Has Modernism Failed - Cp.

5
Has Modernism Failed?
Suzi Gablik

            In a film shown in 1982 at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, the

English "living sculptors" Gilbert and George take turns enumerating their
own characteristics. They tell us that they are unhealthy, middle-aged,
dirty-minded, depressed, cynical, empty, seedy, rotten, badly behaved,
arrogant, stubborn, perverted, and successful--finishing with "we are
artists."

            Who could ask for anything more? In the artificial, decaying

environment of urban industrialism, art is not born of moral virtue; it is not
meant for the saving of souls. If my attempt to throw light on the main
issues of our present situation, "to show what contemporary art is and
does, and how it came into being," has been realized at all, it must be
fairly obvious by now that ours is not a healthy society, enjoying an
optimistic, conciliatory kind of art. If the modern artist once embraced
modernism with hope, pride, and a crusading spirit of disobedience, at this
stage of the day he seems to cling on with desperation, feeling indefinably
sad and shoddy. If Gilbert and George can be taken as any yardstick, it is
from his unfitness that the contemporary artist draws his power. The mood
has changed from vehemence to decadence and weary cynicism. Are these
words, then, a reasonable obbligato to what has become of Western
cultural history--a tradition of revolt gone sour? Do they draw a fair
portrait of the collective sensibility of an age dying of industrial exhaust,
and without a breath of rapture?

            I would betray the seriousness of the question were I simply to

declare that modernism had failed, or even that it has come to a sticky end.
The fact is no answer can be given without first examining what the ideals
of modernism have been, and what has been essential to its system of
values. What we finally think about all this will depend on what we now
regard as the true end and purpose of art.

            The period through which we have just lived has been, on the
whole, one in which whatever was inherited from the past was thought of
as a tiresome impediment to be escaped from as soon as possible. The first
Futurist manifesto, published in 1908 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
declared that only by becoming free of "the stinking gangrene of
professors, archaeologists, touring guides and antique dealers," only by
burning libraries and flooding museums, could Italy save itself. The new
world of speed and technology required a new language of forms derived
not from the past but from the future. A second manifesto declared that
only by denying its past could art correspond to the intellectual needs of
our time. Tradition was reactionary. Modernism alone was revolutionary
and progressive.

            But between that time and the end of the First World War in 1918,
disenchantment of another kind set in. By the 1920s, the postwar
generation of Dadaists was already doubtful "given the mercenary nature
of our society, which in the words of Richard Huelsenbeck "is at best a
cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural
association of psychopaths" whether it was feasible, or even morally
justified, to make art at all. The catastrophic effects of the war had
shattered everyone's faith in a rational and peaceful future. A civilization
that had condoned such inhumanities did not deserve the conciliations of
art: it had lost its credibility. And so the public was baited with
meaningless, aggressively absurd objects--white-haired revolvers, Lesbian
sardines, vaccinated bread, and flashes of lightning under fourteen years
old. The Dadaists and Surrealists wished to infiltrate a disturbed world, in
order to destroy all its existing patterns, all its accumulated truth, however
compulsive and authoritative.

            Once art began its relentless advance into traditionlessness, every

new style served as a new beginning, a new plunge ahead. Beliefs had to
be continually changed, replaced, discarded--always in favor of newer and
better ones, which would only be rejected in turn. (Neither science nor art
in our era has been content with what has been believed before,
associating traditional beliefs with backwardness and a lack of
momentum.) The "new" became the chief emblem of positive value.
"Being an artist," in the words of Joseph Kosuth, "means questioning the
nature of art. If you make paintings, you are already accepting (not
questioning) the nature of art." The impulse to experiment continuously is
profoundly different from the goal of tradition, which implies a
conservative attitude and considers the past as a model, or guiding
example. But what the early modernists failed to foresee, in their
dedication to the new, was that such a conception of history could only be
built on sand, since no belief ever had anything solid to support it.
Maximizing the variable of change, "stimulating it artificially and making
it the most important thing on the stage", destroyed stability. Pressed to its
ultimate conclusion, the steady violation of expected continuities"--which
has been the crucial element in modernist "progress"--is radically at odds
with systemic wisdom and equilibrium.

            To sustain itself, a society must also have values that resist change.
One of the social functions of tradition has been to foster stability, and so
to hinder change. The reflex of negation, in the effort to perpetuate itself
as a mode of thought, has ended up destroying not only tradition, but also
the art of the previous avant-garde. At this point, the possibilities for
stylistic innovation seem, paradoxically, to have reached a limit. Radical
consciousness has been stymied, along with the authority of tradition. Art
must now proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor
held together by tradition. So many metamorphoses and revolutions of
every kind, so many differing values presented simultaneously, have
finally done away with the entire frame of things--and destroyed the
conviction that there are any limits to art at all. Having thus removed any
standard against which we might any more measure ourselves, we no
longer know what rules we ought to follow, much less why we ought to
follow them. And so the very question of what constitutes success or
failure has to be an ambivalent one: it can only be judged by being
measured against some valid conception of what a work of art is, and this
is a conception we no longer have.
            Only with hindsight can we now see that tradition and authority
may be necessary, even to make a genuine avant-garde possible--in order
to provide something to revolt against. At this point, we have neither: the
polarizations have flattened out, and everything simply reverses into its
opposite. The artist finds himself under continuous pressure to be modern,
but discovers that to be modern now is to be traditional--a law of history
that Heraclitus called enantiodromia. That is to say, when one principle
reaches the height of its power, it collapses into its opposite. Artists are
finding that the only way to make something new is to borrow from the
past. All this has led, in the last few years, to a disaffection with the terms
and conditions of modernism--a repudiation of the ideology of progress
and originality.

            Traditions are a product of the recurrent affirmations that have

gone into their practice. When modernism made its massive assaults on
the accomplishments of the past, it deprived subsequent generations of
artists of any ground plan or guidance for the future. More stable traditions
of art imposed certain standards on their practitioners, patterns which were
accepted as the natural and right way to do things, and which became part
of the individual's practice and second nature as an artist. These standards
were transmitted from teacher to pupil, handed down from master to
disciple. This transmission is what has sustained practices and given them
their history. One of the unsettling characteristics of modernism, as a
tradition, is that it has failed to develop the means for training artists.
Nowadays, the artist has no function to transmit traditional skills, or even
to impart a knowledge of art--nor is there any consensus as to what should
be learned. Certainly, nothing more sharply distinguishes the modern view
of art from that of the past--a state of affairs that was well described by the
painter Bruce Boice in a lecture I heard recently at the School of Visual
Arts in New York. The talk was entitled "What It Means to Be an Artist,"
and Boice was addressing a group of students. "After leaving school," he
said, "students often don't work, because there's no reason to work.
Nobody pays attention any more, so there seems no reason to press on.
There's never a reason to do art work--it doesn't seem to matter--it all
looks all right, but it just doesn't matter. You get bored doing it because
you're in a vacuum. There's no motivation, no rules to say what you should
do, or whether it's good or not. Confidence is the thing that allows you to
work eventually--you know you can do this thing and succeed at it. It gets
harder all the time, but you get more used to the frustration. If there were
rules it would be simple enough to know what to do. But you find yourself
looking for something, and you don't know what it is. So how do you ever
know when you find it?"

            Needless to say, these comments underline the core weaknesses of

the modernist ethos, the retreat into privatism and self-expression, which
means that there is no example to follow, no authority to rely on, no
discipline to be received. It is almost as if the freer the artist has become,
the more impotent he feels himself to be. If we accept as accurate Erich
Fromm's description, in The Sane Society, of which human needs are basic
and essential--the need for relatedness, for transcendence (a concept which
for Fromm has nothing to do with God but refers to the need to transcend
one's self-centered, narcissistic, alienated position to one of being related
to others, and open to the world), the need for rootedness, for a sense of
identity, and for a frame of orientation and an object of devotion, then the
achievements of modernism would appear to have been had at too high a
cost. Its renunciations of so much that is crucial to human well-being "in
the name of freedom and self-sufficiency" are what will have failed us. In
the end, we could not sustain these virtues without suffering their defects.
Seductive though it may have seemed to escape from the world into the
self, something vital has been lost along with the forsaking of reality.
"Failure" is perhaps a very highly charged word--but in ways that are only
gradually coming to light, something, it would seem, has miscarried.

            We have obviously reached a threshold where the achievements of

modernism can only really be understood against the implicit contrast of
other values. The question of whether or not modernism has failed turns,
finally, on the question of whether it was appropriate in the first place to
reject tradition. It is just this sense that we may have taken too much to
heart the drive to innovate and emancipate-- regarding them wrongly as
the only goals to be pursued and claiming them as the standard for all that
progress and modernity mean--which has led the philosophers Edward
Shils and Alasdair Maclntyre to argue on behalf of traditions as essential
to the worthwhile life. The relentless emancipation from all traditions has
resulted, in the opinion of Shils, in the loss of much that is indispensable
to the good order and happiness of individuals. Traditions set standards
from which to draw practical guidance as to what is right and wrong; they
generate stable and durable systems of relationship, which help to situate
individuals in the social order and establish for them a network of social
obligations and responsibilities. Modernism so embraced notions of
freedom and autonomy--and of art needing to answer only to its own logic,
its own laws, the pure aesthetic without a function--that we now have
whole generations of artists who doubt that it was ever meant to be
organically integrated with society in the first place. It was during the
1950s, among the community of artists out of which Abstract
Expressionism emerged, that the totally self-possessed, self-reliant
individual became the model for the typical artist's role. The gesture of
putting paint on canvas became the ultimate gesture of liberation--not only
from political and social norms, but from previous art history as well.
History (which implies responsibility to the past and a dependence on the
achievement of others) was the obstacle to be transcended. A new art was
necessary, and according to Barnett Newman, "we actually began from
scratch, as if painting were not only dead but had never existed." Harold
Rosenberg wrote at the time, about Willem de Kooning, that he "discards
all social roles in order to start with himself as he is, and all definitions of
art in order to start with art as it might appear through him." In a similar
vein, but much more recently, the German Neo-expressionist Georg
Baselitz has stated, "The artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role
is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an attitude, an attitude to the
work he does. . . . There is no communication with any public whatsoever.
The artist can ask no questions, and he makes no statement; he offers no
information, message or opinion.... It is the end-product which counts, in
my case, the picture."

            Individuality and freedom are undoubtedly the greatest

achievements of modern culture. But insistence upon absolute freedom for
each individual leads to a negative attitude toward society, and the sense
of a culture deeply alienated from its surroundings. The desire for an
unconditioned world can only be realized, when all is said and done, at the
cost of social alienation--in the absence of integration and union. If
freedom is the absolute value, then society limits, or even frustrates, what
is most essential and desirable. When art had a social role--when artists
knew clearly what art was for--it never functioned entirely in terms of self-
interest. Today, there is a sense that only by divorcing themselves from
any social role can artists establish their own individual identity. Freedom
and social obligation are experienced in our world as polar opposites
which run at cross purposes to each other.

            But the paradox of freedom, as I have been trying all along to

show, is that it is very difficult for the individual to preserve his identity in
a society where traditional institutions and values offer no support.
Liberation and alienation turn out to be inextricably connected, reverse
sides of the same coin. Beyond a certain point, freedom, like technological
progress, is counterproductive: it defeats its own ends and becomes
alienating. For artists to lose the sense of being members of a tradition
which transcends both themselves and their contemporaries leads to
demoralization.

            In its quest for autonomy and its belief that art cannot possibly
thrive any longer constrained by moral or social demands, modernism
discouraged the individual from finding any good outside himself. But, as
Alasdair MacIntyre argues so cogently in After Virtue, in a society where
there is no longer a shared conception of the communal good, there can no
longer be any substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to
that good. A tradition can only maintain its character as a tradition if it
exists in a medium of certain virtues which impose restraints and provide a
conception of excellence. A good is something that is not uniquely mine--
it is bound up with the concept of observing a limit. For practices to
flourish, it is necessary that they embody the virtues. In societies in which
the virtues are not valued, it is difficult for practices to flourish. Modern
society views discipline as a form of constraint submitted to grudgingly,
but certain aspects of the moral character can be achieved only through the
exercise of virtues that exist independently of each individual, and cannot
be altered according to taste. The imperative quality of the rule lies
precisely in the fact that it is binding--the element of choice is taken out. It
requires us to act in a certain way simply because it is good to do so.
Virtues are the necessary instruments which help to keep a balance
between stasis and change, conservation and innovation, morality and self-
interest--and which provide us with a sense of limits. It is this balance
which our culture seems fatally to have lost.

            Obviously, what the good life is taken to be is always relative to

the individual's historical and social context. We act according to the way
we see things. MacIntyre points out that the virtues are fostered by certain
types of social institutions and endangered by others' cultures differ
considerably in the kinds of self they enable the individual to develop. In
our society, satisfaction is to be found in the vice of acquisitiveness, and
virtue concepts play almost no part at all. What were vices in the
Aristotelian scheme, and in the Athenian milieu--specifically, the wish to
have more than one's share--is not only perfectly normal in the modern
world, it is the driving force of modern productive work. Modernity
emphasizes quantity: more is always better. Between the values of
tradition and those of modernity, there has been a fateful conflict, a radical
alteration in what the human imagination is prepared to envisage and
demand. Desires, needs, and expectations have expanded exponentially.
Confronting each other are not merely two ideologies, but two very
different modes of being. What is required to live well and flourish in the
tradition of the virtues is very different from what is required to live well
and flourish in the culture of bureaucratic individualism. Indeed, the
possession of the virtues--the cultivation of truthfulness, moderation, and
courage--will often, according to MacIntyre, bar us from being rich or
famous or powerful.

            "Thus," he states, "although we may hope that we can not only

achieve the standards of excellence and the internal goods of certain
practices by possessing the virtues and becoming rich, famous and
powerful, the virtues are always a stumbling block to this comfortable
ambition. We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the
achievement of worldly success were to become dominant, the concept of
the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near
total effacement." Within the competitive ideals of capitalism, virtue and
success are not easily brought together.

            In itself, capitalist society cannot foster a communal spirit or

generate the virtues; it can only generate affluence. By now it must be
clear that one of the ways in which the adversary culture of modernism has
failed was through surrendering its inner independence to the pressures of
external, bureaucratic power. The growing dependence on a market-
intensive, professionally manipulated art world has resulted in artists
losing their power to act autonomously and live creatively. This particular
change happened without being instigated. It was nondeliberate. It
happened because late capitalism, with its mass-consumption ethic,
weakened the capability of art for transmitting patterns of conscious
ethical value. And, as we have seen, this was so because often the very
same artists who opposed capitalist ideology in their art were not really
resistant to it; at the level of personal intention, they had a double
standard, and were in complicity. They were unwilling to put their own
career interests at stake in the service of convictions they were ready to
accept in their art. Whether or not this process can be reversed will depend
on what we all now think of the hopes and ideals with which the modern
era began--and whether we believe that art is related to a moral order, or
that its function is purely an aesthetic one.

            Many artists, imagining perhaps that the time has come for a
resolute turning away from this forced antithesis between tradition and
modernism, have begun to relinquish the modernist imperative to break
with the past, and are doing some antiquarian shopping in old styles. The
Italian Neo-expressionists, in particular, are working in all directions--
backwards and forwards, up and down. It is almost as if there were a
general consensus among younger artists that, since the market has been
so successful in capitalizing on innovation as a profit-making factor, the
only relevant approach to the present situation is to be found in the
absence of innovative and radical art. At this point, however, it is hard to
tell. Ambiguities abound, given the even greater financial success of Neo-
expressionist works. It may also be the case that for many of these artists,
capitalist society is here to stay, and they no longer find the means to
condemn it, or see any point in maintaining a radical position or posture.
There is also the ironical feeling that complicity itself is now passed off as
subversion, and being hospitable to traditional values is the most radical
act.

            These situations may well mirror one another, but they are not at
all clear. All that postmodernism has proven so far is that something can
be more than one thing at the same time, and can even be its own opposite.
Obviously, the key question of the moment is whether Neo-expressionist
painting is yet another symptom of our society's compulsive need to
disenchant, or whether it holds the potential--however amorphous still--to
restore a failing mode of consciousness. All that can be said so far is that it
brings the problem to the surface in a very compelling way. Writing in Art
in America, the critic Craig Owens, for instance, interprets Sandro Chia's
depiction of the Sisyphus myth as a testimony to the painter's ambivalence
about his own activity. Chia portrays Sisyphus as a comic, slightly
ridiculous figure, a grinning bureaucrat in a business suit and fedora,
condemned to the eternal repetition of pushing a giant boulder up the side
of a mountain. In Owens' view, the myth of Sisyphus has been trivialized
by Chia into a joke, and its tragic despair parodied. What we are
witnessing, Owens feels, is the wholesale liquidation of the modernist
legacy, in the form of contempt. Raiding the antique and commandeering
the forms of tradition become the fate of the artist who finds that his
avant-garde mission has failed.

            If Neo-expressionism is indeed our peculiar, crippled effort to

understand the lifeless symbols we inherit, the issue at stake will be how
to determine which artists are merely scavenging the past and which are
seeking, more actively, to influence and transform the spiritual vacuum at
the center of our society. Ours is a culture in which, as the sociologist
Theodore Roszak has pointed out, the capacity for transcendence has
become so feeble that when confronted with the great historical
projections of sacramental experience, we can only wonder what these
exotic symbols really meant. After more than a century of alienation and a
negative attitude toward society, art is showing signs of wanting to be a
therapeutic force again. There is no doubt that a new process has started
asserting itself; but the problem remains of sifting out that which is largely
sensationalism geared to the media-machine from that which carries a
genuine potential for developing a more luminous culture.

            If the eclectic image-plundering of the Americans Julian Schnabel

and David Salle never quite coalesce into commitment or meaning--and
therefore seem more like a symptom of alienation than a cure--there are
others, like the German Anselm Kiefer, whose imagery is engaged and
even suggests a willingness to believe again. Kiefer, it seems to me, is one
of the few artists working today who opens up the vision and ideal of
apocalyptic renovation and makes the effort to regain the spiritual dignity
of art. It is as if he were opening up the fenestra aeternitatis--the window
onto eternity and spiritual clairvoyance--which in our society has been
closed for a long time.

            Kiefer lives in the countryside somewhere between Frankfurt and

Stuttgart, and avoids art centers. Nature, in his pictures, is projected as the
center of a timeless, archetypal reality rich with symbols, evocations, and
incantations. The burned and parched wheat fields, often encrusted with
real hay and straw, are metaphors for a devastated earth, but at the same
time, since Kiefer is almost Wordsworthian in his nature mysticism, they
hold out hope for a regeneration of the Wasteland. Like his mentor Joseph
Beuys (whom he once visited every day for two months, in a rare instance
of genuine discipleship), Kiefer would like to bring back the ancient
healing function of art. Both Kiefer and Beuys perceive that the only way
to create significantly political art today is by making the visionary powers
central. This widening of the creative field by grounding oneself in
transformational vision is the only thing that can eliminate the spiritual
sterility of modern life, and possibly save the world from suicide.

            In a remarkable series of works, Kiefer has converted disused Nazi

architecture--former Gestapo headquarters--into painters' studios. These
provocative images assimilate the burden of German culture, its agony and
its defeat, by transforming shame into renewal. In Kiefer's vision, art once
again can be the great redeemer, a cure for the mistakes of the past; but for
this to happen, not only is a mythical language of transcendence necessary,
but the virtues, too, must be reinstated. In a remarkable image called Faith,
Hope, and Love, he presents us with an image of the tree of life in which
art and the virtues are one. The three theological virtues of faith, hope, and
love (which were added by the Christian religion to the four cardinal
virtues of the Roman world--prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice) are
written on the trunks of three trees whose roots are embedded in an artist's
wooden palette. In a related work, Resumption, done in 1974, a winged
palette--Kiefer's emblem of the artistic imagination--hovers like a spirit in
the sky above a grave heaped with ashes. We have a source outside the
world, this art seems to say, and it is from this source that we affect the
world. Kiefer's work allows no escape into despair. It is not easy optimism
either, but affirmation that all has not been lost, that something, some
potentiality, even from the shadow of Hitlerian evils, will emerge again.

            Like Kiefer, Joseph Beuys has a declared interest in the

reenergizing of art's transformational power. Both share a preoccupation
with images of planting and growth, with energy fields, and scenes of
death and transfiguration. Beuys has described his sense of purpose as the
need to provoke people and make them understand what it is to be a
human being; and teaching has always been a major aspect of his creative
life. But his real interest lies in the potential of radical transformation--
whether of thought patterns, materials and substances, states of
consciousness, or political and social reality.

            In 1943, in a now legendary event, Beuys was shot down in the
Crimea and rescued by Tartar tribesmen, who saved his life by wrapping
him in fat and felt to help his body regenerate warmth. As a result of this
experience, Beuys found himself drawn to the healing properties of these
materials, which later became the basis for many of his sculptures. Among
his early works are a piano which has been completely covered with felt,
and a chair whose seat is covered with a thick layer of fat. These
substances were deliberately chosen by Beuys because normally they
would be considered unaesthetic and economically worthless. Fat expands
and soaks into its surroundings. Felt attracts and absorbs what surrounds it.
"It is the transformation of substance," Beuys has written, "that is my
concern in art, rather than the traditional aesthetic understanding of
beautiful appearances." Once he spent a week with a coyote in a New
York art gallery. While the artist himself lay on the floor wrapped in felt,
the coyote played with copies of The Wal1 Street Journal.

            Beuys' work has always had a multiplicity of layers. He does not

place primary value on the artist as the producer of his work, but on the
quality of his vision and imagination--on his ability to function as a
pontifex, or bridge-builder, between the material and spiritual worlds, and
between art and society. The emphasis is always on moving art out of the
private studio into a more worldly concern, in which politics and art
become linked through the idea of social sculpture. Education should have
the socially engaged personality as its goal, not the disaffected, dropout
genius. Trying to make meaningful art in a society that doesn't believe in
anything requires breaking down the rigidity of specialization, the
segregation of functions and activities, both within the personality and
within the community as a whole. It means reintroducing the artist in his
role as shaman, a mystical, priestly, and political figure in prehistoric
cultures, who, after coming close to death through accident or severe
illness, becomes a visionary and a healer. The shaman's function is to
balance and center society, integrating many planes of life-experience, and
defining the culture's relationship to the cosmos. When these various
domains (the human and the divine) fall out of balance, it is the shaman's
responsibility to restore the lost harmony and reestablish equilibrium.
Only an individual who successfully masters his actions in both realms is a
master shaman. The artist as shaman becomes a conductor of forces which
go far beyond those of his own person, and is able to bring art back in
touch with its sacred sources; through his own personal self-
transformation, he develops not only new forms of art, but new forms of
living. By offering himself as a prototype for a new creative mode--that of
a self without estrangement, able to transcend the world without negating
it--Beuys shows us how we might actually achieve the possibility of a
society that would maximize personal autonomy and social relatedness at
the same time. Learning to shuttle from one wave length to another as
healer, diviner, leader, and artist offers an alternative to entrapment in the
web of bureaucratic imperatives and stylistic gamesmanship. Beuys seeks
an enlarged vision that carries the artist outward, toward a new externality,
and away from the mutually destructive relation of alienation"”that
reduction of the link between art and society to a purely negative function.
In this sense, he provides us with a model which has passed through the
fundamental errors of modernism, and whose raison d'etre is grounded in a
deeper source. In dialectical terms, the tension between traditional and
modern values is resolved by the creation of an interesting synthesis of
elements from both.

            Obviously, it is not possible to simply give up our individuality

and return to earlier times when the freedom of human action was more
limited and social roles were strictly prescribed. Our present problems
cannot be resolved by seeking to restrain individualism through the
reimposition of traditional forms of authority, or by a regression to a past
state in which they had not yet been brought into being. At this point, our
possibilities rest with the use we make of our freedom--whether we
decide, finally, to use it for self-aggrandizement or for moral rearmament.
If anything is to change, we will need to subordinate the overdevelopment
of this valued function to the dynamic good of the whole, and a new object
of devotion must take the place of the present one. "I've been rich," Sophie
Tucker once said, "and I've been poor, and believe me, rich is best." As
long as money remains the one unambiguous criterion of success, the
standards of the moneyed life will continue to prevail. The effort to get
rich, and then become richer, will remain the sovereign value, as other
values become weaker and weaker. The revolution in aspirations and
expectations, as many have pointed out before me, must be the single great
revolution of our time. It is only as individuals that we can find the way
back to communal purposes and social obligation and reconstitute the
moral will. If we accept as relevant and necessary the project of spiritual
regeneration, we will look for means by which we can approach art again
as total human beings--not only with an aesthetic nature, but also with a
moral nature, and with a philosophical and social purpose in mind.

            Our art seems, in the last few years, to be leaving its experimental
period behind. There has been so much varied activity over the past half-
century that most prejudices have now been destroyed. The old and the
new intermingle; and it has become clear that imitation and invention are
not, of themselves, either good or bad. In our present state of freedom,
there is no recognized means of prescribing or forbidding anything to
anyone. We can see now, however, that rebellion and freedom are not
enough: modernism has moved us too far in the direction of radical
subjectivity and a destructive relativism. At this point we might do well to
make the most of a few well-observed rules again, for this is the
mainspring of all art. Only when traditional rules exist, and one is used to
expecting them, can one then enjoy breaking them. Tradition teaches
wisdom, and the final lesson of modernism may be no more than this: that
we need a fruitful tension between freedom and restraint. The concept of
the good is necessarily bound up with the concept of observing a limit.
Perhaps after a long phase of rebelliously throwing out everything, we are
more able to recognize that what is most acutely missing now is a sense of
limits. Since immunity from the responsibility of tradition has itself
become a tradition, perhaps we can go forward from the point we have
reached by also going back, with a new knowledge of how form, structure,
and authority sustain the spirit and enable us to live our lives with more
vision; they are a necessary condition of our well-being.

It may well be that only a cultural critic who looks at the dynamics of the
total situation can contain and express its contradictions rather than taking
a stand on one side or the other, or submitting to serve the ends of any
particular ideological group or stylistic tendency. The role of criticism
today, as I see it, is to engage in a fundamental reconstruction of the basic
premises of our whole culture; it can be nothing less than challenging the
oppressive assumptions of our secular, technocratic Western mentality. It
is not just a matter of seeing things differently, but of seeing different
things. Our culture expects us to be manic--to overproduce, to
overconsume, and to waste--but in all this, something vital is missing: the
knowledge that life can be transformed by a sacramental experience. For
this reason, the essays assembled here invite the reader to step outside our
current outlook, and its fixed investments in the soulless power-politics of
cultural bureaucracy, in order to see it in perspective--to compare our
world view with others, and to acquire insights that defy cultural
conditioning. Direct knowing is the only thing that can break the cultural
trance: deliberately and soberly changing one's mind about the nature of
truth and reality, and about what is really important.

             Like all ideas, the idea of modernism has had a lifespan. Its legacy
requires that we look at art once again in terms of purpose rather than style
if ever we are to succeed in transforming personal vision into social
responsibility again. Perhaps the real answer to the question of whether or
not modernism has failed can only be given, in the end, by changing the
basic dimensions in which we measure not only happiness and
unhappiness in our society, but also success and failure.

 This is the last chapter in Suzi Gablik's book Has Modernism Failed?,
published in 1982 by Thames & Hudson