Conditions of Modernity

Jeannene Przyblyski, talked about the conditions of Modernity, to specifically locate them within a discussion of the experience of novelty and newness, and then talk a little bit about how that relates to art practice and the way that artists might choose to position themselves in the world.

The Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's, View of the Boulevard du Temple, from 1939, one of, we think, the first photographs that was ever taken. And we looked at this photograph as an example of the experience of a kind of optical repositioning of human relationship to the world. That is to say that, through a conjunction of optics and chemistry, the way, that is, light is refracted through a lens, and the way that the effects of light are captured on sensitized chemical materials, we have what was seen, at the time, as a more exact and real transcription of the world. And it wasn't just that it was more exact and real, but that it allowed us to see and experience things that the naked eye, alone, couldn't see and experience.

So, the difference between certain kinds of stillness and movement, the way that the photographic eye or the human eye captures movement and understands and registers movement, or does not, and the way in which a sensation of the human visual command of the world might be extended through photography.

So, the view out the window, a fleeting moment in the course of human experience, captured and preserved forever on the photographic plate. And the dream that photography could extend one's knowledge and experience of the world in all sorts of foreseen and unforeseen ways.

The great engraving by Maurisset called, Daguerreotypomania, from December 1839, I love because it demonstrates just how quickly photography was assimilated into the collective unconsciousness of a modernizing society. And that's maybe a big way of saying that one of the interesting things about photography is that people knew what to do with it even before it was invented. And so its assimilation into the way people thought about how they knew and experienced the world was very quick. So, we see this popular caricaturist, in the mass press, imagining that photographers might go up in the air in balloons and allow human beings to see a god-like view of down below from above. The Google view, if you will.

We see an imagination that photography will put an end to the work of engravers and illustrators. And there's a series of illustrators who are hanging themselves in response to the invention of photography. We see people flocking to the portrait studios to have their pictures taken, and we see all of this conjoined with other new inventions of the time that radically transformed the way that we understood humans' ability to traverse time and space. So, a locomotive steam engine going across the background of the picture, steamboats traversing the lake in the distance. And this sense that we were poised in the 19th century, in modernizing and industrializing countries in particular on the brink of a new experience of the understanding of cities, the understanding of how quick change could happen, and the understanding of how great a human being's reach over the world around them might be.

And we can see a little bit about how artists in other media try to respond to that experience of rapid technological change and the impacts that it had on our ways of knowing and understanding and experiencing the world. And, certainly, Impressionism is an excellent example of that, because I don't believe that impressionist painters lessened their grasp and their interrogation of reality as a result of the invention of photography. I think they were challenged by photography to think about reality in new and specifically optical ways, so that Monet's interest in capturing the effects of light, the ephemeralness of the Gare Saint-Lazare which was one of the new train stations enclosed in a glass arcade that were built in the 19th century in France, is all about exploring not the heaviness and solidity and permanence of the locomotive, but of exploring those kinds of effects of merely optical sensation reflected, refracted light, the smoke from the locomotive smokestack, the movement of people in a public urban space as being optical effect.

And that is very much born of the influence of photography, and born of the influence of all sorts of new technologies in the 19^th century, including train travel, that made the world seem smaller because distances could be covered more quickly.

And also more, for lack of a better word more analytical, at the same time. Because the other thing that train travel and photography did, in different ways, was alter people's quantitative experience of time.

Which is to say that photography depended upon a more exact, increasingly exact understanding of exposure and developing times.

And, on the other hand, successful networks of train systems depended upon countries adopting a standardized measurement for time. Because if all the train conductors and engineers weren't moving according to the same timetable, well, you can imagine what would happen, it just simply wouldn't work. Everybody would crash, and so a uniform, standardized experience of time was a product of the 19th century invention of all sorts of modernizing technologies. At the same time that people's understanding of the world in the 19th century was being radically transformed by these new technologies, their understandings of how they related to each other were being transformed by new economies of working, new demands for labor force that altered and impacted all kinds of relationships and, most particularly, the relationships between men and women.

So, when we look at a painting like Édouard Manet's, Olympia, from 1863, which, I'm sorry that this is only the first time we're seeing it, it's a painting that I hope reminds you a little bit of those odalisque postures that we saw in Carrie Mae Weems's photographs. And, for sure, Carrie Mae Weems had this canonical image in mind when she was posing her young models for that photograph. When we look at a photograph like this, it is all about referencing tradition, that is to say, the tradition of the reclining female nude that could be traced back through the 16th and 17th century to the work of artists like Titian and Velázquez that Monet would've admired very, very much.

And, on the other hand, demanding that tradition of a genre of painting, a formal genre, the reclining female nude, needed to be radically transformed by the experience of the contemporary moment.

So, we don't feel like we're looking at some mythological goddess or some generic figure, we feel like we're looking at a specific woman who's looking back at us in a rather confrontational way. We know the name of the model. Her name was Victorine Meurent, and she was a model that appears repeatedly, in a number of guises and masquerades, almost Cindy Sherman-esque, in Manet's work. And she is a model who appears, here, as someone who is even more explicitly awaiting her male customer, and sort of taking the measure of their worth, than the barmaid in Manet's painting, Bar at the Folies-Bergère. She's attended to by a black female servant. And that raises questions about racial hierarchies, as well as gender hierarchies, in 19^th century France, and it also signals those other kinds of migrations and territorializations that were a part of colonial and imperial movements of the 19th century by which European nations, in particular, expanded their reach to Africa and to the Americas.

And did so, in part, because they were enabled by all these new modes of technological mastery of time and space.

Betty Boop is a sister, if you will, in some ways, of Manet's Olympia. It's another version of the Modern woman, eroticized, and Betty's certainly curvaceous and oddly made-up for someone who is pictured, here, as an ostensibly young female character. She is located within an immigrant culture in the United States so, just as her inventors the Fleischer brothers and character artist Grim Natwick were part of an American migration in the time between the World Wars in Europe, an American migration specifically from the Slavic countries, and very often, of Jewish peoples, as well. She's also this sort of uncertain marker of the Modern woman's place in the world.

And the early 20th Century is a time that sees movements towards rights to vote, and rights to increasingly equal roles of citizenship in the United States and in the European nations.

It's a time in which women claiming the ability to own their sexuality in public was very much a part of a general sense of cultural uncertainty that marked the times between the Wars.

And so, Betty Boop's novelty and her modernity are all bound up in trying to puzzle out and reposition everyone in a time of uncertain social hierarchies and uncertain relationships between people.

This does, indeed, have a nationalistic context, as well, and a violent context, as well, because all of those technologies that could be used to enhance human reach over the world, to master time and space, could also be used to conquer time and space and to contest ownership of time and space.

So, war becomes highly technologized and highly mechanized in the 19th and 20^th century, and the experience of devastation that could be wrought by war ratcheted up to an even more massive scale, at the same time.

And so, this is a work that we've also seen before, Pablo Picasso's, Guernica, from 1937, an image of protest in response to one of the first saturation bombings in the history of military warfare. And we need to have this view of mechanized and technologically leveraged warfare in view, as well as the expression of human outrage against it.

Because certainly the capacity for destructiveness is the other side of the fascination with newness and the valuation of newness and novelty and technological invention and technological progress that informs the 19th and 20th century.

That growing understanding of humankind's capacity for self-destruction is accompanied by a growing awareness of its mediation through technology.

So, it's important to know that, Guernica, was shown at the World's Fair at a moment where these large, state-organized expositions were a place to bring all of human innovation and all of human productivity together and put it on spectacular display.

That's the place where this work was first exhibited, even as, when we turn to something like Martha Rosler's series of photo montages called, Bringing the War Home, from 1967 to 1972, we see the thoughtful way in which Rosler is using collage to dramatize the ways in which a media culture, enabled by television, brings the wars of the 20^th century into everyone's living room, into everyone's living room, as experiences that are greatly disturbing and graphic.

And yet, because of their locatedness within an everyday domestic interior and we have this sort of amazing Modern housewife with her vacuum cleaner slung over her shoulder sort of like a military weapon, wielding it against the brocade drapery even as the drapery's pulled back to see American soldiers in the battlefields of Vietnam.

When we look at these images, we're being asked to confront the duality of the celebration of newness and innovation that remains a part of contemporary culture to this day.

The media and television and social media today has had the effect of making the world even smaller, and has also exacerbated the degree to which people have become increasingly habituated to interacting with each other, and knowing about each other, and relating to each other through commodified images rather than through direct social interaction.

We are mostly in an experience of mediation these days. Anyone who thinks of being in a restaurant and watching everybody on their portable electronic devices talking to somebody else who's somewhere else, at the same time that they're with their family and friends, just understands what a powerful thrall media culture holds over us.

So, all of these technological developments have shrunk the world at the same time that they've prosthetically enhanced human reach over the world, enabled nearly instantaneous communication, enabled us to, actually, in some ways, feel a great deal of empathy with people that are very distant from us.

We can think of any number of natural disasters, over the course of the last decades, in which great efforts at offering relief, and help, and financial assistance, and other forms of assistance, had been mobilized through the media, for a greater good. And, at the same time, we can all begin to enumerate all the ways in which these new technological innovations and new ways of expanding human power, in real, physical ways have been used to great catastrophe.

So, what is the artist's role in all of this?

Is the role of the artist, in Modern times and in contemporary culture, to further the culture, or to question it?

There's no right answer.

And this work is ongoing.

So, how do you choose to position yourself as an artist, as a creative thinker, and as a feeling person, in relationship to that?

I think novelty for novelty's sake, more often than not, turns out to be novelty in the service of a dominant power structure.

Our desire for the latest technology increases wealth for a few.

Video games that are used to recruit for the military are another example in which the efficacy of the design and the seductiveness of these new forms of interaction pretty readily yield to uses that reinforce the dominant conditions of national antagonism, of a militarized society, and of confrontation, that inform much of our interactions and much of our anxieties about contemporary life, as well.

So, that's one set of possibilities that artful work works in the service of reinforcing dominant belief systems, mainstream ideologies, and habitual confrontations.

Another way of thinking about it is this that the acknowledgement of the experience of an ongoing iterative process of newness requires that artists continually interrogate these emergent conditions of contemporaneity, and continually improvise new solutions to addressing them critically. That's another form of newness.

Well, however you decide to position yourself in all of this, your choices can't help but take part in this larger dialogue that consistently meets contemporary experience with a range of solutions that draw upon the immediate past, and then try to find ways to keep going.

Try to find ways to adapt what we know to the conditions of uncertainty that currently confront us.