WHATCHA READIN?: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MODERNISM? (2010)

Grey Matters in New Haven is a fairly new addition to the city that has changed its character a little. Book Trader, the former primary used bookstore, stocked mostly trade books—novels of all kinds, biographies, books on a range of subjects, yes, but not many purely intellectual works. Grey Matters is more like visiting “the old curiosity shop” and at least some Yale students I’ve met view it as the means to serendipitous finds, browsing their way into the byways of texts not on the syllabus.

I say that, but I don’t know for certain. Maybe there are still theory classes like there were in the ‘90s, but I doubt it. In fact, the shelves of Grey Matters let me glimpse again what it was like to elbow one’s way around Micawber Books on Nassau Street in Princeton or Labyrinth Books on York in New Haven back there at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one; even the university bookstores attached to Yale and Princeton were once full of books! Strange but true. And so you could go in at any time and expect to find bound copies of the entire works of a considerable range of authors, or at least the best-known or most oft assigned. And there were shelves packed with the products of university presses, each proclaiming that new research and new terminology and new career-making inquiries or late career-capping retrospectives were as important and timely as whatever latest celebrity memoir or business, money, love or family How To.

At Grey Matters, which used to be a clothes store, it’s like you’re in the attic where all those used student copies from the ‘80s and ‘90s went to remote storage. Sometimes you’re even faced with a collection curated from the library of a deceased professorial eminence, a memento mori of texts, books that may bear an inscription from the author, letting your mind wander for a moment over conversations and conference meetings and correspondence that may have gone into a lengthy acquaintance over the course of time needed to bring an idea to birth as a book. The writer’s life, so very rewarding! And yet it all seems filmed over with the dust that has long since settled on print culture, blown in from the long years that have intruded themselves between my earliest thirties and my dawning mid-sixties.

The students, at play in grandpa’s library of long gone intellectual heroes, may take what value they find. Me, I’m on the lookout—as sometimes in used record shops—for this or that find that reminds me there’s room for one more. Something I passed over before but which now will have its day, suiting my mood or a quest for a new wrinkle in an old suit of clothes. I’m not that various, sticking usually with What I Know, but the landscape of that terrain has altered in sometimes unrecognizable ways by this point. And with books, unlike music, I don’t feel the same friction of identity. A book can be picked up out of idle curiosity. Music, less so. Music will need to be inhabited and the object itself has to have a certain allure or aura. A book—usually I have “heard of” the author at least—can just be a momentary indulgence.

So it was when I stepped away from a conference celebrating the career of Peter Brooks (one of those important professors of literature in my grad school days who is stlll with us, as emeritus, and still producing books) to browse a bit and let my mind wander: I came upon a Gabriel Josipovici hardback in clean wrappers—with a Klee on the cover—from Yale University Press: What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010). Now, it wasn’t simply that perhaps elegiac or perhaps jeering or perhaps ironic rhetorical question/title that got my interest, but also the date of publication. Having recently begun a new fiction ms. set in 2010, I found the coincidence providential. I’d already found—from what little I’d written—that an author born in 1937 and so in his early seventies is holding forth on his views on literature. So why not a quick acquaintance with what GJ (born in 1940) has to say about that literary and artistic movement or tendency or aesthetic doctrine that fascinated me so in my early twenties and became significant to my education and professionalization (such as it was) from the mid-Eighties to . . . well, yes, about the time of GJ’s book! For 2010 is just after the Birth of the Smart Phone, and just after the Big Buy Out, and just two years before my last five week course devoted to Ulysses. Whatever happened, indeed?

The book, it turns out, derives from lectures given in 2007—so not quite the coincidental chime I’d imagined, but no matter. It’s not as if my fictional novelist is not drawing on a lifetime of reflection on his art, much as GJ—a novelist and playwright as well as critic—is doing. In fact, the GJ book that I seemed to dimly recall as I flipped through this later work was Lessons of Modernism (1977; 1987), a book that I at least glanced at somewhere there in my undergrad and/or grad days—1985-94—and so he seemed an old mentor or former teacher showing up again. Why not? I left with the book.

Actually, reflecting on it while carrying groceries home today, I recalled an advisor in grad school mentioning GJ with approval and can only assume Lessons of Modernism was the text in question; it may be that she was pointing to his work as insights from a practitioner of fiction and not simply a critic or scholar. That there was something more at stake for him that had to do with a dissatisfaction with contemporary fiction, which is certainly something I was always going on about back then. The period between the wars had seemed to promise so much for what novels and poems and paintings could be; GJ is fed up by having the likes of Martin Amis and Iris Murdoch and Ian McEwan trotted out as worthwhile novelists. Part of the problem is that GJ is situated in the UK and it’s well known that Modernism didn’t have much purchase there—especially if you clear out the Americans like Pound and Eliot or the Irish like Joyce and Beckett. You’ve basically got Woolf, Forster (if you think so) and Ford Maddox Ford. Lawrence? Well, there you have it. Lawrence is certainly a modernist in his interests but his methods are pretty much cut in the good old yarn-spinner’s mode. But I guess there is a syllabus where Lawrence can sit with “American modernists” like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, sure. The point is that Modernism—which, because of the last named, throws a long shadow of influence in the U.S.—doesn’t inspire the next generation much in the UK. And so GJ imports almost all his examples from Europe and even from other eras.

And that’s where I found him on familiar ground—because arguments about the modernity of Don Quixote and Pantagruel and Tristram Shandy had all fed into background arguments I’d found useful for what made Ulysses the unique work it is. Not that GJ is all that keen to deal with Joyce. He’s much more likely to find figures for his supreme modernist in Kafka, Beckett, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Borges. He’s also apt to pull in Robbe-Grillet and Simon and all those French figures who kept the radical stress on form alive and active in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It’s not that I’m out to fault GJ for his references; I merely read his book to see how well what he says jells with my own discontentment with fiction as generally practiced, looking for maybe the odd apercu that would bounce around in my brain while at work on what my Jonathan Hawthorn is hawking.

Following the idea that serendipity has its own logic, or at least that what gets taken up randomly may provide random yet providential input, the passages in What Ever Happened that appealed most to me came from Kierkegaard (who I’ve mainly read in quotations, though he seems to be for GJ the kind of “modernizing thought influencer” that I found in Nietzsche, way back there in my schooldays), and, which I'll get to first, some quotations from visual artists that struck me as apropos to my own endeavors in that realm. The first from—so unlikely a source as to be memorable—Marcel Duchamp, he of the objets trouvé and source of all that “is it art?” “what makes it art?” rigamarole that keeps the critics and scholars busy and Duchamp, no doubt, laughing in his grave:

“Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.”

For Duchamp: what object to choose and what to do with it?  In “normal painting” (which is I guess what I do), “what size,” “what orientation,” “what surface,” “what colors,” “what brushes,” “what ‘object’ or ‘subject’ or ‘image’” . . . notice how the second we move away from tangibles—the materials that are used to make the art object I’m making (called “a painting”) we get bogged down. Is the object I’m making a depiction of some other object (the “object” of my attention—in my case, often a photograph or photographs I’ve chosen), or is it a depiction of a “subject”—as in a topic or theme? Or both? And is the ”choice” of an image to depict—based on photograph or image of a painting or some other kind of visual source—the start of the object I’m making or is it not really “an image” until I’ve done something with it? The good news is that—in order to paint—I don’t have to care at all! I’ve only got to make my choices and get busy, which is what I like about Duchamp’s statement. I don’t even have to choose how I want to talk about the painting really. (I’m still put-off by the fact that what I’m doing while I’m at work on the ”piece” is called “painting” and that when I’ve stopped work on it, it is now called “A painting.” The point seems to me to be that “painting” is what you do (as in: applying paint to a surface), and the thing you achieve is a painted surface and we should have some term for the thing other than that which designates the act itself. But we don’t. To even call it “a work of art” is a distortion, since not all will admit that every painting is a work of art, because “art” has a limited range of applicability, whereas “painting” is a generic term (it’s a painting, not a drawing, etc.). But then so many works of art aren’t paintings and the whole problem of “work”—again an activity that gets imported into the static object at the end of the process—is its own headache.)

What this all gets at, to me, is the fact that “the painting” is never really finished, so “painting” it is because it could go on, but also it points to the fact that the painting is not a static object at all—though a photograph of it is. The painting keeps changing—first as the pigments set, then as they age, and, always, depending on the light and temperature in which they are situated, they look different to different eyes, which also age and change. So, if you are at all an aware viewer, you know that you yourself—in terms of your attention and focus and awareness—are never exactly the same when you look at the thing. You keep seeing it differently, if you bother to look carefully.

So, I’ll go with “choice is the main thing” when we’re talking about making the thing—or appropriating a thing for artistic use. But “choice” is not the main thing about the “finished thing.” Except to the extent we become critics and, like GJ, choose our quotations and our examples. So let’s turn to another quotation I wrote down, this time from Francis Bacon, the powerful twentieth-century British painter (I’ve seen two retrospectives, one at Yale British Art Gallery, the other at MoMA), who said, in an interview: “I believe art is recording; I think it’s reporting.”

Now, the context for Bacon’s statement is he’s explaining why he doesn’t care much for abstract, non-representational painting, but also why his style of painting—which is truly unique and a significant achievement for twentieth-century painting—isn’t simply “illustration.” In other words, even as great a painter as Bacon has to worry about what the hell he’s doing. It’s not enough to just be a great painter and get on with it. No, you’ve got to carve out some space between those who believe all representational imagery is “illustration” (clearly, an “applied arts” and not “fine arts” region) and those for whom “abstraction” is built into the very nature of painting since the point of the procedure is not to make an exact copy of some already existing thing but to alter it according to a method, style or manner. Bacon has a definite style, manner, and method and it should be enough to have those things and so be discussed for what those things, in his case, bring to the table. But Bacon, in trying not to just dump on shaping colors on canvas for the sake of visual effect as an end in itself, has to take on a dimension that matters to him (and to me): “recording . . . reporting.” As in: his paintings have “subject matter.”

At the outset though I want to say that I believe that any kind of painting is recording and reporting. An artist of abstract painting is recording and reporting too. It’s just that what they record and report doesn’t take the form of a representational image, and so the “report” is something you have to work to intuit. But the point is that, even with a representational image you recognize at once—Christ’s nativity, say, or a Rembrandt self-portrait—you have to work to intuit the “report.” Because the report is how the painting is a painting. It’s always a report on what was made. Now, with a more abstract canvas the record is really just the record of what got painted, and that’s what makes abstract painting so satisfying as an object: there’s nothing but the painting as painting to be concerned with. But the kind of “recording" Bacon means has to do with the artist as a person who exists in time and so wants to leave a record of that—which may take the shape of a series of non-representational paintings, or which may take the shape of a series of faces or places or animals or what-you-choose.

And so, for my projects of “renderings,” I felt implicated. Since I have one series, called “Philly Days,” in which I choose scans of photos taken in the period when I lived in Philadelphia (1979-83) and make them the basis of paintings: “for the record,” so to speak. That was. Now I’m reliving it (not just recording but reliving because the whole time I’m painting I’m in some space not wholly contained by the here and now). 

Then there’s a series called “21st Century Studies” from photos taken in the 21st century, which, because the pictures chosen are at most 23 years old, feel more immediate and so a “report” on life in the 21st century, so far. In both series, I’ve so far drawn only from my own “circles”—of friends and families, but the “reporting” on the 21st century could go on into other areas. 

I’ve also commenced two series that allow me to “record” images that “stand for” certain influences in my early life: one I call “Pop Figures,” which so far consists of a rendering of James Joyce and his book Ulysses, painted for its centenary; a rendering of the photo of The Beatles on the cover of The Beatles For Sale (1964); a rendering of a composite of stills of Boris Karloff as ‘the Creature” in the original film of Frankenstein (1931). 

The other, related, series is called “Masters Revisited” in which I take an image of a painting by a master painter and submit it to my style of rendering; so far I’ve done a study of the mother and children in Michelangelo’s Flood sequence on the Sistine Chapel; a study of a Madonna and child by Raphael; a reconfiguring of the “muse of history” model in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, complete with images of places of personal relevance on the map behind her; and a painting done from a lithograph by Delacroix—illustrations for Goethe’s Faust—depicting Faust and Mephistopheles on horseback.

So, the final point: because I’m nothing like so great a painter as Bacon I don’t mind at all that what I do be considered “illustration.” In fact, I think that, if Bacon pushed a bit harder on his language, he’d see that “recording and reporting” simply means—in one sense, at least—illustrating one’s point. One puts up images when words fail or when—perish the thought!—they are utterly irrelevant to the act of looking. Even better than the act of looking is the act of painting.

Then there’s the act of writing (as opposed to reading) but more on that next time . . .