FROM MODERN TO POST-MODERN ART
When I look at the workings of western culture/society
over the past several thousands of years, I ask What were
we doing? What did we discover? What did we accomplish?
And I search for the works of art which define, delimit,
or illuminate my questions.
I'm not doing this to show off my erudition. Hell's bells,
any art historian would find countless points in my view
of the world which are clearly naive and/or misinformed.
I do this searching to assist my own perception of the world
I live in. By writing down my views, I make them memorable,
and then I read some other writer's views with a great deal
more interest. Sure, I'd like him to prove me right. In
short, it helps my learning and understanding processes.
I put down Uncertainty* as the major human discovery of
modern times. The principal exponents of Uncertainty are
chance, probability, and randomness. The early landmarks
are Dalton's writing about atomic theory in 1803 and the
1828 demonstration of molecular rearrangement in chemistry.
I see this demonstration of chemical change in 1828 as the
start of modern life, the start of the era of what we call
science, hard science, technology laden science.
After four thousand years of rapid social development in
Europe, finally, technical science was born. The absolutes
of the Christian universe were put to rest; the unknowns
of the new age, the age of unfettered inquiry, gave us a
charter for a new freedom. Instead of everything being known,
suddenly everything was unknown. That's real uncertainty.
Uncertainty got its final boost in 1906 when it was convincingly
proved that the action of human judgment takes place wholly
within the “black box,” that inaccessible, unknowable
unconscious part of us. We cannot observe that decision-making,
or know how it is done.
Pollock gave elegant expression to the notion of randomness,
to infinite uncertainty, and he did it with great skill
(not chance), with rhythm, with grace, and with unforgettable
style. Some of the abstract expressionists, particularly
those called action painters, did rely upon the chance delivery
of paint to canvas. Some whose work looks as if they did,
didn't.
Because I see the modern period as best delimited by "Cezanne
through Picasso," Jackson Pollock and the abstract
expressionists have to come afterward, and that is called
post-modern, simply for lack of a better term.
Though I recognize my conflict with conventional recorders
of art history, I do not have an answer to the problem;
not right now, anyway.
Perhaps it is idiosyncratic to say that Post-modern Pollock
gave highest expression to the major discovery of the previous
period (modern), but it appears to me that this is what
artists do. They summarize, epitomize, synthesize the culture
that produced them.
To put it the other-way-around, to say they are the leaders
of the culture or the prophets of its achievements-to-be
seems to me to be the conventional wisdom, the usual romantic
interpretation of the role of art in society. I find nothing
to support that silly point of view.
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*Responsibility was the major human discovery of the two
thousand premodern, ancient years.
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