The Off-Modern by Svetlana Boym

Author:Svetlana Boym [Boym, Svetlana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781501328954
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2017-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 17.1 Vladimir Tatlin, “Model of the Monument to the 3rd International,” 1919–1920. Image courtesy of bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, New York.

17

Estrangement for the World

What if we rethink the history of modern art, and instead of placing the emphasis on form and function (the “formalist theology” according to Harold Rosenberg) we focus on trans-formative estrangement, creative perspectivism, and renewal of vision?

This will be not a foundational or metaphysical project but an experimental and phenomenological one that begins with the embarrassment of theory. We reconsider some aspects of the history of the avant-gardes, such as the relationship between art and politics; our key term will not be utopia but freedom, and we will open up and recover a broad field of the left democratic politics of the modernist writers who went against the grain of the dominant versions of the left, right, and center. Along those lines we will deviate from the familiar story of the “dehumanization of art” in the modern context, exploring modernist humanism and human erring that find many echoes in the recent off-modern projects of William Kentridge and the Raqs Media Collective and other experimental interpreters of the Russian avant-garde. Our other concern will be with third-way thinking and the forms of unconventional modernist humanism and existential dimensions of modern aesthetic practice.

The off-moderns “invent their own precursors” in Borgesian fashion, but not to suck the life out of them in a gleeful postmodern manner, with the severed heads of quotation marks and lots of disco music in the background. Instead of the familiar tale of avant-garde movements and isms each with a promising new beginning, catharsis, and denouement, from rise to fall (into bourgeois decadence, madness, comfortable institutionalization, etc.), the off-modern story seeks elective affinities, alternative solidarities, and diasporic intimacies of multicultural immigrants across national borders. In other words, we pursue what still troubles us today.

In the Anglo-American and Western European contexts, the history of artistic modernity was mostly written through the agonistic struggles of the avant-garde and the advent of “formalist theology” elaborated in the wake of the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which gave a safe haven and helped to institutionalize many refugees from the European wars. According to Clement Greenberg, modernist art practice should be autonomous, inward, self-referential and self-critical. This is a kind of art that constantly and radically “questions its essence as art” in order not to become kitsch, a “parody of catharsis” (Adorno). Obviously, avant-garde art goes beyond its critique, be it that of the modern world or of traditional art. Still the “formal theology” and the avant-garde spirituality are conceived as an almost messianic quest for ultimate authenticity, a quest that is responsible for the quick succession of isms that supersede one another.16

One aspect of this history is a form of radical disfiguration that turns a living human body into a “stumbling block on the road to self-sufficiency of art” (Kuspit) and thus doesn’t allow art to confront existential human needs. Of course, this might read

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