Modernism
MALCOLM BULL
BETWEEN THE CULTURES OF CAPITAL
Modernism in its various forms has generated a body of critical and historical writing that is without equal. Within this field, the work of T. J. Clark—on Courbet, on Manet, and now in a sequence of essays on painters from David to Pollock—is as exciting as it gets, indeed, as exciting as art history has any reason to be. What makes his achievement unique is not his sensitivity to the nuances of the primary sources, or his almost physical engagement with the surfaces of paintings, but the conjunction of these qualities with a revolutionary’s instinct for the limitless potential of particular historical moments. And if he sometimes writes (as he says Pissarro paints) ‘on a knife-edge, between simplicity and portentiousness, or strong expression and souped-up emotion’, so much the better. No one else would dare. [1]
Farewell to an Idea is based on the premiss that ‘modernism is our antiquity’, already ‘a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp’. The historian of modernism is like an archaeologist who has unearthed ‘a handful of disconnected pieces left over from a holocaust that had wiped out the pieces’ context’. That holocaust was the continuation of modernity, the triumph of capitalism, the disenchantment of the world. Recovering the context of modernism involves the recognition that it was ‘a desperate, and probably futile struggle to imagine modernity otherwise’, a struggle shared, ‘in a century-long co-dependency’, with socialism. Modernism and socialism may both now seem impossible, but impossibility is also the condition of their survival: they are the art and politics of ‘the time that is not yet ripe’. [2]
Let’s stop there. We need to look at some of these terms. Modernism is not a lost civilization; it was never a civilization in the first place. What we are talking about is a series of cultural experiments that took place in capitalist countries around the start of the twentieth century. In other parts of the world (save Latin America) modernism is little more than a footnote in the history of colonialism. Even in the West, modernism had only a limited audience. Exclusively metropolitan, subsidized by eccentric millionaires and made by bohemians, it left most of the population untouched. Neither a style (uniform and diffused) nor a culture (multiform and organic), modernism always looked different and rarely appeared in the same place twice. The episodes that Clark discusses (David in 1793, Pissarro in 1891, Cubism in 1912, El Lissitzky and Malevich in 1920, Pollock in the late 1940s) may not be representative of modernism as a whole, but their disconnexion is an accurate reflection of its scattered distribution.
There were, of course, several modernisms, each with a different trajectory. Architectural modernism and theological modernism were both attempts to make the ornate structures of the past more functional. People were meant to inhabit these modernisms, and they often did not care to. Fundamentalism and architectural postmodernism were the reaction. The type of modernism with which Clark is concerned was always different. In literature, music and the visual arts, the rationalization of existing forms was rarely an end in itself. These modernisms addressed themselves only to those with disposable incomes; they did not have to cut their costs to accommodate the masses. But in all except the visual arts, modernism has had little lasting success. Literary modernism is kept alive only as a canon of set texts. Programmes of modernist music still cannot be relied upon to fill concert halls. Yet visual art is now more widely appreciated than at any time in its history. One thing that histories of modernism need (but usually fail) to do is explain why modernism in the visual arts had a lasting influence in a way that other modernisms did not.
Whereas modernism was local, sporadic and exclusive, modernity, characterized by the erosion of traditional ways and the rationalization of social life, has been global, continuous and inescapable. Establishing a context for artistic modernism within modernity usually requires a double manoeuvre. First extract the modernist seam from the visual culture in which it is embedded, and then argue that this thin seam is so semantically rich that it reflects, metamorphized, the entire stratum of social life from which it comes. This has to be a dubious procedure. When we juxtapose modernism and modernity we are not comparing phenomena of similar type or extent. Despite appearances, modernism was never the culture of modernity in the way that postmodernism has become the culture of postmodernity; there were too many places, too many media and too many people that modernism never reached. This makes it difficult to maintain that modernism is expressive of modernity as a totality, even of modernity’s revulsion at itself; and it carries the implication that modernity found its expression elsewhere. If modernism was not the culture of modernity, something else was.
I will come back to this in a moment. But what about the third term in the argument—socialism? Clark sometimes seems to picture socialism as being, like modernism, simultaneously an expression and a negation of modernity, a parallel counter-culture, modernism’s separated, non-identical twin. This is, at least, tacit recognition of the fact that modernism was even less the culture of socialism than it was of modernity as whole. Neither in Communist states nor in the social-democratic parties and labour movements of the West did modernism ever establish itself as the accepted form of expression or communication. In many cases, it was only briefly tolerated. But it would be equally wrong to suggest that modernism and socialism were separated because, as parallel critiques of modernity, they were in competition for the same space. If modernism was often against modernity it was only intermittently and obliquely opposed to capitalism; the captions to the illustrations in Farewell to an Idea (Private Collection; X Museum, gift of . . .) tell the story (untold in the text) of its total and painless assimilation. In contrast, socialism’s opposition to capitalism was undertaken in the name of modernity; and for many people in the world socialism has been the only modernity there is, not the struggle to imagine it otherwise. To argue, as does Clark, that since both were opposed to capitalist modernity they share the same utopian impulse is misleading; modernism and socialism were rarely opposed to the same things.
What Clark means by socialism is perhaps something slightly different, an ideal never realized. If so, it underscores the divergence of socialism and modernism in his argument. He suggests that modernism had two great wishes, ‘a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism)’ and the dream of ‘turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity’. [3] But the failure to achieve those goals is constitutive of modernism’s meaning and identity in a way that the failure of socialism is not. Both modernism and socialism had their utopian side, yet nobody ever says that actually existing modernism was a disappointing travesty of what modernism should have been. Although individual movements may have had crazy ideas that came to nothing, modernism as a whole does not have an ideal form: the failure of its projects is what makes it interesting. Would anyone, even a cynic, make the same claim about socialism?
One problem with Marxist criticism is that it has always been written at the end of capitalism at a time when capitalism has not been coming to an end. Whether writing a brutal epitaph or (as is more often the case) an extended elegy, the Marxist critic always stands with his back to the future, surveying the wreckage. He rarely sees what is coming. According to Clark, modernity is ‘tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings’. At the same time, there can be ‘no modernism without the practical possibility of an end to capitalism existing’. [4] Capitalism goes on and on but, for modernism and its critics, it is always ‘late’. This positioning creates a blind spot. During the twentieth century the culture of capitalism has renewed itself entirely, yet for many critics every sign of that renewal has been a symptom of its decadence. In consequence, they have missed something that is, I think, now clear, namely that capitalism has had two cultures, not one, and that the second is something other than the senescence of the first.
Classicism and commodity culture
The first culture of capitalism is the one that everyone knows about. It developed in the secular culture of the Renaissance, used the visual forms and literary narratives of antiquity as its raw material, and had naturalistic illusionism as its goal. If it tended to swing between the poles of neo-classicism and anecdotal realism, that was also the source of its enduring strength. It survived not just the transition to industrial capitalism, but also the convulsive politics of industrialism in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. This last claim needs some justification, for this is the point at which the first culture is often said to have broken down. But the period from 1850 to 1950 conforms, in significant respects, to the pre-existing pattern: nineteenth-century realism was the last, and perhaps also the fullest expression of the classical aesthetic of mimesis; the first half of the twentieth century saw the final flourishing of the classical style.
The suggestion that classicism was the dominant form of high art until the mid-twentieth century is not as outrageous as it sounds. Not only did it remain institutionally entrenched until the 1950s—the basis of the curriculum, the preferred model for public art—it was also the form to which almost all the great modernists—Picasso, Eliot, Stravinsky—reverted after their most daring experiments. In Art Deco, classicism found one of its most flexible and widely diffused manifestations; in surrealist painting, a new syntax for the old forms. Both socialist realism and fascist art were variants of classicism (the former, despite its name, more neo-classical than realist) and between them they dominated the visual culture of Europe east of the Rhine. But classicism was not a reactionary style, it was hegemonic: the official culture of every state, the unconscious of every would-be revolutionary. It can only be made to appear otherwise by separating and discounting official, totalitarian and decorative art, and by downplaying the classical tendencies within modernism. The classical tradition petered out in the early 1960s, not the 1860s. Pop received the surrender.
The second culture of capitalism is equally familiar, but not everyone thinks it is a civilization. Before the 1970s it was called mass culture or kitsch; since then it has been known, misleadingly, as postmodernism. It can be argued that the continuity between kitsch and postmodernism is such that they constitute a single culture; and that this culture replaced not, as the word ‘postmodernism’ implies, modernism, but classicism. The differences between the first and second cultures of capitalism might be enumerated as follows: 1) the shift from mimesis to the meme; from the imitation of the world to the reproduction of the unit of reproduction—or, to put it another way, from iconocity to indexicality; and, following from this, 2) the acceptance of stylistic eclecticism (classical models enjoyed their unique prestige on account of their supposed naturalism, their occasional use as ornament in architectural postmodernism was deeply anti-classical), 3) the reliance on large numbers of consumers to distribute/create the product, and 4) the erasure of the social rather than the technical traces of facture.
The preconditions of commodity culture (as I shall call it) were the expansion of the market and the development of new media. What poetry and painting were for classical culture, the periodical, the photograph and their progeny (film, radio, TV, video, other electronic media) were for the culture of commodities. The sources of commodity culture were various: sometimes (as with popular music) drawing almost exclusively on folk traditions; at others using the classical, sometimes viewed through the prism of modernism. The so-called postmodern era has been characterized not by any fundamental change in commodity culture, but by its colonization of the institutions and media of classicism.
For most people, the culture of modernity has been the culture of commodities; or, to put it more bluntly, ‘postmodernism’ was the culture of modernity all along. This is true not just for the huge numbers of people in the twentieth century whose first experience of anything other than folk traditions has been American-style TV; but also for their predecessors who moved straight from agrarian communities to the world of the newspaper and the wireless (in neither of which classicism or modernism ever took root). Only for those steeped in the classical tradition did postmodernism require new forms of attention.
The relationship between the two cultures was antagonistic. They co-existed for the best part of a century, the second growing in the enormous condescension of the first. Few educated people could believe that commodity culture was really a culture at all, let alone that it would supersede the culture of classicism. On this point, Marxists took their stand with the reactionaries. But the argument has proved unsustainable. There was, and is, every indication that people of all educational levels (now perhaps especially the more educated, who can afford to make fuller use of it) find the endless inventiveness of commodity culture to be pleasurable, plausible and spiritually satisfying. Its hegemony may only just have begun.
Artists of the fold
What is said above has all been said before, much of it by Perry Anderson and Fredric Jameson, but classical culture and commodity culture are rarely juxtaposed like this because each is usually compared not with the other, but with modernism. In histories of modernism, one or other of these cultures usually provides the ground on which modernism figures. Indeed, modernism’s heroic opposition to its cultural context is one of its defining characteristics. For Clark
There is a line of art . . . that makes no sense—that would not have existed—without its practitioners believing what they did was resist or exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist. [5]
But it was never as simple as that. The modernists appear to be the major players in twentieth-century art only because classical culture is written out of the script too early, and popular culture arrives on the scene too late. In fact, both the cultures of capitalism were there the whole time, and modernism did not stand out against either so much as exist in the space between them. That space was narrow.
Clement Greenberg, who had an acute sense of modernism’s vulnerability, always tried to argue that commodity culture and classicism were manifestations of the same thing, the former merely a debased version of the latter. But for this to be true there would have had to be more similarity in appearance or function than there ever actually was. Not only was kitsch often fabricated in different media and used in different ways, but those differences were visible to the naked eye. The invention of taste allowed every haut bourgeois to tell them apart. Modernism, in its repeated attempts to offend bourgeois sensibility, did not so much oppose itself to classicism and commodity culture as undermine the attempt to keep them separate. If modernism had been straightforwardly opposed to both the cultures of capitalism, we would expect to find it wherever one or the other was strong. But modernism only came into being where and when the two overlapped. Modernism was strongest in France, the site of their most awkward imbrication. Where classicism was weak, as in England and the United States, modernism was slow to develop; where popular culture was weak, as in Italy, modernism struggled to found itself on a technological version of modernity. Where no such overlap existed within their own culture, the modernists often generated the experience through migration—American expatriate modernism in Europe is the obvious example.
Certain features of modernism become more salient when viewed in this context. One is its sense of being squeezed. You can feel it in the bombast of modernist rhetoric, the calls for autonomy, the gestures toward utopian space. Another is its inveterate doubleness. Clark thinks that modernism’s ‘continual two-facedness . . . has to do with the fact that art, in our culture, finds itself more and more at the limits, on the verge of emptiness and silence’, but this picture of modernism trapped between modernity and the void is poetry, not history. [6] Modernists were not partisans resisting the present and pressing on eternity, they were negotiating the equally tricky but rather more mundane path between the two cultures of capitalism. Working between two antithetical cultures meant that resistance to the one almost always involved some degree of complicity with the other. More often than not the doubleness of modernism is the helpless duplicity of the double-agent.
That makes modernism sound more dishonest than it usually was. But we need some way of demystifying modernism’s relation to the cultures of capitalism. It did not just happen to exist between the two cultures; it must also have had some role in their functioning (if not, why did it survive there and nowhere else?). The first question that needs to be asked about the relation of modernism and capitalism is not ‘How did modernism resist capitalism?’ but ‘What did modernism do for capitalism?’. One answer might go something like this. By simultaneously resisting and mediating the two cultures modernism created a space between them, a distinct zone where their transgressive intermingling did not instantly compromise their separation. This liminal space facilitated the long overlap between the two cultures; it was also the route through which one culture turned into the other. If the space of modernism is the space between the cultures of capitalism, and the time of modernism is that of their overlapping, the trajectory of modernism is that which leads from the first to the second.
We can picture this trajectory as a double fold. Modernism begins where classicism turns back on itself, and ends where it turns back into commodity culture. But both classicism and commodity culture are there all the time, and the route from one to the other is also the layer between them. There is no need to rehearse the arguments to the effect that modernism is the passage from the classical tradition to postmodernism—how materiality of the sign leads to the commodity, aestheticism to consumerism, the signature to the logo, the genius to the celebrity—these are common to all who see the origins of the latter in the negation of the former. My point is rather that this passage is not just a route but also the space between the two cultures and the condition of their long imbrication.
Revolution and modernism
If we think of modernism as a fold in and between the cultures of capitalism, it becomes easier to see where it stands in relation to revolution. For although revolution has also frequently proved to be a fold rather than a cut, it is not to be found in the same places. In Western Europe, revolution was defeated in 1848, almost before modernism began; the subsequent success of revolution in ever more distant parts of the globe has no modernist parallel. Whereas modernism is a feature of capitalist societies, socially and technically able to sustain the overlap of two cultures, revolution has only ever been successful in countries at a much earlier stage of social and industrial development, societies that are ‘imagining having industry’. Russian modernism is not necessarily an exception. The brief conjunction of revolution and modernism after 1917 gives the misleading impression that the one fostered the other in social conditions that were equally conducive to both. But Russia was a divided society. The characteristic forms of modernism (Malevich’s Black Square, Tatlin’s Reliefs) were produced in pre-revolutionary Moscow, where the two cultures of capitalism were starting to overlap. Bolshevism, which killed off modernism along with capitalism, owed its lasting success to the fact that Russia as a whole was not like that.
Revolution has remained central to the mythology of modernism, and Clark’s book is an attempt to restate its importance. He concedes that ‘perhaps “the age of revolutions” has come to an end’, but retains the hope that ‘a space may emerge for resistance on the other side’. [7] It is worth dwelling on this distinction. Where political revolution was successful, it overthrew the ancien régime; and where the modernist revolution ultimately proved successful was in helping to undermine the culture of classicism (which long outlived the absolutist states where it had flourished). In bourgeois capitalist societies, revolutionary activity has only ever succeeded in offering resistance; similarly, although modernism has never effected a revolution against the culture of commodities, it has, according to many critics, offered some resistance to it. If modernism’s revolution was against classicism, it was only ever a resistance movement against commodity culture. The central thesis of Farewell to an Idea is that the former dynamic produced the latter. Inspired by the utopian dream of revolution, modernism has repeatedly succeeded in creating hubs of resistance in capitalism’s circulating economy of signs.
The way in which Clark chooses to argue his case is determined by his longstanding reliance on two critics whose judgements about modern culture are harsher and simpler than his own—Clement Greenberg and Guy Debord. From Greenberg, Clark derives the belief that modernist painting is ‘an ability to lay hold . . . of the fact of flatness—the object’s empirical limits and resistance—and have it be interesting’. [8] From Debord, he gets the conviction that art and politics are inseparable, and that the one can be pursued through the other. Being a ‘Greenbergian Situationist’ commits Clark to arguing (contrary to Greenberg, who saw flatness as modernism’s route out of politics) that flatness and revolution go together. If socialism is modernism’s utopia, and modernism socialism’s praxis, formalism is modernism’s telos. As Clark recently wrote in these pages: ‘transcendence in modernism can only be achieved—is not this central to our whole sense of the movement’s wager?—by way of absolute immanence and contingency, through a deep and ruthless materialism, by a secularization (a “realization”) of transcendence—an absorption in the logic of form’. [9]
If it is true that modernism had only one Other, then Clark’s argument ought to work. But if modernism was a fold between the cultures of capitalism, we are likely to reach the opposite conclusion, namely that it was modernism’s revolutionary qualities that weakened its resistance to commodity culture, and that insofar as modernism did resist commodification it was not all that revolutionary.
Pissarro: anarchism’s art
Within Farewell to an Idea, the test case for Clark’s coupling of revolutionary politics and modernism is the long essay on Camille Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women (Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman) painted in 1891–2. Here, Clark suggests, ‘socialism put Pissarro’s normal skills—his sense of decorum and self-effacing arrogance of technique—under extreme pressure’. [10] The controversial aspect of this claim is not the idea that Pissarro’s work was somehow informed by his anarchism. (The artist himself stated that ‘our ideas, impregnated with anarchist philosophy, give colour to the works we do’, and all the recent literature on the artist deals with the question to some degree. [11]) Its novelty derives from the equation of anarchism with socialism; the suggestion that Pissarro’s politics actively determined the appearance of individual paintings, and the implication that it pushed his work further along the path to modernism (‘decorum’ and ‘self-effacing arrogance of technique’ are the very qualities that modernism negates) and thus away from the market.
Aside from the tricky question of how to map anarchism and socialism at a time when their strategies were diverging, all discussion of Pissarro’s anarchism confronts two difficulties. The first, which Clark acknowledges, is that Pissarro came to anarchism only in middle age, at a time when his subject-matter and technique were already established. Thereafter, his political interests and his working practices both continued to develop, but without obvious links between them. Discerning the influence of the one on the other at any particular point is therefore something of an occult science. Even ‘extreme pressure’ results in nothing more than ‘a slight shifting of boundaries between expressiveness and surface integrity, or drawing and colour, or pastoral and monumentality.’ [12] The second problem is that by 1891, anarchism had been taken up by writers and artists of many persuasions. Anarchists close to Pissarro were associated with neo-impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. In this situation, there was no one way in which anarchism inflected the language of its supporters. No easy generalizations (for example, that anarchism made representation more/less naturalistic) are possible; there is nothing against which to measure that ‘slight shifting of the boundaries’.
Perhaps because of these difficulties, Clark focuses on a single painting and the circumstances of its execution. He places Two Young Peasant Women between the Fourmies massacre of 1891 in which ten people were killed in a May Day demonstration, and the Paris bombings of 1892 for which an anarchist known as Ravachol was eventually convicted. It was a turning point in anarchist tactics: a moment of profound revulsion at the violence of the state, a brief interlude before the arrival of the assassin and the lone bomber. Pissarro shared the anarchist reaction to Fourmies and had some sympathy for Ravachol; for Clark, therefore, it is not just the anarchist tradition but the unstable anarchist mood of 1891, ‘vengeful, self-doubting and serene’, out of which Two Young Peasant Women comes. [13]
The painting shows two women on the edge of a field. The one on the left is in reverie, her chin resting on her hand; the other kneels in front of her. Perhaps they are taking a break from work and having a chat (the painting is also known as La Causette). The scene is not obviously political, but for anarchists like Kropotkin, peasant life provided the model for an alternative politics that would be decentralized, agrarian and mutual. Maybe these women—at rest in the fields, rather prettier than they might be—offer an idealized glimpse of what such a society would be like. But by 1891, Pissarro was already aware, ‘acutely at just this moment, of the razor’s edge on which such imagining stood’; hence the indeterminacy ‘conveyed by pose, by spatial set-up, even by facial expression’. This is a painting about sociability, and yet, Clark states, ‘The to-and-fro of feeling between the picture’s protagonists strikes me finally as lopsided.’ The genre may be anarchist pastoral, but in the uncertainty of the moment Pissarro has painted a moment of uncertainty: neither of the women is quite sure of the other, ‘of their feelings, or whether what one had said expressed them properly, or what the other would make of them’. [14]
It is a delicate reading of the painting, brilliantly conjured from the messy and violent politics of the Third Republic. But the heightened sense of precariousness on which it relies is contrived. Let us go back to the peasant woman on the left. When first introduced, she is ‘sitting on the ground, or on a grass bank, with knees splayed wide—maybe squatting’. The suggestion that she is seated hardly seems to need qualification: Pissarro depicted several peasant women sitting like this, including the Peasant Woman Sitting: Sunset of 1892; the grass bank is implied under the line of trees behind her, and the angle between her back and her left knee is too wide for any other explanation. In fact, Pissarro only ever depicted women squatting when they were doing backbreaking work, picking things off the ground. Yet hereafter the figure on the left is always ‘the squatting woman’, no longer sitting on the ground but perched ‘on her heels, or her hams, or her haunches’; eventually she is even ‘the crouching woman’. [15]
The shift is far from trivial. By removing her comfortable seat on the grass, Clark gives the figure an awkwardness and tension quite unlike that of her companion; the lop-sidedness and uncertainty of the composition start here. At the same time, Clark’s insistence that she is squatting is his way of signalling that she is more than a tree (some contemporary critics liked to think of Pissarro’s peasants as literally rooted in the landscape, ‘fruits of the soil that supports them’ [16]); that Pissarro has uprooted her and given her a stake in the utopian future described by Kropotkin. But, deprived of her seat, the woman’s centre of gravity falls so far forward that she can only be supported by the canvas itself: she is ‘leaning on the frame with solid certainty, spreading her body out and out across the surface’. The less she is grounded in the earth, the more she becomes paint: she ‘folds out laterally across the picture plane, claiming more and more flat room’. [17]
The redescription of the woman’s pose does a lot of work in the argument. It effects the shift from anecdotalism to indecipherability; from organicist antipastoral to anarchist pastoral, and from self-effacing technique to painterly materiality. But that is not all. It also helps to conceal a potentially relevant source. The clearest statement of Pissarro’s anarchism, and his most explicit attempt to give it visual expression, was a series of pen-and-ink drawings with accompanying texts which he sent at the end of 1889, under the title Les Turpitudes sociales, to some young relatives in England. On the title page, Father Time sits patiently watching the rising sun of ‘ANARCHIE’ coming up behind the Eiffel Tower, the despised symbol of modern beauty. Seen from the back, his pose—seated on a flat stone with both knees drawn up in front of him and his right hand supporting his head—is probably as close to that of the left-hand woman as anything else in Pissarro’s work at this point.
Les Turpitudes sociales does not get a mention in Clark’s 80-page discussion of Pissarro’s anarchism around 1890. If it did, it is hard to see how it would fit with the argument that Pissarro’s political convictions pushed his artistic practice in a modernist direction. Pissarro’s little anarchist primer depicts contemporary urban social evils in a visual language derived from Daumier and Cruikshank. Anarchism may have affected different artists in different ways, but Les Turpitudes sociales suggests that for Pissarro in 1889 it meant heightened tonal contrast and expressive line—naturalism forced towards caricature. If the pose of one of the Two Young Peasant Women is a reworking of that of Time, it is one in which the symbolic content of the posture has been erased, and where all the visual indicators of Pissarro’s political passion are absent as well.
I do not wish to deny that there may be a homeopathic infusion of anarchism in this painting (Pissarro also believed in homeopathy); the point is simply that Clark’s struggle to pin it down and claim it for modernism involves rather more sleight of hand than it should. The painting was given by Pissarro to his wife, so it is difficult to tell whether it spoke ‘a language that the market would not be able to convert—or convert entirely—into its preferred (individualistic) terms’. [18] But the show for which it was finished was a financial success. Indeed, the period of Pissarro’s most active political involvement was almost the only time he received solid support from a commercial gallery. If socialism and modernism did have the long and uneasy partnership that Clark imagines, it ought to be possible to point to times when they were working together against the market. Pissarro is one of the most committed leftists in the modernist canon. It should be easier than this.
Pollock: failures of resistance?
Writing to his father in 1900, Lucien Pissarro floated an idea that the old man could not quite follow. Perhaps commercialism was the true modernism, and all the fin-de-siècle movements in art merely reactions to it. His father responded that although ‘chromos for grocers’ could be made out of any type of art, that did not make commercialism anything special. [19] Almost half a century later, Greenberg was less confident. Kitsch, he now recognized, was on the way to becoming ‘a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld’. [20] The avant garde was in a last-ditch battle against it.
Half a century on again, many art historians have come to doubt whether even Greenberg’s champion, Jackson Pollock, was fighting on his side. One piece of evidence is a set of photographs taken by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1951. They show models in party frocks posing in front of Pollock’s recent drip paintings. Here, it seems, is visual proof that the most revolutionary art of its time (painted in defiance of all the conventions of the classical tradition) offered no resistance at all to the culture of commodities. Those photographs say: ‘Negation is stylish. For stylish . . . read fashionable’. They suggest that modernism served as a ‘cultural softening-up process’ in which art prepared the ground for the market’s exploitation of marginal states. In the case of Pollock, those states were ‘the wordless, the somatic, the wild, the self-risking, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled, the “existential”, the beyond or before our conscious activities of mind’. [21]
To his credit, Clark takes the silent accusation contained in the photographs very seriously. He accepts that ‘the process these photos glamorize is not glamorous, and not incidental: it is one that the practice of modernism knows lies in wait for it, and may prove its truth.’ His response, like that of a good defence counsel, is partly to try to outperform the prosecution. But amongst the many diversions (William IX of Aquitaine, Bakhtin, the Unhappy Consciousness, three different endings) there is an argument. It goes something like this. There is a danger that ‘the Other to modernism—the normal understandings it is supposed to be resisting and refusing—will come to seem a dead formula.’ Whatever else they do, those photographs show what Pollock was up against. They help to remind us that ‘the future that works of art envisage is very often one of misuse and misunderstanding’. The possibility of appropriation by commodity culture is therefore something that has been ‘internalized by modernism and built into its operations’. It is for this reason that ‘the test of art was held to be some form of intransigence or difficulty in the object produced’. For Pollock, the attempt ‘to annihilate the very ground of misreading’ means that his work must resist abstraction as much as it does illusionism. This is ‘why “abstract” and “figurative” go together in Pollock’s practice’, why his work ‘lives on its contradictions’, why Pollock’s painting ‘turns back to the root conditions of its own abstractness, and tries to give them form’. The form it chooses is ‘refusal of aesthetic closure: cutting out, interruption, efforts at infantile metonymy; dissonance meaning mimesis, meaning sensuousness as well as “Gothic-ness, paranoia, and resentment”—the one set of qualities in the form of the other.’ [22]
The argument here is the inverse of the one Clark offered in the case of Pissarro. Whereas he read Pissarro’s revolutionary politics into his painting of Two Young Peasant Women by suggesting that the flatness of the left-hand figure made the subject unreadable, he takes the reintroduction of figurative elements into Pollock’s paintings as evidence of resistance to commodification—a resistance that bespeaks an underlying continuity with modernism’s revolutionary project. Arguments like this can get a bit slippery (resistance is everywhere if you look hard enough), and what you make of them often depends on how convinced you are that the canonical works of modernism are the ones that put up the best fight against the market. (Clark is confident: ‘no work of real concentration’, or with ‘real complexity’ etc. can fail to do so.) Taken together, however, the two arguments give modernism a different role to that which either posits independently. The problem is not that resistance is signified by flatness in one painting and figuration in the other (no one wants to reduce mark-making to univalence), but that if the same ambiguity can function as a sign of resistance in opposing contexts, the resistance it provides must be ambiguous as well.
Clark suggests that modernism’s ambiguities are generated through a combination of negation of the Other and self-negation, but by reusing the argument with opposing terms he makes the negation of the Other and self-negation interchangeable. (The most straightforward example is his defence of abstract expressionism in which ‘vulgarity’ [i.e. kitsch] becomes the means through which abstraction liberates itself from kitsch.) When aggregated, Clark’s episodes therefore provide abundant evidence not of modernism’s intransigence, but of its pliability. By repeatedly blurring the distinction between modernism’s refusal of the Other and its refusal of itself, and arguing that the one refusal may appear in the form of the other, Clark draws attention both to modernism’s doubleness and to the doubleness of its Other. No wonder that, as Clark observes, modernism’s defeats were its victories and its victories Pyrrhic; it often did not know which side it was on.
Degrees of disenchantment
For Clark, as for Weber, modernity’s great uncompleted project is the disenchantment of the world, the process through which society ‘has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of the projected future’ and the accompanying ‘emptying and sanitizing of the imagination’. [23] This analysis of modernity as a social process may be fundamentally right, but it is easy to overstate, or at least to oversimplify, the accompanying disenchantment. It would not take an alien anthropologist very long to locate the idols of our tribe. In Western societies they are housed in the two museums. One (e.g. the National Gallery, the Met—you could probably guess the function of these buildings even before the spacecraft landed), a shrine to the first culture of capitalism; the other (Tate Modern, MoMA), a celebration of the second. Once upon a time, we supposed that the second museum was a sort of negation of the first, but the rehangs have given the lie to that.
The two museums do not house objects of the same type. The first is a relentless paean to the charisma of technique; it includes only objects in a very narrow range of media, produced in accordance with specific craft traditions, all arranged in sequence according to a single narrative. The second, by contrast, works on the principle of plenitude mediated through the institutions of art. The greater the variety the better: everything in the world belongs here, you just cannot show it all at once. Nobody knows what sample of commodity culture artists and curators will buy in next, or how the museum will have to be re-arranged to accommodate it. (Although the second museum started out with abstract paintings, they are unlikely to predominate for long.) Where the first museum represents a culture that is fixed and timeless, the second museum works on a different temporality and a different theory of art. At present, our society seems to need them both: the first museum stakes capitalism’s claim to be grounded in nature and history, and to possess a universal rationality that can transmute the one into the other; the second celebrates capitalism’s limitless fecundity in the manufacture of pleasures, its mysterious ability to work without foundations, to turn anything, for no reason, into an exchangeable object of value.
To many people the disenchantment of the world is the difference between the enchantment of the first and the relative disenchantment of the second. But, in fact, both museums are the site of the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world. The first museum houses many objects whose enchantment was once of a wholly different kind. The enchantment of all those crucifixes, altarpieces and reliquaries is not their original magic. The first museum is the place where the sacred becomes the aesthetic, a lesser enchantment, but still a potent one. In the second museum, art becomes fashion. This is the true significance of Beaton’s photographs. The ‘bad dream of modernism’ turned out to be worse than Clark lets on. Art did not just become ‘fashionable’, it became fashion, i.e. a fully commodified practice, without foundation or meta-narrative. The institutional theory of art on which the second museum is built is essentially a theory of fashion, the theory that the fashion-industry never needed to articulate for itself. Again, a disenchantment perhaps, but also a re-enchantment: ‘merely fashion’ is an oxymoron.
Within this pseudo-Hegelian triad, art as a whole mediates between religion and fashion, between the Papacy and Prada. Modernism is just the hinge on the door that leads from one museum to the other, its role in the disenchantment of the world roughly parallel to that of the Renaissance in the transition from religion to art. Just as Renaissance art, by accentuating the aesthetic properties of cultic objects, helped people to see the natural in the supernatural (and vice versa), so modernism, by emphasizing the contingent properties of aesthetic objects, has allowed people to see the commodity in the masterpiece (and vice versa). If the visual arts did this more effectively than any other, it was partly because (and this was the advantage of working for collectors rather than audiences) they could be more daringly and doggedly insistent on the contingency of their language, and partly because visual artworks—with their minimal demands on our attention (compare the time it takes to walk round a major retrospective with the time you need to read Ulysses), their materiality and marketability—approximate most closely to the commodity form.
The historical position this gives to modernism is not a negligible one. Indeed, it is hard to see how the transition between the two cultures of capitalism would have happened so smoothly without it. But it corresponds in many respects to Clark’s nightmare that
Not only will it [art] forego its role in the disenchantment of the world, but it will accept the role that has constantly been foisted upon it by its false friends: it will become one of the forms, maybe the form, in which the world is re-enchanted. With a magic no more and no less powerful (here is my real fear) than that of the general conjuror of depth and desirability back into the world we presently inhabit—that is, the commodity form. [24]
All that is missing here is an acknowledgement that modernism’s role in the disenchantment of the old world was the enchantment of the new, and the realization that this dreadful premonition is a repressed memory. The account of modernism I have given above is, I suspect, more or less the one against which Farewell to an Idea was written.
For socialism, the disenchantment of the world has always held a utopian promise. If modernism was just a late stage in the history of fetishism as it progressed from religion to fashion, its role in that disenchantment does not amount to much. Yet it did have some effect. The commodity fetish is a weaker fetish than the religious fetish. Today, however, we must look elsewhere for the preservation of whatever living politics we have.
[1] T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London 1999, p. 61. Hereafter FI.
[2] FI, pp. 1–3, 8–9 and 160.
[3] FI, p. 9.
[4] FI, pp. 7–9.
[5] FI, p. 364.
[6] FI, p. 407.
[7] FI, p. 297.
[8] FI, p. 235.
[9] ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, NLR 2, March–April 2000, p. 95.
[10] FI, p. 62.
[11] Letter to Lucien Pissarro, 13 May 1891, quoted in FI, p. 104.
[12] FI, p. 99.
[13] FI, p. 104.
[14] FI, pp. 90 and 121–2.
[15] FI, pp. 62, 87 and 90.
[16] Clément-Janin, quoted in FI, p. 115.
[17] FI, pp. 90 and 68.
[18] FI, p. 114.
[19] Camille Pissarro, Letters to his son Lucien, New York 1943, p. 341.
[20] Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston 1961, p. 12.
[21] FI, pp. 302 and 308.
[22] FI, pp. 305–8 and 364–6.
[23] FI, p. 7.
[24] FI, p. 374.
BETWEEN THE CULTURES OF CAPITAL
Modernism in its various forms has generated a body of critical and historical writing that is without equal. Within this field, the work of T. J. Clark—on Courbet, on Manet, and now in a sequence of essays on painters from David to Pollock—is as exciting as it gets, indeed, as exciting as art history has any reason to be. What makes his achievement unique is not his sensitivity to the nuances of the primary sources, or his almost physical engagement with the surfaces of paintings, but the conjunction of these qualities with a revolutionary’s instinct for the limitless potential of particular historical moments. And if he sometimes writes (as he says Pissarro paints) ‘on a knife-edge, between simplicity and portentiousness, or strong expression and souped-up emotion’, so much the better. No one else would dare. [1]
Farewell to an Idea is based on the premiss that ‘modernism is our antiquity’, already ‘a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp’. The historian of modernism is like an archaeologist who has unearthed ‘a handful of disconnected pieces left over from a holocaust that had wiped out the pieces’ context’. That holocaust was the continuation of modernity, the triumph of capitalism, the disenchantment of the world. Recovering the context of modernism involves the recognition that it was ‘a desperate, and probably futile struggle to imagine modernity otherwise’, a struggle shared, ‘in a century-long co-dependency’, with socialism. Modernism and socialism may both now seem impossible, but impossibility is also the condition of their survival: they are the art and politics of ‘the time that is not yet ripe’. [2]
Let’s stop there. We need to look at some of these terms. Modernism is not a lost civilization; it was never a civilization in the first place. What we are talking about is a series of cultural experiments that took place in capitalist countries around the start of the twentieth century. In other parts of the world (save Latin America) modernism is little more than a footnote in the history of colonialism. Even in the West, modernism had only a limited audience. Exclusively metropolitan, subsidized by eccentric millionaires and made by bohemians, it left most of the population untouched. Neither a style (uniform and diffused) nor a culture (multiform and organic), modernism always looked different and rarely appeared in the same place twice. The episodes that Clark discusses (David in 1793, Pissarro in 1891, Cubism in 1912, El Lissitzky and Malevich in 1920, Pollock in the late 1940s) may not be representative of modernism as a whole, but their disconnexion is an accurate reflection of its scattered distribution.
There were, of course, several modernisms, each with a different trajectory. Architectural modernism and theological modernism were both attempts to make the ornate structures of the past more functional. People were meant to inhabit these modernisms, and they often did not care to. Fundamentalism and architectural postmodernism were the reaction. The type of modernism with which Clark is concerned was always different. In literature, music and the visual arts, the rationalization of existing forms was rarely an end in itself. These modernisms addressed themselves only to those with disposable incomes; they did not have to cut their costs to accommodate the masses. But in all except the visual arts, modernism has had little lasting success. Literary modernism is kept alive only as a canon of set texts. Programmes of modernist music still cannot be relied upon to fill concert halls. Yet visual art is now more widely appreciated than at any time in its history. One thing that histories of modernism need (but usually fail) to do is explain why modernism in the visual arts had a lasting influence in a way that other modernisms did not.
Whereas modernism was local, sporadic and exclusive, modernity, characterized by the erosion of traditional ways and the rationalization of social life, has been global, continuous and inescapable. Establishing a context for artistic modernism within modernity usually requires a double manoeuvre. First extract the modernist seam from the visual culture in which it is embedded, and then argue that this thin seam is so semantically rich that it reflects, metamorphized, the entire stratum of social life from which it comes. This has to be a dubious procedure. When we juxtapose modernism and modernity we are not comparing phenomena of similar type or extent. Despite appearances, modernism was never the culture of modernity in the way that postmodernism has become the culture of postmodernity; there were too many places, too many media and too many people that modernism never reached. This makes it difficult to maintain that modernism is expressive of modernity as a totality, even of modernity’s revulsion at itself; and it carries the implication that modernity found its expression elsewhere. If modernism was not the culture of modernity, something else was.
I will come back to this in a moment. But what about the third term in the argument—socialism? Clark sometimes seems to picture socialism as being, like modernism, simultaneously an expression and a negation of modernity, a parallel counter-culture, modernism’s separated, non-identical twin. This is, at least, tacit recognition of the fact that modernism was even less the culture of socialism than it was of modernity as whole. Neither in Communist states nor in the social-democratic parties and labour movements of the West did modernism ever establish itself as the accepted form of expression or communication. In many cases, it was only briefly tolerated. But it would be equally wrong to suggest that modernism and socialism were separated because, as parallel critiques of modernity, they were in competition for the same space. If modernism was often against modernity it was only intermittently and obliquely opposed to capitalism; the captions to the illustrations in Farewell to an Idea (Private Collection; X Museum, gift of . . .) tell the story (untold in the text) of its total and painless assimilation. In contrast, socialism’s opposition to capitalism was undertaken in the name of modernity; and for many people in the world socialism has been the only modernity there is, not the struggle to imagine it otherwise. To argue, as does Clark, that since both were opposed to capitalist modernity they share the same utopian impulse is misleading; modernism and socialism were rarely opposed to the same things.
What Clark means by socialism is perhaps something slightly different, an ideal never realized. If so, it underscores the divergence of socialism and modernism in his argument. He suggests that modernism had two great wishes, ‘a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism)’ and the dream of ‘turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity’. [3] But the failure to achieve those goals is constitutive of modernism’s meaning and identity in a way that the failure of socialism is not. Both modernism and socialism had their utopian side, yet nobody ever says that actually existing modernism was a disappointing travesty of what modernism should have been. Although individual movements may have had crazy ideas that came to nothing, modernism as a whole does not have an ideal form: the failure of its projects is what makes it interesting. Would anyone, even a cynic, make the same claim about socialism?
One problem with Marxist criticism is that it has always been written at the end of capitalism at a time when capitalism has not been coming to an end. Whether writing a brutal epitaph or (as is more often the case) an extended elegy, the Marxist critic always stands with his back to the future, surveying the wreckage. He rarely sees what is coming. According to Clark, modernity is ‘tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings’. At the same time, there can be ‘no modernism without the practical possibility of an end to capitalism existing’. [4] Capitalism goes on and on but, for modernism and its critics, it is always ‘late’. This positioning creates a blind spot. During the twentieth century the culture of capitalism has renewed itself entirely, yet for many critics every sign of that renewal has been a symptom of its decadence. In consequence, they have missed something that is, I think, now clear, namely that capitalism has had two cultures, not one, and that the second is something other than the senescence of the first.
Classicism and commodity culture
The first culture of capitalism is the one that everyone knows about. It developed in the secular culture of the Renaissance, used the visual forms and literary narratives of antiquity as its raw material, and had naturalistic illusionism as its goal. If it tended to swing between the poles of neo-classicism and anecdotal realism, that was also the source of its enduring strength. It survived not just the transition to industrial capitalism, but also the convulsive politics of industrialism in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. This last claim needs some justification, for this is the point at which the first culture is often said to have broken down. But the period from 1850 to 1950 conforms, in significant respects, to the pre-existing pattern: nineteenth-century realism was the last, and perhaps also the fullest expression of the classical aesthetic of mimesis; the first half of the twentieth century saw the final flourishing of the classical style.
The suggestion that classicism was the dominant form of high art until the mid-twentieth century is not as outrageous as it sounds. Not only did it remain institutionally entrenched until the 1950s—the basis of the curriculum, the preferred model for public art—it was also the form to which almost all the great modernists—Picasso, Eliot, Stravinsky—reverted after their most daring experiments. In Art Deco, classicism found one of its most flexible and widely diffused manifestations; in surrealist painting, a new syntax for the old forms. Both socialist realism and fascist art were variants of classicism (the former, despite its name, more neo-classical than realist) and between them they dominated the visual culture of Europe east of the Rhine. But classicism was not a reactionary style, it was hegemonic: the official culture of every state, the unconscious of every would-be revolutionary. It can only be made to appear otherwise by separating and discounting official, totalitarian and decorative art, and by downplaying the classical tendencies within modernism. The classical tradition petered out in the early 1960s, not the 1860s. Pop received the surrender.
The second culture of capitalism is equally familiar, but not everyone thinks it is a civilization. Before the 1970s it was called mass culture or kitsch; since then it has been known, misleadingly, as postmodernism. It can be argued that the continuity between kitsch and postmodernism is such that they constitute a single culture; and that this culture replaced not, as the word ‘postmodernism’ implies, modernism, but classicism. The differences between the first and second cultures of capitalism might be enumerated as follows: 1) the shift from mimesis to the meme; from the imitation of the world to the reproduction of the unit of reproduction—or, to put it another way, from iconocity to indexicality; and, following from this, 2) the acceptance of stylistic eclecticism (classical models enjoyed their unique prestige on account of their supposed naturalism, their occasional use as ornament in architectural postmodernism was deeply anti-classical), 3) the reliance on large numbers of consumers to distribute/create the product, and 4) the erasure of the social rather than the technical traces of facture.
The preconditions of commodity culture (as I shall call it) were the expansion of the market and the development of new media. What poetry and painting were for classical culture, the periodical, the photograph and their progeny (film, radio, TV, video, other electronic media) were for the culture of commodities. The sources of commodity culture were various: sometimes (as with popular music) drawing almost exclusively on folk traditions; at others using the classical, sometimes viewed through the prism of modernism. The so-called postmodern era has been characterized not by any fundamental change in commodity culture, but by its colonization of the institutions and media of classicism.
For most people, the culture of modernity has been the culture of commodities; or, to put it more bluntly, ‘postmodernism’ was the culture of modernity all along. This is true not just for the huge numbers of people in the twentieth century whose first experience of anything other than folk traditions has been American-style TV; but also for their predecessors who moved straight from agrarian communities to the world of the newspaper and the wireless (in neither of which classicism or modernism ever took root). Only for those steeped in the classical tradition did postmodernism require new forms of attention.
The relationship between the two cultures was antagonistic. They co-existed for the best part of a century, the second growing in the enormous condescension of the first. Few educated people could believe that commodity culture was really a culture at all, let alone that it would supersede the culture of classicism. On this point, Marxists took their stand with the reactionaries. But the argument has proved unsustainable. There was, and is, every indication that people of all educational levels (now perhaps especially the more educated, who can afford to make fuller use of it) find the endless inventiveness of commodity culture to be pleasurable, plausible and spiritually satisfying. Its hegemony may only just have begun.
Artists of the fold
What is said above has all been said before, much of it by Perry Anderson and Fredric Jameson, but classical culture and commodity culture are rarely juxtaposed like this because each is usually compared not with the other, but with modernism. In histories of modernism, one or other of these cultures usually provides the ground on which modernism figures. Indeed, modernism’s heroic opposition to its cultural context is one of its defining characteristics. For Clark
There is a line of art . . . that makes no sense—that would not have existed—without its practitioners believing what they did was resist or exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist. [5]
But it was never as simple as that. The modernists appear to be the major players in twentieth-century art only because classical culture is written out of the script too early, and popular culture arrives on the scene too late. In fact, both the cultures of capitalism were there the whole time, and modernism did not stand out against either so much as exist in the space between them. That space was narrow.
Clement Greenberg, who had an acute sense of modernism’s vulnerability, always tried to argue that commodity culture and classicism were manifestations of the same thing, the former merely a debased version of the latter. But for this to be true there would have had to be more similarity in appearance or function than there ever actually was. Not only was kitsch often fabricated in different media and used in different ways, but those differences were visible to the naked eye. The invention of taste allowed every haut bourgeois to tell them apart. Modernism, in its repeated attempts to offend bourgeois sensibility, did not so much oppose itself to classicism and commodity culture as undermine the attempt to keep them separate. If modernism had been straightforwardly opposed to both the cultures of capitalism, we would expect to find it wherever one or the other was strong. But modernism only came into being where and when the two overlapped. Modernism was strongest in France, the site of their most awkward imbrication. Where classicism was weak, as in England and the United States, modernism was slow to develop; where popular culture was weak, as in Italy, modernism struggled to found itself on a technological version of modernity. Where no such overlap existed within their own culture, the modernists often generated the experience through migration—American expatriate modernism in Europe is the obvious example.
Certain features of modernism become more salient when viewed in this context. One is its sense of being squeezed. You can feel it in the bombast of modernist rhetoric, the calls for autonomy, the gestures toward utopian space. Another is its inveterate doubleness. Clark thinks that modernism’s ‘continual two-facedness . . . has to do with the fact that art, in our culture, finds itself more and more at the limits, on the verge of emptiness and silence’, but this picture of modernism trapped between modernity and the void is poetry, not history. [6] Modernists were not partisans resisting the present and pressing on eternity, they were negotiating the equally tricky but rather more mundane path between the two cultures of capitalism. Working between two antithetical cultures meant that resistance to the one almost always involved some degree of complicity with the other. More often than not the doubleness of modernism is the helpless duplicity of the double-agent.
That makes modernism sound more dishonest than it usually was. But we need some way of demystifying modernism’s relation to the cultures of capitalism. It did not just happen to exist between the two cultures; it must also have had some role in their functioning (if not, why did it survive there and nowhere else?). The first question that needs to be asked about the relation of modernism and capitalism is not ‘How did modernism resist capitalism?’ but ‘What did modernism do for capitalism?’. One answer might go something like this. By simultaneously resisting and mediating the two cultures modernism created a space between them, a distinct zone where their transgressive intermingling did not instantly compromise their separation. This liminal space facilitated the long overlap between the two cultures; it was also the route through which one culture turned into the other. If the space of modernism is the space between the cultures of capitalism, and the time of modernism is that of their overlapping, the trajectory of modernism is that which leads from the first to the second.
We can picture this trajectory as a double fold. Modernism begins where classicism turns back on itself, and ends where it turns back into commodity culture. But both classicism and commodity culture are there all the time, and the route from one to the other is also the layer between them. There is no need to rehearse the arguments to the effect that modernism is the passage from the classical tradition to postmodernism—how materiality of the sign leads to the commodity, aestheticism to consumerism, the signature to the logo, the genius to the celebrity—these are common to all who see the origins of the latter in the negation of the former. My point is rather that this passage is not just a route but also the space between the two cultures and the condition of their long imbrication.
Revolution and modernism
If we think of modernism as a fold in and between the cultures of capitalism, it becomes easier to see where it stands in relation to revolution. For although revolution has also frequently proved to be a fold rather than a cut, it is not to be found in the same places. In Western Europe, revolution was defeated in 1848, almost before modernism began; the subsequent success of revolution in ever more distant parts of the globe has no modernist parallel. Whereas modernism is a feature of capitalist societies, socially and technically able to sustain the overlap of two cultures, revolution has only ever been successful in countries at a much earlier stage of social and industrial development, societies that are ‘imagining having industry’. Russian modernism is not necessarily an exception. The brief conjunction of revolution and modernism after 1917 gives the misleading impression that the one fostered the other in social conditions that were equally conducive to both. But Russia was a divided society. The characteristic forms of modernism (Malevich’s Black Square, Tatlin’s Reliefs) were produced in pre-revolutionary Moscow, where the two cultures of capitalism were starting to overlap. Bolshevism, which killed off modernism along with capitalism, owed its lasting success to the fact that Russia as a whole was not like that.
Revolution has remained central to the mythology of modernism, and Clark’s book is an attempt to restate its importance. He concedes that ‘perhaps “the age of revolutions” has come to an end’, but retains the hope that ‘a space may emerge for resistance on the other side’. [7] It is worth dwelling on this distinction. Where political revolution was successful, it overthrew the ancien régime; and where the modernist revolution ultimately proved successful was in helping to undermine the culture of classicism (which long outlived the absolutist states where it had flourished). In bourgeois capitalist societies, revolutionary activity has only ever succeeded in offering resistance; similarly, although modernism has never effected a revolution against the culture of commodities, it has, according to many critics, offered some resistance to it. If modernism’s revolution was against classicism, it was only ever a resistance movement against commodity culture. The central thesis of Farewell to an Idea is that the former dynamic produced the latter. Inspired by the utopian dream of revolution, modernism has repeatedly succeeded in creating hubs of resistance in capitalism’s circulating economy of signs.
The way in which Clark chooses to argue his case is determined by his longstanding reliance on two critics whose judgements about modern culture are harsher and simpler than his own—Clement Greenberg and Guy Debord. From Greenberg, Clark derives the belief that modernist painting is ‘an ability to lay hold . . . of the fact of flatness—the object’s empirical limits and resistance—and have it be interesting’. [8] From Debord, he gets the conviction that art and politics are inseparable, and that the one can be pursued through the other. Being a ‘Greenbergian Situationist’ commits Clark to arguing (contrary to Greenberg, who saw flatness as modernism’s route out of politics) that flatness and revolution go together. If socialism is modernism’s utopia, and modernism socialism’s praxis, formalism is modernism’s telos. As Clark recently wrote in these pages: ‘transcendence in modernism can only be achieved—is not this central to our whole sense of the movement’s wager?—by way of absolute immanence and contingency, through a deep and ruthless materialism, by a secularization (a “realization”) of transcendence—an absorption in the logic of form’. [9]
If it is true that modernism had only one Other, then Clark’s argument ought to work. But if modernism was a fold between the cultures of capitalism, we are likely to reach the opposite conclusion, namely that it was modernism’s revolutionary qualities that weakened its resistance to commodity culture, and that insofar as modernism did resist commodification it was not all that revolutionary.
Pissarro: anarchism’s art
Within Farewell to an Idea, the test case for Clark’s coupling of revolutionary politics and modernism is the long essay on Camille Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women (Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman) painted in 1891–2. Here, Clark suggests, ‘socialism put Pissarro’s normal skills—his sense of decorum and self-effacing arrogance of technique—under extreme pressure’. [10] The controversial aspect of this claim is not the idea that Pissarro’s work was somehow informed by his anarchism. (The artist himself stated that ‘our ideas, impregnated with anarchist philosophy, give colour to the works we do’, and all the recent literature on the artist deals with the question to some degree. [11]) Its novelty derives from the equation of anarchism with socialism; the suggestion that Pissarro’s politics actively determined the appearance of individual paintings, and the implication that it pushed his work further along the path to modernism (‘decorum’ and ‘self-effacing arrogance of technique’ are the very qualities that modernism negates) and thus away from the market.
Aside from the tricky question of how to map anarchism and socialism at a time when their strategies were diverging, all discussion of Pissarro’s anarchism confronts two difficulties. The first, which Clark acknowledges, is that Pissarro came to anarchism only in middle age, at a time when his subject-matter and technique were already established. Thereafter, his political interests and his working practices both continued to develop, but without obvious links between them. Discerning the influence of the one on the other at any particular point is therefore something of an occult science. Even ‘extreme pressure’ results in nothing more than ‘a slight shifting of boundaries between expressiveness and surface integrity, or drawing and colour, or pastoral and monumentality.’ [12] The second problem is that by 1891, anarchism had been taken up by writers and artists of many persuasions. Anarchists close to Pissarro were associated with neo-impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. In this situation, there was no one way in which anarchism inflected the language of its supporters. No easy generalizations (for example, that anarchism made representation more/less naturalistic) are possible; there is nothing against which to measure that ‘slight shifting of the boundaries’.
Perhaps because of these difficulties, Clark focuses on a single painting and the circumstances of its execution. He places Two Young Peasant Women between the Fourmies massacre of 1891 in which ten people were killed in a May Day demonstration, and the Paris bombings of 1892 for which an anarchist known as Ravachol was eventually convicted. It was a turning point in anarchist tactics: a moment of profound revulsion at the violence of the state, a brief interlude before the arrival of the assassin and the lone bomber. Pissarro shared the anarchist reaction to Fourmies and had some sympathy for Ravachol; for Clark, therefore, it is not just the anarchist tradition but the unstable anarchist mood of 1891, ‘vengeful, self-doubting and serene’, out of which Two Young Peasant Women comes. [13]
The painting shows two women on the edge of a field. The one on the left is in reverie, her chin resting on her hand; the other kneels in front of her. Perhaps they are taking a break from work and having a chat (the painting is also known as La Causette). The scene is not obviously political, but for anarchists like Kropotkin, peasant life provided the model for an alternative politics that would be decentralized, agrarian and mutual. Maybe these women—at rest in the fields, rather prettier than they might be—offer an idealized glimpse of what such a society would be like. But by 1891, Pissarro was already aware, ‘acutely at just this moment, of the razor’s edge on which such imagining stood’; hence the indeterminacy ‘conveyed by pose, by spatial set-up, even by facial expression’. This is a painting about sociability, and yet, Clark states, ‘The to-and-fro of feeling between the picture’s protagonists strikes me finally as lopsided.’ The genre may be anarchist pastoral, but in the uncertainty of the moment Pissarro has painted a moment of uncertainty: neither of the women is quite sure of the other, ‘of their feelings, or whether what one had said expressed them properly, or what the other would make of them’. [14]
It is a delicate reading of the painting, brilliantly conjured from the messy and violent politics of the Third Republic. But the heightened sense of precariousness on which it relies is contrived. Let us go back to the peasant woman on the left. When first introduced, she is ‘sitting on the ground, or on a grass bank, with knees splayed wide—maybe squatting’. The suggestion that she is seated hardly seems to need qualification: Pissarro depicted several peasant women sitting like this, including the Peasant Woman Sitting: Sunset of 1892; the grass bank is implied under the line of trees behind her, and the angle between her back and her left knee is too wide for any other explanation. In fact, Pissarro only ever depicted women squatting when they were doing backbreaking work, picking things off the ground. Yet hereafter the figure on the left is always ‘the squatting woman’, no longer sitting on the ground but perched ‘on her heels, or her hams, or her haunches’; eventually she is even ‘the crouching woman’. [15]
The shift is far from trivial. By removing her comfortable seat on the grass, Clark gives the figure an awkwardness and tension quite unlike that of her companion; the lop-sidedness and uncertainty of the composition start here. At the same time, Clark’s insistence that she is squatting is his way of signalling that she is more than a tree (some contemporary critics liked to think of Pissarro’s peasants as literally rooted in the landscape, ‘fruits of the soil that supports them’ [16]); that Pissarro has uprooted her and given her a stake in the utopian future described by Kropotkin. But, deprived of her seat, the woman’s centre of gravity falls so far forward that she can only be supported by the canvas itself: she is ‘leaning on the frame with solid certainty, spreading her body out and out across the surface’. The less she is grounded in the earth, the more she becomes paint: she ‘folds out laterally across the picture plane, claiming more and more flat room’. [17]
The redescription of the woman’s pose does a lot of work in the argument. It effects the shift from anecdotalism to indecipherability; from organicist antipastoral to anarchist pastoral, and from self-effacing technique to painterly materiality. But that is not all. It also helps to conceal a potentially relevant source. The clearest statement of Pissarro’s anarchism, and his most explicit attempt to give it visual expression, was a series of pen-and-ink drawings with accompanying texts which he sent at the end of 1889, under the title Les Turpitudes sociales, to some young relatives in England. On the title page, Father Time sits patiently watching the rising sun of ‘ANARCHIE’ coming up behind the Eiffel Tower, the despised symbol of modern beauty. Seen from the back, his pose—seated on a flat stone with both knees drawn up in front of him and his right hand supporting his head—is probably as close to that of the left-hand woman as anything else in Pissarro’s work at this point.
Les Turpitudes sociales does not get a mention in Clark’s 80-page discussion of Pissarro’s anarchism around 1890. If it did, it is hard to see how it would fit with the argument that Pissarro’s political convictions pushed his artistic practice in a modernist direction. Pissarro’s little anarchist primer depicts contemporary urban social evils in a visual language derived from Daumier and Cruikshank. Anarchism may have affected different artists in different ways, but Les Turpitudes sociales suggests that for Pissarro in 1889 it meant heightened tonal contrast and expressive line—naturalism forced towards caricature. If the pose of one of the Two Young Peasant Women is a reworking of that of Time, it is one in which the symbolic content of the posture has been erased, and where all the visual indicators of Pissarro’s political passion are absent as well.
I do not wish to deny that there may be a homeopathic infusion of anarchism in this painting (Pissarro also believed in homeopathy); the point is simply that Clark’s struggle to pin it down and claim it for modernism involves rather more sleight of hand than it should. The painting was given by Pissarro to his wife, so it is difficult to tell whether it spoke ‘a language that the market would not be able to convert—or convert entirely—into its preferred (individualistic) terms’. [18] But the show for which it was finished was a financial success. Indeed, the period of Pissarro’s most active political involvement was almost the only time he received solid support from a commercial gallery. If socialism and modernism did have the long and uneasy partnership that Clark imagines, it ought to be possible to point to times when they were working together against the market. Pissarro is one of the most committed leftists in the modernist canon. It should be easier than this.
Pollock: failures of resistance?
Writing to his father in 1900, Lucien Pissarro floated an idea that the old man could not quite follow. Perhaps commercialism was the true modernism, and all the fin-de-siècle movements in art merely reactions to it. His father responded that although ‘chromos for grocers’ could be made out of any type of art, that did not make commercialism anything special. [19] Almost half a century later, Greenberg was less confident. Kitsch, he now recognized, was on the way to becoming ‘a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld’. [20] The avant garde was in a last-ditch battle against it.
Half a century on again, many art historians have come to doubt whether even Greenberg’s champion, Jackson Pollock, was fighting on his side. One piece of evidence is a set of photographs taken by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1951. They show models in party frocks posing in front of Pollock’s recent drip paintings. Here, it seems, is visual proof that the most revolutionary art of its time (painted in defiance of all the conventions of the classical tradition) offered no resistance at all to the culture of commodities. Those photographs say: ‘Negation is stylish. For stylish . . . read fashionable’. They suggest that modernism served as a ‘cultural softening-up process’ in which art prepared the ground for the market’s exploitation of marginal states. In the case of Pollock, those states were ‘the wordless, the somatic, the wild, the self-risking, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled, the “existential”, the beyond or before our conscious activities of mind’. [21]
To his credit, Clark takes the silent accusation contained in the photographs very seriously. He accepts that ‘the process these photos glamorize is not glamorous, and not incidental: it is one that the practice of modernism knows lies in wait for it, and may prove its truth.’ His response, like that of a good defence counsel, is partly to try to outperform the prosecution. But amongst the many diversions (William IX of Aquitaine, Bakhtin, the Unhappy Consciousness, three different endings) there is an argument. It goes something like this. There is a danger that ‘the Other to modernism—the normal understandings it is supposed to be resisting and refusing—will come to seem a dead formula.’ Whatever else they do, those photographs show what Pollock was up against. They help to remind us that ‘the future that works of art envisage is very often one of misuse and misunderstanding’. The possibility of appropriation by commodity culture is therefore something that has been ‘internalized by modernism and built into its operations’. It is for this reason that ‘the test of art was held to be some form of intransigence or difficulty in the object produced’. For Pollock, the attempt ‘to annihilate the very ground of misreading’ means that his work must resist abstraction as much as it does illusionism. This is ‘why “abstract” and “figurative” go together in Pollock’s practice’, why his work ‘lives on its contradictions’, why Pollock’s painting ‘turns back to the root conditions of its own abstractness, and tries to give them form’. The form it chooses is ‘refusal of aesthetic closure: cutting out, interruption, efforts at infantile metonymy; dissonance meaning mimesis, meaning sensuousness as well as “Gothic-ness, paranoia, and resentment”—the one set of qualities in the form of the other.’ [22]
The argument here is the inverse of the one Clark offered in the case of Pissarro. Whereas he read Pissarro’s revolutionary politics into his painting of Two Young Peasant Women by suggesting that the flatness of the left-hand figure made the subject unreadable, he takes the reintroduction of figurative elements into Pollock’s paintings as evidence of resistance to commodification—a resistance that bespeaks an underlying continuity with modernism’s revolutionary project. Arguments like this can get a bit slippery (resistance is everywhere if you look hard enough), and what you make of them often depends on how convinced you are that the canonical works of modernism are the ones that put up the best fight against the market. (Clark is confident: ‘no work of real concentration’, or with ‘real complexity’ etc. can fail to do so.) Taken together, however, the two arguments give modernism a different role to that which either posits independently. The problem is not that resistance is signified by flatness in one painting and figuration in the other (no one wants to reduce mark-making to univalence), but that if the same ambiguity can function as a sign of resistance in opposing contexts, the resistance it provides must be ambiguous as well.
Clark suggests that modernism’s ambiguities are generated through a combination of negation of the Other and self-negation, but by reusing the argument with opposing terms he makes the negation of the Other and self-negation interchangeable. (The most straightforward example is his defence of abstract expressionism in which ‘vulgarity’ [i.e. kitsch] becomes the means through which abstraction liberates itself from kitsch.) When aggregated, Clark’s episodes therefore provide abundant evidence not of modernism’s intransigence, but of its pliability. By repeatedly blurring the distinction between modernism’s refusal of the Other and its refusal of itself, and arguing that the one refusal may appear in the form of the other, Clark draws attention both to modernism’s doubleness and to the doubleness of its Other. No wonder that, as Clark observes, modernism’s defeats were its victories and its victories Pyrrhic; it often did not know which side it was on.
Degrees of disenchantment
For Clark, as for Weber, modernity’s great uncompleted project is the disenchantment of the world, the process through which society ‘has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of the projected future’ and the accompanying ‘emptying and sanitizing of the imagination’. [23] This analysis of modernity as a social process may be fundamentally right, but it is easy to overstate, or at least to oversimplify, the accompanying disenchantment. It would not take an alien anthropologist very long to locate the idols of our tribe. In Western societies they are housed in the two museums. One (e.g. the National Gallery, the Met—you could probably guess the function of these buildings even before the spacecraft landed), a shrine to the first culture of capitalism; the other (Tate Modern, MoMA), a celebration of the second. Once upon a time, we supposed that the second museum was a sort of negation of the first, but the rehangs have given the lie to that.
The two museums do not house objects of the same type. The first is a relentless paean to the charisma of technique; it includes only objects in a very narrow range of media, produced in accordance with specific craft traditions, all arranged in sequence according to a single narrative. The second, by contrast, works on the principle of plenitude mediated through the institutions of art. The greater the variety the better: everything in the world belongs here, you just cannot show it all at once. Nobody knows what sample of commodity culture artists and curators will buy in next, or how the museum will have to be re-arranged to accommodate it. (Although the second museum started out with abstract paintings, they are unlikely to predominate for long.) Where the first museum represents a culture that is fixed and timeless, the second museum works on a different temporality and a different theory of art. At present, our society seems to need them both: the first museum stakes capitalism’s claim to be grounded in nature and history, and to possess a universal rationality that can transmute the one into the other; the second celebrates capitalism’s limitless fecundity in the manufacture of pleasures, its mysterious ability to work without foundations, to turn anything, for no reason, into an exchangeable object of value.
To many people the disenchantment of the world is the difference between the enchantment of the first and the relative disenchantment of the second. But, in fact, both museums are the site of the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world. The first museum houses many objects whose enchantment was once of a wholly different kind. The enchantment of all those crucifixes, altarpieces and reliquaries is not their original magic. The first museum is the place where the sacred becomes the aesthetic, a lesser enchantment, but still a potent one. In the second museum, art becomes fashion. This is the true significance of Beaton’s photographs. The ‘bad dream of modernism’ turned out to be worse than Clark lets on. Art did not just become ‘fashionable’, it became fashion, i.e. a fully commodified practice, without foundation or meta-narrative. The institutional theory of art on which the second museum is built is essentially a theory of fashion, the theory that the fashion-industry never needed to articulate for itself. Again, a disenchantment perhaps, but also a re-enchantment: ‘merely fashion’ is an oxymoron.
Within this pseudo-Hegelian triad, art as a whole mediates between religion and fashion, between the Papacy and Prada. Modernism is just the hinge on the door that leads from one museum to the other, its role in the disenchantment of the world roughly parallel to that of the Renaissance in the transition from religion to art. Just as Renaissance art, by accentuating the aesthetic properties of cultic objects, helped people to see the natural in the supernatural (and vice versa), so modernism, by emphasizing the contingent properties of aesthetic objects, has allowed people to see the commodity in the masterpiece (and vice versa). If the visual arts did this more effectively than any other, it was partly because (and this was the advantage of working for collectors rather than audiences) they could be more daringly and doggedly insistent on the contingency of their language, and partly because visual artworks—with their minimal demands on our attention (compare the time it takes to walk round a major retrospective with the time you need to read Ulysses), their materiality and marketability—approximate most closely to the commodity form.
The historical position this gives to modernism is not a negligible one. Indeed, it is hard to see how the transition between the two cultures of capitalism would have happened so smoothly without it. But it corresponds in many respects to Clark’s nightmare that
Not only will it [art] forego its role in the disenchantment of the world, but it will accept the role that has constantly been foisted upon it by its false friends: it will become one of the forms, maybe the form, in which the world is re-enchanted. With a magic no more and no less powerful (here is my real fear) than that of the general conjuror of depth and desirability back into the world we presently inhabit—that is, the commodity form. [24]
All that is missing here is an acknowledgement that modernism’s role in the disenchantment of the old world was the enchantment of the new, and the realization that this dreadful premonition is a repressed memory. The account of modernism I have given above is, I suspect, more or less the one against which Farewell to an Idea was written.
For socialism, the disenchantment of the world has always held a utopian promise. If modernism was just a late stage in the history of fetishism as it progressed from religion to fashion, its role in that disenchantment does not amount to much. Yet it did have some effect. The commodity fetish is a weaker fetish than the religious fetish. Today, however, we must look elsewhere for the preservation of whatever living politics we have.
[1] T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London 1999, p. 61. Hereafter FI.
[2] FI, pp. 1–3, 8–9 and 160.
[3] FI, p. 9.
[4] FI, pp. 7–9.
[5] FI, p. 364.
[6] FI, p. 407.
[7] FI, p. 297.
[8] FI, p. 235.
[9] ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, NLR 2, March–April 2000, p. 95.
[10] FI, p. 62.
[11] Letter to Lucien Pissarro, 13 May 1891, quoted in FI, p. 104.
[12] FI, p. 99.
[13] FI, p. 104.
[14] FI, pp. 90 and 121–2.
[15] FI, pp. 62, 87 and 90.
[16] Clément-Janin, quoted in FI, p. 115.
[17] FI, pp. 90 and 68.
[18] FI, p. 114.
[19] Camille Pissarro, Letters to his son Lucien, New York 1943, p. 341.
[20] Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston 1961, p. 12.
[21] FI, pp. 302 and 308.
[22] FI, pp. 305–8 and 364–6.
[23] FI, p. 7.
[24] FI, p. 374.
posted by Auguste Maquet at 2:01 PM
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