On the Reconstruction of Modernism
A proposal of discourse
by Padraige O' Cellas
TO BE CONSIDERED:
I. THE DEATH OF THE FINE ARTS
The category of the aesthetic
has become anachronistic; the beautiful and the sublime are lost categories
in the fine arts, and the artist is no longer concerned with the edification
of sensibilities refined in leisure. In the place of genius writhing in
passions calculated to strike awe into the hearts of young aristocrats
has risen a new tradition destined to outlast all previous epochs, the
cool observer blind to the actual world whose interpretive compositions
(readings of the world) pose themselves without authority as configurational
after the manor of a scientific hypothesis. So now do the muses sing, of
the intellectual beauty of technical complexity, of the cold barren forms
of an industrial ecology, of wires and pipes which blindly traverse the
globe seemingly to never end. Invisible canals of information, data pulsing
along the microwave energy highways in the air and space, glass fibers
carrying the secret in words set ablaze with lasing electrons, machines
whose functions are beyond normal understanding and displace human employment;
Impassioned Vision is a pyramid of grids from whose flesh picked skeleton
the new consciousness engineers branch out variations in geometric forms
and reflectivity.
II. IN DEFENSE OF THE NEW TRADITION
The democratic sensibilities
of the artist are forever suspect: art, like sport, is intrinsically competitive,
and any undertaking whose objectives rely upon individual skills will be
a cynical advocate of collective ideals. Hence the necessity of dissolving
art into the elements of which it was compounded, viz. magical technique,
craft skill, rhetoric, philosophical scholarship, sexual fashion, etc.
and freeing these from their bondage under the sign of Great Art that they
may reinfuse themselves back into the population, out of reach of the genius
where it may rejoin itself to science. This constitutes the critical phase
of a new aesthetic, the identification and analysis of streams which are
conjoined in the new tradition. In its destructive phase, a critique of
the politics of symbology must be actively advanced. In its constructive
phase, a redefinition of the avante-guard must be proposed, and a reconstruction
of its objectives effected. The artist may never function as a leader in
a democratic society, hence the necessity of defining art as the invention
of alternative perspectives, and of its objectives as the occupation of
and testing and reporting upon those states.
III. HOLISTIC CRITIQUE AND
THE HOLOGRAPHIC CONSONANCE
The first term is stunted if
it is understood wholly negatively, i.e. as the linguistic critique of
everything, but may be expanded to include practice of all kinds. Upon
the presumption that art is a variety of critical activity, and that artistic
statements cannot be simply translated by philosophical or argumentative
restatement, we arrive at the conception of a holistic critique in which
critical activity is defined across the whole gamut of personal behaviors,
and the elements of critique are identified as demonstrative creations;
alternative reformulations. The entire body is engaged. The second term
tends toward over extension, and the antagonism between the two extremes
of critique and harmony may be greatly lessened if by the term holographic
is understood only the identity of consciousness and light, leaving open
all of the possibilities of negative configuration which critique as demonstration
requires.
The ruling signifier of the
holographic paradigm is the electromagnetic signalupon which is erected
a metaphysics of light within whose perview all theoretical statements
in the domain of holography are made. This symbolic framework is given
directly by the nature of the medium and the process of the fabrication
of holograms. As a result holographic art emulates the structures of consciousness.
Whether with a justifiable basis in fact or not, the root metaphor of the
holographic paradigm is the equivalence of consciousness and light, where
light is understood as an indicator of attention, a medium of cognition,
a state of illumination, and as the elemental matter of sentience, (primal
matter).
That this conception is a
repetition of the error which sought a primary matter from which all substances
grew or were compounded, is of course, perfectly obvious, but the usefulness
is judged by considerations drawn from the non-scientific syllogisms of
literary logic. Like its alchemical counterpart, the holographic thesis
is written in the code of political myth, and withstands with indifference
any growths or modifications of its specific physical postulates.
FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS:
IV. RECONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN
The engineering model
of critique/praxis.
A defense of visual
certainty
V.IDEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION
The integration of the sciences
i.e., Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, etc. and the Political Economy to
generate Political Art.
VI. NON-PARTICIPATION
Holographic art as painting
with cortical structures and functions. the science of holoconstruction,
or mental engineering.
The First Death: the explosion
of the unity of the mind, the separation of the components. Distillation,
sublimation, the manipulation of the sectors. Sector coordination.
The Second Death: the dissolution
of the compensating and coordinating mechanisms. The disappearance of the
field of components.
Non-visibility of the processing,
direct action.
VII. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE OPERATIONS
-
Experimental reconfiguration.
-
Tuning across the spectrum
-
The unimpeded flow
-
The tuned configuration
VIII. THE FAILURE OF MODERNISM
-
The critique of technical rationality
-
The critique of scientific epistemology
-
The failure of the International
Style
IX. MODERNISM REDEFINED
-
Poglioli
-
Postmodern critics
-
The Modernist Manifestos
-
The greater historical movements
of modernization.
-
A revisionist interpretation
of Modernism
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