Atdtda22: [42.2ii] Shocking the bourgeoisie, 612-613

[Paul Nightingale]

[612.12-13] "Arturo Naunt, Chelsea's own, shocking the bourgeoisie since
1889."

Chelsea as an inner-suburb adjacent to Kensington. Its profile might be
indicated by the presence of the Chelsea School of Art, which opened in the
mid-1890s; or even the Chelsea Arts Club, where modernist exhibitions were
organised by the likes of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, names synonymous with
Bloomsbury (nowhere near Chelsea, of course).


Insofar as the idea of modernity implies both a radical criticism of the
past and a definite commitment to change and the values of the future, it is
not difficult to understand why, especially during the last two centuries,
the moderns favored the application of the agonistic metaphor of the
"avant-garde" (or "advance guard," or "vanguard") to various domains,
including literature, the arts, and politics. The obvious military
implications of the concept point quite aptly toward some attitudes and
trends for which the avant-garde is directly indebted to the broader
consciousness of modernity -- a sharp sense of militancy, praise of
non-conformism, courageous precursory exploration, and, on a more general
plane, confidence in the final victory of time and immanence over traditions
that try to appear as eternal, immutable, and transcendentally determined.
It was modernity's own alliance with time and long-lasting reliance on the
concept of progress that made possible the myth of a self-conscious and
heroic avant-garde in the struggle for futurity. Historically, the
avant-garde started by dramatizing certain constitutive elements of the idea
of modernity and making them into cornerstones of a revolutionary ethos.
Thus, during the first half of the nineteenth century and even later, the
concept of the avant-garde--both politically and culturally--was little more
than a radicalized and strongly utopianized version of modernity. 

From: Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Duke University Press, 1987, 95.


And so to:

[613.3] "... a tiny German hand camera ..."

Signalling the juxtaposition of classical to modernist art forms, the camera
an instrument of mechanical reproduction (to use Benjamin's phrase) that
would have contributed to modernist anxiety.