art history's "Eurocentric methodology," which has the unfortunate consequence, as Myers points out, of "reproducing existing disciplinary boundaries, feeding the Western notion of art as autonomous from other spheres of activity (5).

This blanket disparagement of the discipline ignores the contributions of art historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Reigl, and Max Dvorak, who contributed a nascent critique of representation decades before it became fashionable. However, in his own essay, "Around and about in Modernity: Some Comments on Themes of Primitivism and Modernism," Myers perceives the rashness of discounting Modernism's contributions to the critique of representation too quickly. He defuses any simple opposition between uppercase Modernism and lowercase modernity by acknowledging the allegorical mode of criticism that is at the core of early modernism and that defies any simplistic categorizing. Rather, he argues, "I suggest we understand the lowercase 'modernism' to embrace a range of artistic...