A Million Keys

I picked up the first installment of the three proposed magazines for documenta 12 and read it over the weekend. Three overarching questions guide this documenta- Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and What is to be done?- and each magazine explores one of these leitmotifs in depth. The first issue asks, “Is modernity our antiquity?” and it begins with an essay by the same title written by artist Mark Lewis. His essay had a few revelatory morsels that fit in well with the Gillick article I reposted and some other thoughts I’ve been kicking around.

Lewis begins the essay by describing his draw to a crumbling modernist apartment building in his hometown of Vancouver. Over five years, he has taken hundreds of photos and hours of footage of the structure, and he admits that the project is partially underwritten by a desire to construct an elegy to its demise. He acknowledges that in romanticizing modernity’s decay he skirts a larger issue- that being the transformation of modernist forms into historical ones. The crux to him is how to articulate this distance. He ends this section with:

…we look to the (monumental) history of modernism to tell us something about the conflicts at the heart of the modern, about the latter’s failure to make us free, its failure to provide us with a future in which we might recognize ourselves. In the end, this may not be so very different from the desire to find the truth in the classical past.

The essay gets more interesting in the next section- Lewis goes onto to discuss the fundamentals of modernity according to Baudelaire and elaborates on T.J. Clark’s statement in Farewell to an Idea that “modernism is our antiquity”. He continues:

The aesthetic ideas and practices that came to be known as modernism initially had some stake, investment, and predicative power in how modernity was going to shape up. Modernism tried to make sense of the modern revolution in the world; it produced aesthetic objects, images and ideas in relation to the fact that modernity was deemed not yet complete, nor its ideas fully actualized. Modernism was, in other words, the idea that modernity could be figured and interpolated with utopian possibility. If one concludes that this power of predication is now impossible, then the grounds upon which today’s artistic ideas and practices stand are littered with the archeological remnants of modernism. What is shocking that, whereas modernity and modernism were cast as relentlessly forward-thinking, we now find “signs” of the modern in the past, in the unfilled dreams of what never came but still might. It is precisely this failure (of the modern and of modernism too) that is given a kind of noble profile in its unrealized potential.

I believe it is precisely these “archeological remnants of modernism” which back Gillick’s statement that:

…contemporary art is not well placed to confront the recent clarifications and extremes of conflict in a direct way.

I have not viewed the Memorial to the Iraq War exhibition at the ICA but I imagine, from Gillick’s response, that the effect is similar to the peace tower built for the Whitney Biennial last year. The peace tower came across as a trite simulacrum of a modernist utopian protest- an artifact glaringly distant from our present time. I understand, however, the impulse to scavenge this “antiquity” for some sort of answer or truth to guide us out of the mire. Artist Josephine Meckseper wonderfully expresses both the yearning to look back to 1960s protest culture for direction and the futility of such an exercise.

Simply, her work evidences the fact that direct political statements are commodified in the contemporary culture of consumerism. Which is why it is so difficult to assert them, in or outside the realm of contemporary art. This is something I thought about after the show for Incapacitants at No Fun a few weeks ago. I was on stage during the entire performance and the emotional response from the audience was absolutely overwhelming to witness. The outpour of visceral, directionless rage shared by the audience and the band evidenced the pervading feeling of hopelessness in our time. If anything, this shared sensation itself was the “direct statement”, not any explicit political declaration. If political messages are communicated at all- they are imbued in the action itself and intuitive reaction of the audience. I see examples of this “overwhelming feeling” all the time- from Christoph Buchel’s total installations to assume vivid astro focus’s equally elaborate installations to Sunn O))) to even the increasing resurgence of rave culture….There’s an immediate, instinctive effect there. And on the heels of the rampant irony of the early 2000’s, this may be what we have.