About the Immediate Future of Modern Art

About the Immediate Future of Modern Art I. In the second half of the century a lingering crisis in the visual arts was virtually stopped in its tracks-and tracts-by the realisation of recent events: the second World War, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and the inevitable moral and ethical crises produced by these events. Admittedly one can see very little overt evidence of any crisis or dilemma ...Art rolled on to become more and more! But of course the crisis was a great delayed reaction which the more perceptive of observers are now wrestling withdnot least the artists, although they have consistently denied that any kind of break has occurred, as has the entire support symbiosis): art as realty, art asa surrogate secular(cultural) religion. The commercial temples! There is, as yet, a ‘positive vacuum’ i.e. no healthy plenum ... only decadent posturing, and worse, academic gainsaying . Secular monitors-such as the Marxists-have gone on preaching, but the irrelevance of what they offer is well known and need not be answered. There is a very long way to go to alert people to the absurdities which proliferate as answers both in physical objects and in (art)events and ‘profound’ exegesis. My position is that of a Modernist, more specifically a Formalist in the wake of the Sovietartists and writers of the first decades of the century and later the Prague School (Jacobson and others). As an artist I am not somebody who feels he has the answer and must preach some new message. What follows is, therefore, a moderately unstructured bid to alert those, supposedly interested, to lookagain. This piece isby way of being a polemic against Post-Modernism (antiModernism ) and the so-called ‘New Art’. 11. Sincethe tacit discovery that art was in a steep decline, there have been two main thrusts: the first is to question the past Anthony Hill (artist, mathematician, educator), 24 Charlotte Street, London WI, U.K. Received 10 February 1987. 0 1987 ISAST PergamonJournalsLtd. Printedin Great Britain. 0024-094X/87 63.0010.00 Anthony Hill Fig. 1. Thishistoriographicfigure is a ‘model’-just one of many suchasindicatean interpretation of eventsin termsof individualartists andmovements.The ‘form’ofthe modelcallsforsomeexplanation but it is neverthelessmore or less self-evident. and ask if Modern Art has failed and let us down; and the second is a massive conspiracy to answer yes and claim that Post-Modern Art is better and that everyone should stay with it. Sojust how doesModern Art come out of these reassessments? And is it dead and completely over? I believe that all matters in art are matters of taste, be it historical explication or brute creation, and that no theories or opinions can escape this fact. The search should really be elsewhere if objective facts are what one wants. Can one look at Modern Art ‘objectively’? Does it contain any ‘objective’ components ? I do not intend here to attempt an answer to these questions; I am simply expressingan opinion,a personal evaluation . My premise derives from a point of view, an interpretation of the changes of value in art in the first half of the century. Of course, it did not suddenly start in 1900 and, indeed, it involves an assessment also of developments in the socalled fin de sitcle. Obviously I cannot encompass all of this in the present piece. However, it will be necessary to state clearly-but without all the dialecticone or two points of view vis-A-vis the options open for a continuing Modernist Art. I am certainly in no way alone in believing that the traditional mediaeasel and wall painting and candlestick and monumentalsculpture-are well and truly over, exhausted, and an option now only for the amateur and the ‘Boho’ artist; however, I do not hold a dogmatic view as to prescribing ‘the course ahead‘ any more than Arp and Lissitzky did in their seminal publication of 1924, The Isms of Art. Many of the general debates have to do with the question of plurality in the field of art options, and it has to be admitted LEONARDO, Vol. 20, NO.4, pp. 349-352,1987 that for some time now the answer has been, in...