T.J. Clark, 'Modernism, Postmodernism, Steam'
Let me say again what I said at the start. I do not know the art of the present well enough to be able to ask questions of it with any authority; but I think I know the art of the previous era well enough to know what questions ought to be asked. I have been arguing that modernism wished to understand, and put under real pressure, the deep structure of belief of its own historical moment—those things about itself that modernity most took for granted, or most wished were true. The pressure was formal. The beliefs would survive the test of the medium, or they would disintegrate. Mostly, it seems, they disintegrated. Modernism was modernity’s official opposition. It was the pessimist to modernity’s eternal optimism. It cultivated extremism—it seems as an answer to modern life’s pragmatism and technicality (which of course most modernists also loved). Technique in modernism was not problem-solving. It made problems worse.
The question to put to the art of the present, then, is what does that art appear to see as the beliefs in the culture of our own moment that are similarly structural, similarly the core of our present ideology; and how does art envisage putting those beliefs to the test? I have talked somewhat generally about “beliefs,” but of course for visual artists it is beliefs about vision and visualization that count, or, rather, beliefs that take the form of images—of fresh modes of visibility, or dreams of knowledge arranging itself in specifically visual form. We all know that such beliefs are at present the cutting edge of a new myth of modernization. Oursler is typical here. Any artist with smarts is going to see that the dream life that matters currently is the one promoted by the World Wide Web. But how is that dream life going to be put under real pressure? We are back to the problem implied by Marx’s “Teach the petrified forms how to dance by singing them their own song.” Mimicry is not enough. Nor is hectoring from the outside. It has to be singing. But singing involves hitting the right note, being exactly on key. It involves not an approximate knowledge of what the age of the digital believes about itself, but an intuition (of the kind that Manet and de Chirico managed) of precisely the central knot in the dream life—the founding assumption, the true structure of dream-visualization. It is easy to fake modernity’s uncanny. Modernity, as Benjamin reminds us, has thrived from the very beginning on a cheap spectacle of the strange, the new, the phantasmagoric. But modernity also truly dreams. The art that survives is the art that lays hold of the primary process, not the surface image-flow. …
Just as Manet, with one side of himself, fell for the notion of capitalism as pure realm of appearance, present-day visual artists can hardly avoid the glamour of the notion that the verbal is over and the visual has replaced it. But just as Manet in practice discovered that the realm of appearances was also one of identities, fixities, constraints, and determinations, I dare to predict that once the present ecstasy of the virtual and nonverbal is put to the test of form, it too will be found wanting. And I shall stop pretending to be neutral and say why. I shall end by offering artists of the present a few antivisual, antidigital slogans.
Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that the age of the Word is finished. On the contrary, words are still everywhere. And the image machinery we have created and disseminated is just a means for making those words over into images—that is the trouble with it. The ghost abominates the current means of visualization in the culture not out of nostalgic “logocentricity,” but because it sees our present means of symbolic production as essentially flooding the world with verbiage—with the simplest of words (the most banal and transparent of knowledge-motifs) given sufficient visual form. Sufficient, that is, for the motifs to make their hit, name their product, push the right paranoid button. Everything about the actual configuration of image-making in the world around us speaks to that fact. The system’s notions of image clarity, of image flow and image density—they are all essentially modeled on the parallel (and unimpeded) movements of the logo, the compressed pseudonarrative of the TV commercial, the product slogan, the sound bite. Images are still everywhere telling stories or issuing orders. Web pages, billboards, and video games are just visualizations—magnifications and speed-ups—of this prior and continuing world of the shouted (or whispered) sentence.
And at least [this] bitterness points to a complex of problems which, for the moment, our culture wishes not to recognize. If there is to be a visual art of postmodernity, in other words, I think it will have to begin from [anger, skepticism]. It will have to probe, as Manet and Picasso did, at the concepts that truly organize—that produce—our present fictions of the now. Once upon a time that meant mobility, and the free play of appearances, and the great myth of individuality. Those were Manet’s and Picasso’s raw materials. Nowadays it is the notions of virtuality and visuality. It is time this imaginary was put to the test of form.
