modernism

[Daniel Julius]

On Nov 16, 2007 4:12 PM, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
> Of course I *do* believe there was some internal coherence, some correlation
> across arts and across nations, in what is called Modernism. I just find it
> a healthy mental exercise to ask once in a while: what if the designator
> were one of Vonnegut's granfalloons? How many of our assignments of artists
> and works to epochs and eras and periods are optical illusions, canals on
> Mars, Bermuda triangles, born of our inability to grapple with big,
> many-dimensional data clouds as "just one damn thing after another"?
>
> So, poised in doubt and contradiction and amibiguity, I'm a thoroughly
> modern Modernist.  And since that's an ironic, self-referential and
> thoroughly "meta" perspective drawing attention to the possibility of *no*
> fixed point outside this maze of words, I'm also post- as post- can be.


And Monte I would like to add (probably obviously), that even your
suspicion about the nature of the Modernist movement--that is, was it
really true similarities in artists or eras, or was it our placing a
lens over that time's output that caused us to see things as
related--is also itself very postmodern.  Your allowing yourself,
maybe even your actual ability, to distance yourself from that flow of
discourse and ask questions not of authorship, but of the perceptor's
perception, I think is a really interesting hallmark of postmodernism.

Similarly, I think we sit at a funny junction right now, because we do
not occupy a watershed era of the type that David Morris (very clearly
[and I think accurately]) illustrated above, but we are such keen
observers of those trends that we are able to recognize that, and yet
still apparently unable to change it.  I think that consciousness of
our limitations might separate us from the Mannerists and other minor
johnny-come-latelys that were mentioned above.

-
Dan