Turning Point: Toward A Second Modernism
Carla Subrizi
The potential
for a second Modernism emerges through the way recent art both destroys and rethinks
art of the first Modernism. The concepts of Charles Baudelaire and later Walter
Benjamin were the soil into which the 20th century laid its roots. Contradiction
and intuition regarding identity (individual and social), history, and a conception
of time and its narration in which the senses assume an important role, came
to the fore. Roads later diverged from the same root, arriving at a diversity
that Post-Modernism recovered, sometimes distorted, reconsidered, and realigned.
The negation of
absolutes and the adoption of thought based on ambiguity, paradox, feeling, and
relativity (already in Baudelaire) were integral to Modernism. History was seen
as grounded in progress, in historical evolution of the same kind as biological
evolution in the sciences (Baudelaire criticized the widespread "Americanism"
of his time and later Benjamin posited his allegory of time as expectation grounded
in the instant). Modernism questioned the notion of dialectics as a sterile countering
of opposites, or irreconcilable terms (thesis and antithesis). Lucid intuition
overcame these ways of thinking. The relative, the absolute, and their lack of
completion, if considered separately, as Baudelaire did, provided a new hypothesis
in which error, deformation, nonsense, the drive toward evil, prevailed.
Nihilism as an
exploration of the unknown, or "other," became emblematic of a new
critical paradigm for understanding the world, and it has followers to this day.
A profound identity crisis afflicts the "subject" along with certain
reference points. Baudelaire and Friedrich Nietzsche respectively introduced
the notions of the "dandy" and the "superman," new individuals
who refused any banal logic based on superficial premises.
In one sense
Post-Modernism took root in Modern ambiguity or sought to make it an anchoring
point (as though the absence of certainty and heterogeneity in the place of homogeneity
could be substituted for by the "certainty of uncertainty" and the
celebration of chaos) to justify any kind of eclecticism. At the end of the 20th
century, in 1989 for Europeans with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in an epoch
that always defied facile simplifications, the basis for a new turn occurred
which we are currently living. It could be considered the dawning of a second
Modernism.
In this context,
artists view the function of art both within and without its systems of presentation.
They consider the artwork a tool of investigation that is aligned with life and
its fundamental questions (history, politics, human relations) but which also
seeks to glean its meaning. Art is no longer viewed as the definitive result
of a preexisting thought. The artist thinks of the work, even after its realization,
as a work in progress, a rethinking of individual and collective identity, power
relationships, and systems that organize life and culture. Action and commitment
in the world become fundamental points in a project that is essentially critical.
The relationships between individuals that denote social relationships and meetings
become part of art.
Marco Vaglieri
thinks of artwork as a reflection of its context; through its encounters, a fabric
of social relations is woven. The city becomes, just as Baudelaire had indicated,
a place without a face which noneless reveals different physiognomies to different
people who pass within it. Feelings and performances condition relationships,
passages, and sensory crossings that defy any absolute definition. Enzo Umbaca
chooses places like subway stations and city streets to identify unconventional
relationships. At times he searches these environments for anomalous situations
only to transfer them into another context. A group of twelve street musicians,
for example, is invited to play their work on a popular radio station.
Identities
mix and places and individuals open to diverse new meanings. Such pluralistic
meanings call into question the nature of identity itself along with the concept
of absolute definition and physiognomy. In his 2002 video work "The Other
Gaze," Cesare Pietroiusti walks in a crowd of people who walk to and fro
on a sidewalk, filming as he goes.
Every time
Pietroiusti meets a person walking toward him he changes direction. Federico
Del Prete, by means of photography, investigates issues of behavior, gesture,
and the body. Del Prete might relate the power of a motorcycle to the body of
a laborer at work. The body (also of the motorcycle) expresses itself in tactile
terms such as weight, power, curvaciousness, and musculature. The body is deprived
of its belonging to a particular individual or even human being. Even as a "thing"
it calls to mind sensation, history, memory, and presence. Del Prete amplifies
meaning by seeking new metaphors and allegories of reality. Reality is
a fundamental reference point but is not explicitly expressed.
With minimal
deviations of the senses and shifted meanings that are not immediately recognized,
the artist asserts himself as a critic who radically reexamines every social
and cultural convention. M+M, Mala Arti Visive, and Sara
Rossi are artists
who work with ambiguity and paradox. Their images and actions are replete with
double meanings that reside at the confines of legibility and therefore invite
questions that are the beginnings of critical discourse. The second Modernism
announces itself as an age of critical reflection on its past. Rather than pushing
the present by re-proposing a logic based on mechanisms of progress and faith
in the future to come, attention is shifted to the possibility of recognizing
what Baudelaire referred to as the modernity of every time. It thereby becomes
a conceptual measurement that transcends the convention of historical periods
as a sequence of facts, re-proposing the idea of modernity as the paradoxical
dilemma of all "Modern Times."
