The crazy race for the hazy future

The Latin term Modo.

(From Wiktionary )

only just recently, presently

At the end of the sixth

century, Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman, writer and librarian used the term modernus in the sense of contemporary, but wanted to conserve the knowledge and ideas of antiquity. (Both Christianity and Plato/Aristotle etc).

The Venerable Bede (672-735), wrote of moderni and antiqui in the eighth century. He called his present times Tempus modernum. The term modernus came to have a negative connotation.
Alcuin of York, (730-805) thought of himself and his contemporaries as insignificant people of the end of the world warned of the dangers of decay, which could herald the coming of the Antichrist. Only a return of moral renewal and the ways of the ancients could save the world.

In the 12th Century, William, the ageing abbot of Saint-Thierry, when told that King David, when he was old, ruled the kingdom from his bed, concluded that in biblical times, the world was youthful and people had more strength and vitality. Bernard of Chartres wrote about the antiqui and moderni, saying in essence that modern scholars were dwarves who could see farther, but only because they stood on the shoulders of giants.

In the early 17th Century, Rene Descartes argued for new ways of judging and seeking truth. He frequently set his views apart from those of his predecessors. He specifically rejected the ancients . He accounted for things by mechanical explanations. He began ideas which laid the groundwork for the scientific method. He said I think, therefore I am (Cogito ergo sum)

In the late 17th century. John Locke argued against Augustine and the church who said that man was inherently sinful. Locke said that man was essentially borne with a clean slate, or tabula rasa. He also suggested that the people had the right to overthrow their leaders. He broke out of the sacred circle. His theory of mind is often seen as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self.

Lockes ideas went into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of the French Revolution of 1789. This asserts that all men are equal and that there is no divine right of kings and no special privilege for the church. No mention, however, of the rights of women or slaves. The declaration is based on the principles of the Age of Enlightenment, such as individualism and the social contract of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the late 18th Century. A hostility developed towards industrialisation. Romanticism grew. Members in England included artist and poet William Blake and poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein showed concerns that scientific progress might not be always be for the good.

Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.

The movement stressed the importance of "nature" in art, in contrast to "monstrous" machines and factories. The Romantics reacted against the mechanical and the controlled. In art, literature and music, they emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

The Victorian Era continued Enlightenment ideas. The wild, passionate, erotic, even destructive aspects of Romanticism continue in all the arts, (although not in the home). There is a longing for the Gothic and medieval past and at the same time, great scientific and technical progress. Photography takes off. Moving images are captured on film for the first time in 1888, in Leeds.

Fin de sicle

French poets Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Verlaine began Symbolism. They influenced artists. They shared an interest in mystical and spiritual expression in their art and a rebellion against realism that depicted the observable world. They expressed personal inner vision, idealization and fantasy and not just descriptions of reality.

Women on the beach, 1898 by Edvard Munch

MODERNITY

MODERNISM

Charles Darwin Einstein's Theory of Relativity Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis Communism Cars Airplanes Telephones Radios WWI

Cubism Futurism (and Vorticism) Abstraction(ism) Stream of Consciousness dada(ism) Surrealism? Expressionism Existentialism Pop art Celebration of Technology

Avant-Garde.

1. The advance group in any field, esp. in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods. 2. Of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material. 3. Belonging to the avant-garde: an avant-garde composer. 4. Unorthodox or daring; radical.

Pablo Picasso. The Two Saltimbanques (Harlequin and his Companion), 1901

From dictionary.com

The world seen from multiple viewpoints. Picassos Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907. There's something anarchist and ruthless about it that contains dada and Marcel Duchamp and punk.

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

''On or about December 1910 human character changed,'' Virginia Woolf observed. Relations between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children'' shifted, she wrote, ''and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.''

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp, 1912. Successive superimposed images influenced by stopmotion images of Etienne Jules Marey. Criticised as an explosion in a shingle factory. Influence of scientific ideas Einstein?

Umberto Boccioni Elasticity 1912.

Futurists were fascinated with dynamism, speed, and restlessness of modern urban life. We want no part in the past wrote Marinetti in Italy. Old art should be heaved over the side of the steamship of modernity said Mayakovsky in Russia.

Hans Richter saw the beginnings of Dada in the outbreak of World War I. The movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity in art and more broadly in society that corresponded to the war. Dada protested against everything, a nonsensical, absurd world represented by slaughter and stupidity.

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917

Dada was nihilistic and anti rational. Artists made nonsensical speeches, poets constructed poems by cutting random words from newspapers and picking them out of a sack).Marcel Duchamp exhibited 'found objects' out of context e.g. urinals. A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man."

The art of the Surrealist movement was centred around the irrational and the subconscious. Surrealists were influenced by the 'untutored' art of children, madness and so called 'primitive art forms'. They wanted to create something more real than reality itself. Many Surrealists knew and interacted in various ways with Freud and Jung.

The Elephant Celebes, Max Ernst. 1921.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931

Surrealists wanted to change society and perception of the world. They challenged reason and modernity and favoured the magical and the mystical, the instinctive, the chance encounter, automatic writing etc. The Persistence of Memory is one of what Dal called his handpainted dream photographs and can simultaneously be read as a landscape, a still-life, and a selfportrait.

Modernism and the avant-garde

Modernism has proposed a new kind of art for a new kind of social and perceptual world. The avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as a breakthrough to the future. Its members werethe militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity.
(Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, 1989.

Avant-Garde Film

Traditionally, the avantgarde cinema is seen in opposition to Hollywood. Mid 20th century art critic Clement Greenberg attached aesthetic value to the avant-garde in painting as in cinema. He dismissed Hollywood as kitsch the sentimental, the melodramatic and the banal.

In fact, this opposition is not so clear cut. Many avant-garde filmmakers worked in commercial film and some celebrated aspects of Hollywood often the most tacky and the most kitsch. There arose a third category commercial art films which incorporated radical ideas, perspectives and politics.

dada

The Dadaists saw in film an opportunity to assault traditional narrative verities, to ridicule character, setting, and plot as bourgeois conventions, to slaughter causality by using the innate dynamism of the film medium to overturn conventional Aristotelian notions of time and space. In so doing, they knew they would question the ideological underpinnings of the old era which had held the well-made story so dear. Donald Faulkner, NYSU Writers Institute

The Bearded Heart

Tristan Tzara organized a dada event The Bearded Heart, and wanted to show Dada films. He commissioned Man Ray. He also showed his own play Heart of Gas. There was a riot afterwards and seats and lights were broken. One person had a broken arm. Hans Richter wrote that it was Dadas swansong. There was no point in continuing because nobody could any longer see any point.

Salt, Pepper, Pins and Tacks

Man Ray writes On some strips I sprinkled salt and pepper, like a cook preparing a roast, on other strips I threw pins and thumbtacks at random; then I turned on the white light for a second or two. The anarchic arrangement of strips of Rayographs and filmed sequences expressed a spirit of spontaneity and chance, which were the dada strategies of disrupting logic and rational order. The title of the film, Retour { la Raison, is therefore highly ironic.

Un Chien Andalou was born when Luis Bunuel told Salvador Dali of a dream he had in which a cloud sliced across the moon. Dali, too, had been having strange dreams. His consisted of ants crawling from inside his hand. There was one rule when it came to writing the screenplay. The only thing the succession of images would have in common is the fact that they have nothing in common. Its purpose: to document desire and shock.

"I suggested that we burn the negative... something I would have done without hesitation had the group agreed. In fact I'd still do it today; I can imagine a huge pyre in my own little garden where all my negatives and all the copies of my own films go up in flames. It wouldn't make the slightest difference." Luis Bunuel.

Screenshot from Le Chien Andalou, 1929

Precisionists were American painters who painted mammoth urban structures devoid of human activity, standing in mute testament to the hardness and coldness of modern life. Precisionism was an American response to Cubism and Futurism, sometimes called Cubist Realism.

Charles Demuth, Aucassiu and Nicolette, 1921

Skyscrapers, 1922

Charles Scheeler had spent time in Paris, as did many American artists. He created Precisionist landscapes and cityscapes. He teamed up with Paul Strand, a photographer to make Manhatta a city film celebrating New York.

Camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions. People are shown almost as automatons.

Screenshot from Manhatta, 1921

In 1929, Dziga Vertov made the film Man with a Movie Camera which he wrote Represents an experimentation in the cinematic transmission of visual phenomena without the use of intertitle (a film without intertitles) without the help of a script (a film without script)...

...without the help of a Theatre (a film without actors, without sets, etc.) This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema Absolute Kinography on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

Tossing aside the traditional notions of cinematic narratives (poignant love stories, sweeping historical accounts, spooky suspense flicks), Lger zoomed in on every day objects, like "a pipe, a chair, a typewriter, a hat, a foot." Finding visual likeness between shapes and movements, "Le Ballet Mcanique" divorces an objects visual aspects from its function.

Screenshot from Ballet Mcanique by painter Fernand Leger and cinematographer/journalist Dudley Murphy, 1924

Closely aligned with painting, photography Non-narrative, abstract images Celebrating the city, technology, energy Creating an effect, including shock Experiments with montage, form, close-ups Can be Romantic, idealistic

Fernand Lger, Le Grand Dejeuner , 1920/21