CLEMENT GREENBERG
MODERN ANDPOSTMODERN
William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, Oct 31, 1979
Arts 54
, No.6 (February 1980).
This is Greenberg's last essay on modernism. In it he recants his "elegant" definition of the 1960essay, and adds the conviction that modernism constitutes a kind of holding operation again thelevelling and relaxing tendencies of middlebrow taste. In this it recalls (if memory serves) aremark by Samuel Johnson that criticism seeks to maintain standards in the face of their continual tendency to deteriorate.
-- TF
Jules Olitski,
Volitions
, 1983
"P
OSTMODERN" IS A RATHER NEW TERM
.It's a catchy one and has been coming up more andmore often in talk and writing about the arts, and not only about the arts. I'm not clear as to justwhat it points to except in the case of architecture. There we know more or less definitely what"modern" means, so we're better able to tell what "post" means when prefixed to "modern."Modern architecture means -- to put it roughly -- functional, geometric rigor and the eschewingof decoration or ornament. Buildings have been put up or projected lately that break with thesecanons of style, and therefore have gotten called postmodern. Everybody concerned knowswhat's meant, including the architects themselves.Can postmodern be identified in an equally agreed upon way in any of the other arts? I haven'tyet seen or heard the term applied in earnest to anything in recent literature. It's come up inconnection with music, but haphazardly and with no agreement about what it means there. Andfrom what I can tell it comes up hardly at all in talk about the dance or the movies. Away from
architecture, it's in the area of painting and sculpture that I've mostly heard and seen postmodernused -- but only by critics and journalists, not by artists themselves.There are reasons and reasons here. One possible reason is the return to the foreground of figurative or representational pictorial art. But there's been enough precedent, since De Chiricoand surrealism and neoromanticism, for including figurative art in the modern. There have to beother, less obvious, and at the same time more general reasons for the currency of postmodern intalk about recent painting and sculpture. All the more because no critic or journalist I'm aware of who makes free with postmodern points to any specific body of work he or she feels reallyconfident in calling that. Now the post in postmodern can be taken in a temporal chronological sense. Anything thatcomes after something else is "post" that something else. But this isn't quite the way in which postmodern is used. It's supposed, rather, to mean or imply art that supersedes, replaces, succeedsthe modern in terms of stylistic evolution, the way that the baroque succeeded mannerism andthe rococo succeeded the baroque. The corollary is that the modern is over and done with, just asmannerism was over and done with when superseded by the baroque. But the problem for thosewho claim this becomes to specify what they mean, not by post, but by modern. Anything in itsown time can be called modern. However, what we usually mean by modern is somethingconsidered up-to-date, abreast of the times, and going beyond the past in more than a temporallyor chronologically literal sense.Well, how are you to decide what is and what isn't modern in present-day art in a sense that goes beyond the literal one? There's no rule, no principle, no method. It comes down to a question of tastes, or else a terminological quibble. Different stylistic definitions of the modern have been proposed in every generation since the word first came into circulation as applicable to paintingand sculpture in more than a merely temporal sense, and none of them have held. Nor have anyof those offered by the proponents of the postmodern, whether stylistic or not.I want to take the risk of offering my own definition of the modern, but it will be more in thenature of an explanation and description than a definition. First of all, I want to change the termin question from modern to Modernist -- Modernist with a capital M -- and then to talk aboutModernism instead of the modern. Modernism has the great advantage of being a morehistorically placeable term, one that designates a historically -- not just chronologically --definable phenomenon: something that began at a certain time, and may or may not still be withus.What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century. And rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and maybe with Flauberttoo, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in musicand architecture, but it was in France again that it appeared first in sculpture. Outside Francelater still, it entered the dance.) The "avant-garde" was what Modernism was called at first, butthis term has become a good deal compromised by now as well as remaining misleading.Contrary to the common notion, Modernism or the avant-garde didn't make its entrance by breaking with the past. Far from it. Nor did it have such a thing as a program, nor has it reallyever had one -- again, contrary to the common notion. Nor was it an affair of ideas or theories or ideology. It's been in the nature, rather, of an attitude and an orientation: an attitude andorientation to standards and levels: standards and levels of aesthetic quality in the first and alsothe last place. And where did the Modernists get their standards and levels from? From the past,that is, the best of the past. But not so much from particular models in the past -- though fromthese too -- as from a generalized feeling and apprehending, a kind of distilling and extracting of
aesthetic quality as shown by the best of the past. And it wasn't a question of imitating but one of emulating -- just as it had been for the Renaissance with respect to antiquity. It's true thatBaudelaire and Manet talked much more about having to be modern, about reflecting life in their time, than about matching the best of the past. But the need and the ambition to do so showthrough in what they actually did, and in enough of what they were recorded as saying. Beingmodern was a means of living up to the past.But didn't artists and writers before these two look to the past for standards of quality? Of course.But it was a question of how one looked, and with how much urgency.Modernism appeared in answer to a crisis. The surface aspect of that crisis was a certainconfusion of standards brought on by romanticism. The romantics had already looked back intothe past, the pre-eighteenth-century past, but had made the mistake in the end of trying toreinstall it. Architecture was where this attempt became most conspicuous, in the form of revivalism. Romantic architecture wasn't all that slavish, it wasn't the dead loss it's supposed to be, but still it didn't sufffice; it may have maintained a look of the past, but not its standards. Itwasn't revised enough by later experience, or revised in the right way: as Baudelaire and Manetmight have put it, it wasn't modern enough. There ensued finally an academicization of the artseverywhere except in music and prose fiction. Academicization isn't a matter of academies --there were academies long before academicization and before the nineteenth century.Academicism consists in the tendency to take the medium of an art too much for granted. Itresults in blurring: words become imprecise, color gets muffled, the physical sources of sound become too much dissembled. (The piano, which dissembles its being a stringed instrument, wasthe romantic instrument par excellence; but it is as if precisely because it made a point of dissembling that it produced the wonderful music it did in romantic times, turning imprecisioninto a new kind of precision.)Modernism's reaction against romanticism consisted in part in a new investigating andquestioning of the medium in poetry and painting, and in an emphasis on preciseness, on theconcrete. But above all Modernism declared itself by insisting on a renovation of standards, andit effected this by a more critical and less pious approach to the past in order to make it moregenuinely relevant, more "modern." It reaffirmed the past in a new way and in a variety of newways. And it belonged to this reaffirming that the balance was tipped toward emulation as againstimitation more radically than ever before -- but only out of necessity, the necessity imposed bythe reaffirmed and renovated standards.Innovation, newness have gotten themselves taken as the hallmark of Modernism, newness assomething desired and pursued. And yet all the great and lasting Modernist creators werereluctant innovators at bottom, innovators only because they had to be -- for the sake of quality,and for the sake of self-expression if you will. It's not only that some measure of innovation hasalways been essential to aesthetic quality above a certain level; it's also that Modernistinnovation has been compelled to be, or look, more radical and abrupt than innovation used to beor look: compelled by an ongoing crisis in standards. Why this should be so, I can't try to accountfor here; it would take me too far afield and involve too much speculation. Let it sufffice for themoment to notice one thing: how with only a relatively small lapse of time the innovations of Modernism begin to look less and less radical, and how they almost all settle into placeeventually as part of the continuum of high Western art, along with Shakespeare's verse andRembrandt's drawings.That rebellion and revolt, as well as radical innovation, have been associated with Modernismhas its good as well as bad reasons. But the latter far outnumber the former. If rebellion and
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Modern and Postmodern-1979-Clement Greenberg
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