Past, Post and Future

...It is not surprising to find Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles heading the pack of breakthrough filmmakers...

...Now his latest and most idiosyncratic work compels us to re-examine buildings, paintings, novels, poetry, and even films we tend to take for granted...

...Leaving menopause to the ob-gyns, and the USSR to the Cold War specialists, I move on to the third of those categories...

...The New York Times obituary of Derrida put it succinctly: Once deconstruction caught on in the Academy, “literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden meanings...

...Still, the greatest impetus for Modernism came not from creators or curators, but from live cannons—the guns of August that permanently sundered 19thcentury traditions...

...In the process he and his acolytes also eliminated privacy, causing psychological havoc among those who dwelt in Wright’s houses...

...Derrida held that all writing was a prisoner of language’s slippery qualities...

...In the Postmodern epoch these have displayed Appropriated Art (bundles of newspapers...

...Advocates of feminism, gay rights and Third World causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal the prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud and other ‘dead white male’ icons of Western culture...

...IT WAS across the Channel that the movement found its most articulate spokesman...

...its innovative poets, novelists and playwrights were well aware of their classical roots...

...Nevertheless, the unique creations altered the course of architectural design...

...James’ late novels, described as “avant-garde” by the historian, were dictated, long-winded exercises, many of the passages baroque and airless...

...His vigor, demonstrated in previous studies of Freud, the Enlightenment, Mozart, and Weimar culture, goes on undiminished...

...He died at 46 in the France that had been so hostile to the early stirrings of Modernism...

...Never mind...

...There also were, and are, the legendary Biennial Exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum...

...the bitter, fragmented poetry of T.S...

...Philosophy, law, art history, psychology, anthropology, sociology: All have been playing an aggressive game of catch-up with literature departments in this regard...

...But instead of trying to provide an answer to these simple requests, the response is cries of anger: To raise these questions shows ‘elitism,’ ‘anti-intellectualism,’ and other crimes—though apparently it is not ‘elitist’ to stay within the self- and mutual-admiration societies of intellectuals who talk only to one another and (to my knowledge) don’t enter into the kind of world in which I ’d prefer to live...

...it may starve that indispensable quality in Modernism, the humane element...

...Baudelaire’s friend, the painter Édouard Manet, took up the baton, flouting contemporary standards by painting a nude woman in the company of two fully dressed men...

...So, too, the natural sciences: The theory and philosophy of science—if not yet the actual practice of science—have increasingly become hostage to sundry forms of epistemological incontinence, as the logic and substance of science is deliberately confused with the sociology of science...

...Flush with funds from the nouveau riche, they co-opted the revolutionary painters by exhibiting their works...

...But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless...

...Take, for instance, John Cage’s Postmodern 4'33"— four minutes and 33 seconds of silence...

...its honor roll includes rebels like Duchamp, who contributed a pseudonymously titled urinal (signed R. Mutt) to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917...

...I would argue that the early signs of terminal illness surfaced long before Star Wars and Ju rassic Park...

...All art is immoral...

...Thus is it highly possible that the mechanization of the movies is simply another symptom of the decay, perhaps the death, of the Modernist enterprise...

...In his new book the author gazes intently in the rearview mirror as he appraises the revolution in arts and letters that lasted from the late 1850s to the 1970s...

...There was Andres Serrano’s much abhorred yet much publicized photograph, Piss Christ, showing a crucifix in a jar of urine...

...But by then Fleurs had caught the imagination of European intellectuals...

...In its place, the artists and writers employ what they have termed “irony”: making bad art a commentary on the essential meaninglessness of the creative act...

...He is not optimistic about this process...

...These were given strong impetus by the French philosophe Jacques Derrida, father of “deconstruction...

...as Peter Gay points out, “A t the very least we can say that Modernism has had 120 years to throw its products—often exquisite and always new—onto the cultural market, producing confusion, astonishment, and delight...

...There were, and are, the dependably execrable, exhaustively covered, Postmodern exhibits at London’s Tate Gallery (the latest including an installation entitled Shibboleth—a 548-foot crack in the museum floor, into which a few unsuspecting visitors have fallen...

...Ergo there can be no permanent meaning or truth, ergo the text is devoid of any meaning save what the reader assigns to it...

...Through these new lips, More bright, more beautiful, T o infuse my venom, my sister...

...Time, and time alone, will do the job, accompanied, of course, by laughter—as derisive as humanly possible...

...Although the prose in the Whitney catalogues is usually as appalling as the artworks, it provides a valuable, if smeared, window on the Postmodern world...

...Technology the servant may become the master...

...and the big, bizarre operas of John C Adams (Nixon in China) and Philip Glass (Einstein on the Beach...

...After the armistice was signed, and the horrific price of the Great War became evident, art and politics were upended...

...Ranging back to Beowulf, the Lascaux Cave paintings and the earliest records of lute and pipe melodies, it goes all the way up to the last decades of the 20th century...

...Wright essentially banned walls in homes, opening up vast rooms, bringing in light and space...

...Gay traces the movement back to Charles Baudelaire, the French bard whose 1857 collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) shocked tout Paris...

...Example: “In the U.S...

...Yet more than two decades after Oscar’s flamboyant martyrdom, Marcel was still masking his own homosexual liaisons in the autobiographical masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past, substituting female names for male (Albertine for Albert and so on...

...Architects and designers could claim to take a ‘deconstructionist’ approach to buildings by abandoning traditional symmetry and creating zigzaggy, sometimes disquieting spaces...

...the neurotic, visionary stories of Franz Kafka...

...The future is what artists are...

...THE HISTORIAN is on firmer ground when he examines breakthrough architecture...

...For what Postmodernism has always lacked is a genuine sense of humor...

...Moreover, even when Modernism cocked a snoot at the past it never denied the significance of history and tradition...

...Allen Ginsberg, whose rambling poem “Howl” was once judged to be obscene...

...Those creatures are the Philistines de nos jours, echoing in lofty tones the insight of Henry Ford, who observed in his Yahoo wisdom that “History is bunk...

...The present is of no importance...

...and Advocacy Art (a series of military photos entitled Gays in the Military, archly subtitled Poo Poo Platter and La Treen...

...Le Corbusier went so far as to define a house as “a machine for living...

...Oscar’s fate was one of many fin-de-siècle ironies...

...But Gay takes the long view, following that trio’s influence to the works of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as they usher in the epoch of computer-generated imagery...

...Modernism’s artists knew how to draw before they broke away from the iron rules of perspective and color theory...

...It has had a good long run...

...Yet even icons grow old, and their thoughts and actions were ultimately shoved offstage by more recent personalities and works...

...Should MoMA hereafter be referred to as MoPMA...

...It would guide the architect back to “certain simple forms and handling...

...today where is a search for origins and identities that is not motivated in part, by the collapse of old categories (menopause, the Soviet Union, the canon...

...Gay also places Henry James and Marcel Proust on his list of Modernist authors, but this seems a stretch...

...Meanwhile, aesthetic as well as moral equivalence has invaded the Academy (after all, without any agreed-upon cultural touchstones “Teenage Wasteland” is as worthy as Romeo and Juliet...

...What got me to musing about creators past and present was Peter Gay’s overview, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Norton, 610 pp., $35.00...

...Translated by Roy Campbell) The poet had only 10 years to savor his notoriety...

...Her novel, The Fountainhead, is a thinly disguised and wholly bogus portrait of Wright as a victim of insensitive know-nothings...

...travers ces lèvres nouvelles, Plus éclatantes et plus belles, T’infuser mon venin, ma soeur...

...In stark contrast, a truly comic sense animates the works of Wilde and Joyce, the impudent paintings of René Magritte (the famous painting of a pipe with the inscription “This is not a pipe”), Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon featuring whores with the faces of African masks— and a thousand other works that showcase Modernism’s exuberance and antic wit...

...For the past is what man should not have been...

...Igor Stravinsky’s pulsating The Rite of Spring ballet...

...Something dangerous and intriguing was in the air...

...One day, these contemporary artists and thinkers will themselves be displaced by Post-Postmodernism, just as the Boomers gave way to the Gen X-ers who gave way to the Gen Y-ers...

...Should Broadway mount a new musical, Thoroughly Postmodern Millie...

...others have the intellect but not the style...

...Few would disagree with the standard definition of “the canon” as a compilation of books, music and art that shaped Western culture...

...Once upon an era, the Modernists shook Western culture to its foundations, transfiguring the world as they rose to prominence...

...A court censured him and excised the most disturbing mentions of sadomasochism and incest...

...At the time of his demise in 1900, for example, museum administrators were just coming into their own...

...Video Art (a tape loop endlessly displaying the police abuse of Rodney King...

...What could be more contemporary than the here and now...

...Professional outsiders like Marcel Duchamp, who painted a mustache on his version of the Mona Lisa, and Salvador Dalí, whose technical proficiency was almost as effective in such self-consciously provocative pieces as The Great Masturbator, were soon to be displayed alongside the socially acceptable paintings of Pablo Picasso and the agreeable mobiles of Alexander Calder...

...Customarily, it takes more than half a century to get a true perspective on a vanished era...

...Whether in aesthetics, philosophy or science, fashion is always on the hunt for the new, new thing...

...There is no guarantee that the contributions of technology to making a movie, so influential and apparently so promising, will necessarily improve it...

...But upon consideration I realized that the linking of Post with Modernism made sense...

...Not that either intellectual can damage a movement badly in need of euthanasia...

...Even history, whose raison d’être, one might have thought, was a commitment to factual truth, has suffered...

...THANKS TO Postmode its adherents, any number of spectacular no-talents (most of them with a PC agenda) have proliferated in the arts...

...In fact, he enjoyed worldwide recognition early on...

...Those dead white males—and females— have supplied the shoulders on which the dwarfs of Postmodernism are now posing...

...T o whip your joyous flesh, And bruise your pardoned breast, T o make in your astonished flank A wide and gaping wound, And, intoxicating sweetness...

...But few if any subjects have escaped unscathed...

...A wide-ranging intellect, Gay spends a good deal of time and space on Modernist silent and sound movies...

...But these days history is in a hurry— and so are historians...

...Eliot, whose very titles were commentaries on the decline of the West: The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men,” “Gerontion...

...the X-rated, stream-of-consciousness prose of James Joyce’s Ulysses...

...Frank Lloyd Wright was a gifted egomaniac who, like so many Modernists, thought of the machine as an instructor...

...Should Charlie Chaplin’s classic be remade as Postmodern Times...

...It is with the future that we have to deal...

...The conservative curmudgeon Roger Kimball noted that “Departments of literature were among the first to capitulate to such trendy and destructive fads as deconstruction, structuralism and cultural studies in all its unlovely allotropes...

...Some have the energy but not the scholarship...

...This mechanistic view was both liberating and insensitive...

...The “anything” included Arnold Schoenberg’s edgy 12-tone music...

...those who think of him as a victim of the Philistines have been reading too few biographies and too much Ayn Rand...

...Installation Art (detritus in a dumpster, while outside the trees of Central Park were enclosed by the kitschy drapes of Christo...

...he died in 1867...

...Oscar Wilde was the personification of art for art’s sake, mocking Victorian conventions with coruscating plays and gaudy prose, misbehaving in public, pushing the envelope until it tore apart...

...Happily, the movement has been fingered as a scam by thinkers on both the Right and Left...

...At the age of 84 Gay still possesses both assets...

...Emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life...

...The radical linguist Noam Chomsky was equally offended by deconstruction: “Most of it seems to me gibberish...

...His memorable phrases set the tone for all that was to follow: “The past is of no importance...

...As for Proust, his brilliant observations of society, and his emphasis on the primacy of art, mark him as a colleague of Wilde...

...The present is what man ought not to be...

...Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) again traumatized the bourgeois, and Modernism was under way...

...In his personal life he was a snob, careful not to emphasize his mother’s Jewish heritage, assiduously courting the rich and titled— hardly the earmarks of a revolutionary...

...Postmodernism has had a bad short run, and whatever slouches toward Western culture now would be more than welcome...

...As the world knows, Wilde paid for such impudence with his life...

...This was outlandishly praised by certain music critics, anxious that they too should be living in a golden age, just as Bach’s and Beethoven’s contemporaries did...

...Wright liked to portray himself as an outsider, much maligned for his revolutionary ideas...

...William Butler Yeats, with one foot in the past and the other in the Modernist movement, wondered what was en route in his poem “The Second Coming”: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born...

...Broadway’s great Modernist, Cole Porter (unmentioned by Gay), stated the conditions in a lighter mode: The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today And black’s white today And day’s night today… Anything goes...

...Accused of a homosexual affair with “Bosie,” the treacherous young son of the Marquess of Queensberry, he unwisely fought the charges in court, lost and went to Reading Gaol...

...This canon is not merely a safe list of Shakespeare, Bach Da Vinci, and other approved giants...

...Two stanzas will suffice to give the tenor of the volume: Pour châtier ta chair joyeuse, Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonné, Et faire à ton flanc étonné Une blessure large et creuse, Et, vertigineuse douceur...

...What it cannot and should not contain is the Postmodern attitude and its consequent results...

...His concept came to be applied to all art—including architecture, the social sciences, politics and indeed life itself...