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CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT 439 T he impetus so evident in the first decades of the twentieth century, to bring forth a new art that would eschew representation, and to do without any depicted objects, has been widely understood as a movement of purification: any element or any formal device that was not rooted in the nature of material would be eliminated from the new art, and its artistic forms would be solidly grounded in the material in which it was realized. Artistic forms profit from being true to the materials in which they are realized—so it was said—as they are then grounded in the real stuff of which they are made. In this way artworks escape from dissembling imitation , the result of their having a derivative existence dependent on their models , and become full-fledged objects with the same sort of material existence that rocks and tables and curling stones have. Another way of bringing the form of an artwork into alignment with the materials in which it is realized is to free it from the corrupting influence of forms imported from other media: painting becomes true to the nature of its material when it understands that it is not drawing (and so dispenses with outlining contours and colouring them in) and not sculpture (and so dispenses with the illusion of three-dimensional forms).Painting becomes painting when it understands that it is produced by smearing coloured goo on a two-dimensional surface (and that, despite the simplicity of the description, offers plenty to be getting on with). Similarly, cinema becomes cinema when it does away with the influence of Postscript 440 POSTSCRIPT literature or theatre and takes as its reality that it is articulated light, light given spatio-temporal form in being projected by a machine that runs at a fixed, nearly unvarying, speed. One strength of these descriptions is that they placed artistic form at the centre of discussions about the arts. This view taught that artworks do not communicate discursively,through the propositions they impart to us.Artworks communicate differently—they are perlocutional (i.e., their meaning lies in what they do to us). Thus, these descriptions established the basis for the more recent development of corporeal aesthetics. That strength I acknowledge. However, in this book I have tried to propose a new history of the development of early modernist ideals. I have retained the view that early modernism’s strength was to acknowledge that the propositional content of artworks has only slight (if any) aesthetic relevance, that their real meaning derives from what they do to us. By examining two exemplary moments in early modernist art, I have tried to show that this view of the nature of artworks and their effects, far from being a contemporary discovery, was a well-elaborated, well-defended position in the first decades of the last century . But I argue that notions of how artworks affect us were far different from what they are generally understood to be. In the first decades of the twentieth century it was widely accepted that artworks affect us pneumatically. Once this is understood, I contend, a host of new understandings about the aesthetics of early modernism follow. One of these concerns the importance of cinema for early modernist art. Historians of early modernist art have dealt with the topic of how early modernist artists proposed to recast cinema. They have claimed that its dynamism was attractive to the city-dwelling, automobiledriving denizens of the modern era—but they have also noted that advanced artists of the time believed that cinema could realize its dynamic virtues only by escaping the burden of representation and the pernicious influences of literature and theatre. I have taken a different tack than that of most art historians who write about art and cinema in the early decades of the twentieth century. Instead of focusing first on how Surrealist or Dada or Cubist ideals influenced the form of certain “avant-garde” films made during that period, I have begun by considering the influence that cinema had on modernist ideals (more exactly, the actual programs for aesthetic revision propagated by the artists involved in two exemplary early modernist movements). I have argued that in the early years of the twentieth century, a new “Paragone” of the arts erupted, with many artists and art theorists contending that cinema was the “ottima arte.” For them, cinema was a paradigmatic pneumatic influencing machine, one...

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