There is a close relationship between American modernism and modernity.
This period focus in the transformation brought about by World War II and what happened aftermath of the conflict. Hollywood democratic modernism often took the form of social realism (you'll see social and political realism in the Hollywood cinema of the 1930's and 1940's). Hollywood films always had to communicate to their audiences a sense of "reality". The movies had to be clear, transparent from the beginning to the end. However, Hollywood realism deepened in the new Deal era, when the artists gathering in southern California carried with them a concern for radical politics coupled with an interest in the reality of life in America.
Those Europeans filmmakers who arrived in Hollywood from Nazi Germany were keenly aware of the importance of gilms in the international struggle against Nazi fascism. The convergence in Hollywood of radical American artists, and of refugees from European fascist dictatorships, provided Southern California with a new generation of filmmakers, inclined to attune the Hollywood screen to the political reality of the day.
After the war modernist activity reaches its height. The Waste Land, Ulysses, Mina Loy’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the greatest works of Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, as well as Picasso, Matisse and Paul Klee (for instance) in the art world, all emerged during this period.
However, I have limited the temporal frame, but it extends far enough to cover the sixties and the early seventies, which witness a development of post modern aesthetics and theory. This will permit reflection on the extent to which post modernism both derives from nascent tendencies in modernism as well as marks some significant breaks from the former. A basic question, whether regarding modernism or postmodernism, is where and how the interaction between serious art and mass culture has resulted in progressive or detrimental formations. Indeed, the role of mass culture has had a direct bearing on the Modernist v. Post Modernist debates. Charles Jencks and Andreas Huyssen have both argued that Modernism depends upon a distinction between elite and low art, whereas Postmodernism, at least in its overtures, is more populist. Both critics point out that the precise meaning of the term "popular" is in question here, but in addition to this question, the Modemist/Elite and Postmodernist Populist division is troubled by 1) its abstraction from specific American contexts and 2) a competing historical account of Post modernism. It is my sense that (until the Cold War) American literary modernism did not have so adversarial a relationship to mass culture or to populist art as its European counter parts; whether the absence of an avantgarde in this country between the world wars is a concomitant factor we might also consider. The competing historical account of Postmodernism represented by, for example, Alan Nadel and Ann Douglas sees Postmodernism originating during the Cold War as a theoretical praxis intended to make language and representation ideologically accountable. The backfire of the theory is that every semiotic instance becomes ideologically hyper coded. The stance becomes that signs necessarily dissemble, concealing ideology, or that the presumption of reference is itself ideological. Language and representation can no longer be conceived as mimetic or descriptive; they are always rhetorical in function, and the subject cannot say of what he is being persuaded. Hence, a semiotic system repeats itself through the subject and turns him/her into its dupe. In these scenarios, it is the task of a critical elite to seek behind language for either the hidden ideological imperative or the lack of reference, the nonsense, of the signifier. There is a tension between the progressive, egalitarian version of Postmodernism and the version which casts it as radically skeptical, politically enervating, and defensively self referential. If we accept that there are conflicting tendencies in post modernism, how have the debates over mass culture been used by both? Does mass culture itself register the conflicting tendencies and provide accessible idioms for dynamizing the dialectic?
To wit, modernism claims to be rational (truth of materials, form follows function, no shenanigans about ornament) and yet modern art forces you to interact with it in a fragmented.
However, I have limited the temporal frame, but it extends far enough to cover the sixties and the early seventies, which witness a development of post modern aesthetics and theory. This will permit reflection on the extent to which post modernism both derives from nascent tendencies in modernism as well as marks some significant breaks from the former. A basic question, whether regarding modernism or postmodernism, is where and how the interaction between serious art and mass culture has resulted in progressive or detrimental formations. Indeed, the role of mass culture has had a direct bearing on the Modernist v. Post Modernist debates. Charles Jencks and Andreas Huyssen have both argued that Modernism depends upon a distinction between elite and low art, whereas Postmodernism, at least in its overtures, is more populist. Both critics point out that the precise meaning of the term "popular" is in question here, but in addition to this question, the Modemist/Elite and Postmodernist Populist division is troubled by 1) its abstraction from specific American contexts and 2) a competing historical account of Post modernism. It is my sense that (until the Cold War) American literary modernism did not have so adversarial a relationship to mass culture or to populist art as its European counter parts; whether the absence of an avantgarde in this country between the world wars is a concomitant factor we might also consider. The competing historical account of Postmodernism represented by, for example, Alan Nadel and Ann Douglas sees Postmodernism originating during the Cold War as a theoretical praxis intended to make language and representation ideologically accountable. The backfire of the theory is that every semiotic instance becomes ideologically hyper coded. The stance becomes that signs necessarily dissemble, concealing ideology, or that the presumption of reference is itself ideological. Language and representation can no longer be conceived as mimetic or descriptive; they are always rhetorical in function, and the subject cannot say of what he is being persuaded. Hence, a semiotic system repeats itself through the subject and turns him/her into its dupe. In these scenarios, it is the task of a critical elite to seek behind language for either the hidden ideological imperative or the lack of reference, the nonsense, of the signifier. There is a tension between the progressive, egalitarian version of Postmodernism and the version which casts it as radically skeptical, politically enervating, and defensively self referential. If we accept that there are conflicting tendencies in post modernism, how have the debates over mass culture been used by both? Does mass culture itself register the conflicting tendencies and provide accessible idioms for dynamizing the dialectic?
To wit, modernism claims to be rational (truth of materials, form follows function, no shenanigans about ornament) and yet modern art forces you to interact with it in a fragmented.
An important author would be Stanley Kubrick and his work is highly recommended.
Winter
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