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“The Complete Actual Present” Dancers and Visual Artists Explore the Immediate Cultural Moment (Expressions of Modernity) Part Three Gertrude Stein declared prophetically that “the business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express the complete actual present.”1 Stein, keen observer of modern art and pioneer of the avant-garde in literature, understood the braiding of historical processes with cultural ambitions. Like much of modern visual art, her writing embraced episodic structure, employed movement inspired by life, and took inspiration from popular culture. Picasso said, agreeing with Stein, “To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered at all.”2 Both Stein and Picasso, each in her or his own way, engaged with the idea of time. Stein explored the possibilities of the stream of consciousness, a term invented by William James. The concept soon fired Stein’s imagination, forcing her realization that external things, instead of changing or succeeding one another, in fact did not. Rather, they coexisted, requiring a sentient being to keep them all in mind at once. Before 1910 Picasso and the other Cubist painters were already engaging with time, simultaneity, and the analysis of forms, processes described by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger in their book Cubism (1912) as “moving around an object to seize it from several successive appearances, which, fused into a single image, reconstitute it in time.” In the visual arts, literature, dance, drama, and music, the overlapping concepts of simultaneity, achronological uses of time, the montage effect, and the fourth dimension all became part of the modernist discourse. Not all visual artists have agreed with Stein and Picasso, but for many it has indeed been vital to engage with the complexities of time, or at least to express something of the essence of their own time. To the powerful sensual , emotional, and aesthetic responses considered in the previous chapter , we now add another shared by both dance and visual art: a response drenched in time and revelatory of the consciousness of its era. The modern (or what is considered to be so at any given moment) might be expressed in many ways—by addressing new technologies or incorporating new materials , for example—but dance, ever changing, engaging the energies of its era in distinctly physical translations, is a more poetic way to do it. “the comPlete actual Present” Dance has been seen as the perfect modernist idiom because it is an art performed in time. Like Cubism and Futurism (and other successor styles) dance necessarily exists in the realm of the temporal, a recognition that has encouraged visual artists to test dance subjects against the most advanced temporal-spatial concepts. Dance feeds into such experiments because it situates the figure in a particular time and place, unlike, say, the timeless, universal quality of the static nude in art. In their evolving arsenal of pictorial means, artists worked on strategies to capture the elusive essences of dance, essences that escaped many writers because they exceeded the power of written language. At the same time dance, typically a more accessible art form than painting, could be engaged to cultivate a broader public taste for modernism. And, not least, it could even serve as an embodied, living link between music and the visual arts. Like visual art, dance responds to the rhythm of individual emotional life, but also to any era’s larger social rhythm. Charles Baudelaire’s definition of modernism as the ephemeral and fugitive, as opposed to the immutable , makes dance peculiarly suitable to modernism. In his oft-quoted article “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire summoned before his reader an artist of contemporary manners, “the painter of the passing moment and all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.” Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe seems a response to Baudelaire’s call in its open revelations of sexuality taken out of the bedroom or brothel into the outdoors. If Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe places his viewer in frank confrontation with modernity and contemporary mores, other painters took up Baudelaire’s challenge to explore the eternal in the ephemeral. Dance, whose antiquity was unquestioned, seemed so basic and ubiquitous in human activity as to approach the status of the eternal. Dance continues while the world changes around it, and dance, whose only constant is movement, reconciles the paradox imagined by Baudelaire...

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