Modernism's End Game

Minimalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/m/minimalism.html
http://the-artists.org/movement/Minimal_Art.html
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/movement_works_Minimalism_0.html
http://www.flickr.com/groups/minimalist-art/pool/

Conceptual Art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_art
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/c/conceptualart.html
http://the-artists.org/MovementView.cfm?id=4F46309A%2D96D2%2D4C1A%2D9D2ECE2243C365B3
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ3LO21vxnQ

Land Art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_art
http://the-artists.org/movement/Land__Environmental.html
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=oNrorfUNrdE&feature=related

Performance Art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art
http://arthistory.about.com/cs/arthistory10one/a/performance.htm
http://the-artists.org/movement/Body_Art.html
http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/arcx.html
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOD5Pu6uVM

Video Art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_art
http://www.acmi.net.au/video_art.htm
http://the-artists.org/tours/video-art.cfm
http://www.videoart.net/home/?CFID=7771544&CFTOKEN=95271769

Arte Povera
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/artepovera/default.htm
http://the-artists.org/movement/Arte_Povera.html

Fluxus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus
http://www.fluxus.org/
http://the-artists.org/movement/Fluxus.html

Photo Realism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorealism
http://the-artists.org/movement/Photorealism.html
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/p/photorealism.html

Kinetic Art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_art
http://the-artists.org/movement/Kinetic_Art.html
http://www.kinetic-art.org/home.asp

Matthew Barney
http://www.cremaster.net/
http://www.drawingrestraint.net/
http://www.cremasterfanatic.com/

Totalitariansim vs Abstract Expressionism

Totalitarian Art
http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/socrealism/tot/index.html
http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history/werckmeister/index.html

Abstract Expressionsim
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/a/abstractexpr.html
http://artnetweb.com/abstraction/intro.html
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/abstract-expressionism.html
http://the-artists.org/movement/Abstract_Expressionism.html
http://abstract-art.com/index.shtml

Pollock
http://www.jacksonpollock.org/
http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/pollockhome.shtm
http://www.jackson-pollock.com/
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pollock/
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1998/pollock/website100/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrVE-WQBcYQ

Rothko
http://www.rothkochapel.org/virtual-interior.htm
http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec98/rothko_8-5.html
http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/01/28/the-art-of-color-rothko-meets-web20/
http://flickr.com/groups/rothko-esque/pool/

Joan Mitchell
http://www.artnet.com/awc/joan-mitchell.html
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/mitchell.html#images
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ghn8uxhiI

De Kooning
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4233773
http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3213

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgv9MaBLNDA&feature=related

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Oshw4Favc&feature=related
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9iK5bq_BrHw&feature=related

Enjoy

The Modern Era

c1400's

The Renaissance
(from Old French Renaissance, meaning "rebirth"; Italian: Rinascimento, from Latin re- "again" and nasci "be born"[1]) was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th through the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. It encompassed a revival of learning based on classical sources, the development of linear perspective in painting, and educational reform. The Renaissance saw developments in most intellectual pursuits, but is perhaps best known for its artistic aspect and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who have inspired the term "Renaissance men".[2][3]

Michelangelo's 'David'

c1500's

Mannerism
is a period of European painting, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts lasting from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520 until the arrival of the Baroque around 1600. Stylistically, it identifies a variety of individual approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the harmonious ideals associated with Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and early Michelangelo. Mannerism is notable for its intellectual as well as its artificial (as opposed to naturalistic) qualities.

c1600's

Baroque
was a Western cultural epoch, commencing roughly at the turn of the 17th century in Rome. It was exemplified by drama and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music.[citation needed]. In music, the term 'Baroque' applies to the final period of dominance of imitative counterpoint, where different voices and instruments echo each other but at different pitches, sometimes inverting the echo, and even reversing thematic material.
The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement.[citation needed] The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumphant power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence. In similar profusions of detail, art, music, architecture, and literature inspired each other in the Baroque cultural movement[citation needed] as artists explored what they could create from repeated and varied patterns. Some traits and aspects of Baroque paintings that differentiate this style from others are the abundant amount of details, often bright polychromy, less realistic faces of subjects, and an overall sense of awe, which was one of the goals in Baroque art.
The word baroque probably derives from the ancient Portuguese noun "barroco"[citation needed] which is a pearl that is not round but of unpredictable and elaborate shape. Hence, in informal usage, the word baroque can simply mean that something is "elaborate", with many details, without reference to the Baroque styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Bernini's 'David'

c1700's

Rococo
a style of 18th century French art and interior design, "Commonly and mostly used in the very graceful age of the great Marie Antionette" Rococo style rooms were designed as total works of art with elegant and ornate furniture, small sculptures, ornamental mirrors, and tapestry complementing architecture, reliefs, and wall paintings. It was largely supplanted by the Neoclassic style.The word Rococo is seen as a combination of the French rocaille, or shell, and the Italian barocco, or Baroque style. Due to Rococo love of shell-like curves and focus on decorative arts, some critics used the term to derogatively imply that the style was frivolous or merely fashion; interestingly, when the term was first used in English in about 1836, it was a colloquialism meaning "old-fashioned". However, since the mid 19th century, the term has been accepted by art historians. While there is still some debate about the historical significance of the style to art in general, Rococo is now widely recognized as a major period in the development of European art.

&

Enlightenment
(French: Siècle des Lumières; Italian: Sècolo dei Lumi; German: Aufklärung) was an eighteenth century movement in Western philosophy. It is an age of optimism, tempered by the realistic recognition of the sad state of the human condition and the need for major reforms. Some classifications of this period also include 17th century philosophy, which is typically known as the Age of Reason.[1]
The term can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated reason as the primary basis of authority. Developing in France, Britain and Germany, the Enlightenment influenced most of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia. The era is marked by such political changes as governmental consolidation, nation creation, greater rights for common people, and a decline in the influence of authoritarian institutions such as the nobility and Church.
There is no consensus on when to date the start of the Age of Enlightenment, and a number of scholars simply use the beginning of the eighteenth century as a default date.[2] Many scholars use the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment.[3]

c1800's

Neoclassicism
(sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism) is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture (usually that of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome). These movements were dominant during the mid 18th to the end of the 19th century.
What any "neo"-classicism depends on most fundamentally is a consensus about a body of work that has achieved canonic status. These are the "classics." Ideally—and neoclassicism is essentially an art of an ideal—an artist, well schooled and comfortably familiar with the canon, does not repeat it in lifeless reproductions, but synthesizes the tradition anew in each work. This sets a high standard, clearly; but though a neoclassical artist who fails to achieve it may create works that are inane, vacuous or even mediocre, gaffes of taste and failures of craftsmanship are not commonly neoclassical failings. Novelty, improvisation, self-expression, and blinding inspiration are not neoclassical virtues; neoclassicism exhibits perfect control of an idiom. It does not re-create art forms from the ground up with each new project, as modernism demanded. "Make it new" was the modernist credo of the poet Ezra Pound.

&
Romanticism
is a complex, self-contradictory artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution.[1] It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.
The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity in untamed nature and its qualities that are "picturesque", both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom, as well as arguing for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage

c1900's

Modernism
describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged roughly in the period of 1884-1914.
The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation.[1] Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In essence, the modernist movement argued that the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age were permanent and imminent, and that people should adapt their world view to accept that the new equaled the good, the true and the beautiful. Modern (quantum and relativistic) physics, modern (analytical and continental) philosophy and modern number theory in mathematics also date from this period.[citation needed] Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions, believing the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated; they directly confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world. Some divide the 20th Century into movements designated Modernism and Postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement

Introduction via Sandro's 1st Thesis

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My first thesis involves two opposing principles, which are a permanent condition of artistic creation and have a bearing on every artistic experience.
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Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same, nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself, in other words, of that which one thinks and experiences. The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively.

For the artist the search for a unified expression through the balance of two opposites has been, and always will be, a continual struggle.

In his silk-screen series Jazz, Matisse describes a "technical" solution of this kind in an accompanying remark titled "Mes courbes ne sont pas folles": The vertical is in my mind, it helps me give my lines precise direction, and even in my hastily sketched drawings, not a single line, as for instance a branch in a landscape, emerges without a consciousness of the relationship to the vertical.-My curves are not mad.6
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Another approach to the two principles is conveyed by the Apollonian/ Dionysian dichotomy. This pair of terms introduced by Schelling refers to the lucid, conscious will directed towards form and order that characterizes the essence of the god Apollo in contrast to the frenzied, unconscious and unclear, creative impulse embodied by Dionysus. In man we find by nature a blind, unrestrained, productive impulse, which stands opposed to a level-headed, restrained [...] and therefore actually negating impulse in the same subject. [...] To be both intoxicated and sober not at different moments but at one and the same time, this is the secret of true poetry.7
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What underlies this universal structure of artistic creation? Nietzsche describes the two principles as drives, Schelling as forces or impulses, and Mondrian as human inclinations. But the three authors obviously agree on their significance as elemental, constitutionally conditioned opposites of all human endeavor. The call for their union thus transcends the framework of artistic production and applies to human behavior in general.
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The concept of the "psychic apparatus"9 developed by Freud in the thirties comprises three psychic instances with distinct functions: The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism's life. This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs. No such purpose as that of keeping itself alive or of protecting itself from dangers by means of anxiety can be attributed to the id. This is the task of the ego, whose business is also to discover the most favorable and least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account. The superego may bring fresh needs to the fore, but its main function remains the limitation of satisfactions.10
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At first sight, it seems obvious that the power of the id lies in the inclination towards the expression of oneself, in the by nature [...] blind, unrestrained productive impulse of the Dionysian, and that the inclination towards the creation of universal beauty, the Apollonian principle of a level-headed, restrained [...] and therefore actually negating impulse is the expression of the superego. However, on their own, neither the id nor the superego are capable of any expression at all. Only through the ego can the impulses of the id or the demands of the superego be expressed and formed; the latter are never "pure" or unadulterated but always appear in connection and competition with the attendant claims and demands of the ego.
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The infant's first experiences of life do not distinguish between the inner and outer world, between the ego and the non-ego, but only between the sensations of pleasure or "un"-pleasure. The mother (or other parent person), whose caring intervention eases the tension of the infant's needs, is not experienced as a separate, self-contained being but rather blends with the infant's "mono-reality." For the infant, the essential and exclusive contents of reality consist of the repetitive experience of its needs being gratified "as if by themselves." These experiences form the basis of the archaic feeling of omnipotence which becomes one of the first constituents of its psyche.11
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Only gradually does the infant learn to associate the fluctuations in its sensation of well-being with the arrival of its mother and to experience her as something separate from itself. She then becomes a larger than life, omnipotent figure. However, child and mother are not always clearly separate and distinct; the infant's self-perception alternates between the two poles of this symbiotic dual unity. The child may "represent" this unity by following the example of the mother and trying to experience itself as a unified whole. The mother then becomes part of itself and in its fantasy, the infant adopts her size and power. Or the dual unity may take shape in the mother so that the child feels it is absorbed in her size and power. A rudimentary form of both poles has thus established itself in the child, between which the experiences and feelings of the self oscillate, namely a) the feeling of its own greatness and omnipotence, which forms the basis of the grandiose self and which seeks expression and display, and b) the archaic, omnipotent parent figure, the basis of later idealized structures, which compel the child to live up to this figure in order to become part of its greatness and power.
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Further development of this core self is defined by the growing child's relationship to its immediate environment. The child experiences itself-in the sense of being mirrored-through the eyes of its parents. Both their positive and their gradual, reality-oriented corrective reactions to its behavior are internalized and, in the best of circumstances, enable the child to transform its archaic fantasies of greatness and omnipotence, step by step, into a healthy self-confidence, into reality-based ambitions and into exhibitionist pleasure in its own activities, that is, in their display. The idealized parent figures are also viewed more and more realistically and the ideas associated with them internalized to form the foundations of the ideals that guide the growing child.
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In the course of this two-fold process, out of the core self there emerge the decisive psychic "contents" or configurations towards which our self-love is directed, that is, the two essential components or "poles" of the self: a) the exhibitionist pole of the self (the grandiose self), comprising the sensation and conviction of one's own uniqueness with the related ideas, experiences and pleasure in their display, and b) the idealized pole of the self (the idealized structures), comprising one's own guiding ideals and the success of one's efforts to live up to them in intent and deed. From now on these two poles form the inner core of the individual and coincide with the deepest, most intimate perception of the self. They form the basis of the inner experience, which leads us to say "that is me."12
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But even in the case of optimal development in childhood, the corresponding narcissistic equilibrium is not necessarily established once and for all; adults also need ongoing means of mirroring their own behavior and confirming their own worth.
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conclusion: every work of art thrives on the tension between the demands of exhibitionist aspirations and the requirements of the idealized structures for which it is a vehicle. The elementary challenge of artistic work consists of uniting these two principles into a homogeneous gestalt.
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ge·stalt or Ge·stalt (gə-shtält', -shtôlt', -stält', -stôlt') n.
A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.
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Since people experience their guiding ideals as objective and independently valid values, a number of individuals can espouse the same ideals. Common ideals unite those who hold them into a community and thus form the foundations of every culture. To a certain extent they represent the social and integrating aspect of our psychic structure. In contrast, the personal experience of subjective aspirations and ambitions enables individuals to experience themselves as the center of their own initiative and activity, to set themselves off against their co-human beings and also to have an effect on them.
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Every society is based on a set of conventions and maxims that regulate the behavior of its individual members with a view to the fulfillment of collective goals. These conventions and laws structure the behavior of all the members of a society, so that the behavior of others is more or less comprehensible and predictable, and can also be influenced within the framework of the given order and the individual's possibilities. These conventions form the prerequisite of all social communication and mutual cooperation. However, they can fulfill their function only when they are binding for everyone, that is, when they are obeyed. To this end, they are idealized and, if ignored, sanctions are imposed, ranging from ridicule or contempt to official punishment.
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Not only fashions, etiquette, customs and laws, ethical and aesthetic principles, morals and "good taste," but also a society's knowledge and technology-these all are subject to an order. In most cases, the orders of a society are legitimated by both rational and irrational values and argumentation. They are distinguished from each other not only by their function but also by the emotional value they have for the individual and for society.Every individual takes a more or less conscious stand on the diversity of existing conventions and maxims.
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To this end, the individual classifies them according to the importance s/he assigns to them. Some will be jettisoned, others pragmatically employed, still others internalized and appropriated as one's own. But society not only confronts the individual with laws and conventions, it also offers, within the social framework, many means of gratifying instinctual drives and exhibitionist aspirations and ambitions. Here the individual must again choose which of these to appropriate. The double choice thus made not only determines the space people assign to their instinctual drives and exhibitionist aspirations, and the particular form they will take; it also determines the way in which people see themselves as individual and social beings. We know from our own experience how difficult it is to make this selection coherent and compatible with the idealized and exhibitionist poles of our self as well as with our social environment.
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Most social conventions are older than the individuals whose behavior they regulate. They are already there as we grow up. They define us not only from without but also from within because in the long course of childhood, during which time we are dependent on our parents, we have largely internalized the basic principle of all social convention: "always act in conformity with society." For that very reason social conventions bear the mark of the individual as well. Their reality rests on the awareness and the behavior of single individuals and acquires its collective shape only through them.
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Due to the conventions formed in the course of its history, every artistic genre possesses a language conditioned by its respective medium. This means artists encounter a predetermined structure, which they use and whose development they thereby influence. Even if artists later find what they regard as their own idiom, they have merely redefined a few of the rules and are expressing themselves in a variant of the general language. Every new artistic idiom is comprehensible and thus viable only to the extent that it follows laws whose coherence and inner logic can serve as the basis for new conventions.
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These rules, like those of every social convention, are both functionally and ideally determined. They not only fulfill the function of communication-the artist's utterance, that is, the fulfillment of his exhibitionist aspirations-but also embody separate rational and irrational values. They thereby allow the artist to relate his utterances to these values and thus, simultaneously, to satisfy idealized demands with his exhibition.
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Every artistic idiom shares one essential aspect with speech. Speech unites sound and meaning. This unity between the sensual and the spiritual is the creative achievement of all human language, for it allows the spiritual to enter a sensual dimension, and thus provides the medial prerequisite of the artistic experience in which the spiritual acquires a sensual shape and becomes one with it.
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Artists thereby obey their own inner standards of beauty-the aesthetic equivalent of the idealized pole of the self. This justifies their exhibition, 'enhances' it as it were, and unites the aspirations of the two poles of the self into a homogeneous form. The genuinely creative artist then succeeds in charting new territory in the fields of beauty, of ideas and subject matters worthy of idealization, and also of socially accepted individual demands and freedoms. Since message and form are inseparable in art, the artist always creates new linguistic structures that are themselves the message. The Medium Is the Message: Reduced to its actual truth content, namely "the medium is a message," McLuhan's aphorism finds compelling confirmation in works of art.

Introduction via Sandro Bocola

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In the present debate on postmodern art, neither its champions nor its opponents can ignore the need to study and define the opposite end of the spectrum: modernism. In the process, it becomes clear that there is no consensus about its substance, about the common, unifying properties of its varied manifestations and what these signify.

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Despite a historical mode of presentation, I do not intend to write a history of modernism. This study attempts only to point out the main lines of its development and to place them in context in conjunction with chapters summarizing parallel developments

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I have restricted myself to the visual arts... Only a few artists, as representatives of entire groups or movements, are examined in depth.

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Those selected not only mirror the artistic production of our age but also its reception by the public. Public response is a decisive factor in artistic development; success and public recognition or the absence thereof affect all artistic endeavor in many and far-reaching ways. Who knows how the oeuvres of Cézanne or van Gogh would have developed, had the artists received recognition in their lifetimes, or how Picasso would have proceeded if practically no one had paid any attention to him. The work of these artists is clearly inseparable from its reception. The success of an artist indicates that viewers recognize or think they recognize themselves in a work (or its creator) and thus identify themselves with the art or the artist. Only a "successful" work mirrors the consciousness of "its" age. This also holds if awareness-and thus success-comes later, as in the case of many pioneers.

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I am well aware of the limitations of my undertaking... For, as Popper says, there can be no history without a point of view; like the natural sciences, history must be selective unless it is to be choked by a flood of poor and unrelated material. [...]

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The only way out of this difficulty is [...] consciously to introduce a preconceived selective point of view into one's history; that is, to write that history which interests us. This does not mean that we may twist the facts until they fit into a framework of preconceived ideas, or that we may neglect the facts that do not fit. On the contrary, all available evidence which has a bearing on our point of view should be considered carefully and objectively. [...] But it means that we need not worry about all those facts and aspects which have no bearing upon our point of view and which therefore do not interest us.1

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The way out of this dilemma, of course, is to be clear about the necessity of adopting a point of view; to state this point of view plainly, and always to remain conscious that it is one among many, and that even if it should amount to a theory, it may not be testable.3

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The German historian Sebastian Haffner comes to a similar conclusion. There is no such thing as a historical science comparable to the natural sciences-and for a very simple reason: Nature is the present but history deals with the past. The present is real, concrete, explorable. But the past is not real anymore, it has become unreal. It has been removed by time, it no longer exists and can therefore no longer be explored. Basically, all historical studies rest on a simple terminological mistake, on the confusion of the terms 'past' and 'history'. [...]

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In a word: History is not a given like nature, history itself is an artificial product: Not everything that has ever happened becomes history but only that which writers of history at some time somewhere considered worth recording. It is the writing of history that creates history. History-to put it bluntly-is not reality; it is a branch of literature.4

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A word about the relationship of scientific, political and social developments to the course of the visual arts. This relationship is of great significance, for it reveals that the views, attitudes and mental thrust of a society's artistic output are the same as those that propel its development in other areas. But there is, in my opinion, no causal relationship between these parallel and synchronic processes; artists at the dawn of modernism were as baffled by the trailblazing discoveries of contemporary science as were their peers in the sciences by the achievements of modern painting and sculpture.

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in other words, that they share the same initial givens. However, it does not necessarily follow that such shared givens inevitably lead to similar developments. At the turn of the century, the most varied tendencies and models could be observed in all fields of culture. Every historical turning point is characterized by the fact that new problems can no longer be resolved by the old models, that the established consciousness and established approaches are no longer able to cope with a new situation.

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The problems of any turning point are fundamental in nature. To be resolved they require a new paradigm that can adequately cope with unfamiliar demands, i.e. with the above-mentioned givens involving all areas of endeavor: the resulting shared paradigm yields a meaningful correspondence among the scientific, political, social, philosophical and artistic developments of a new, incipient age (or of a new epoch within this age).

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par·a·digm (pār'ə-dīm', -dĭm') n.
One that serves as a pattern or model.
A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

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I view modernism as an independent cultural age comparable to Greco-Roman antiquity (500 bce-400 ce), the Middle Ages (400-1300), or the Modern Age (1400-1900). A look at this chronology shows that these epochs successively diminish in length. Modernism, whose beginnings I date around 1870,15 already seems to be drawing to a close and is unlikely to survive into the 21st century. This dwindling life expectancy is a consequence of steadily accelerating cultural developments. The fact that modernism is of brief duration does not lessen its status as a cultural age.

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The respective paradigms define the self-image and the worldview of their contemporaries and invest individual and collective ambitions with meaning, measure and orientation; they form the spiritual basis of the respective cultures and find representative expression in their art.

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The process is dialectical. The paradigm is subject to change as a consequence of the respective artistic endeavors and these endeavors are in turn affected by independent changes of the paradigm. This interplay between specific worldviews/self-images and their formal condensation in the work of art propels artistic developments.

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di·a·lec·tic (dī'ə-lěk'tĭk) n.
The art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments.
The contradiction between two conflicting forces viewed as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.

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The nature of the process might be compared to the course of a human life and can be viewed and interpreted as such from a number of different vantage points. The guiding idea of an age is delimited by birth and death. It has already germinated in the spiritual heritage of the preceding age now drawing to a close. It enters the stage of history with the emergence of a new ideal; it embarks on its own era. It progresses through childhood and youth (its archaic epoch) and reaches the classical phase of its development on coming of age. All doubts have been dropped; its artistic, aesthetic manifestations have acquired a clear, distinctive and unmistakable shape. The new idea has found its own language, community and conventions. Succeeding generations will test their viability, adapt them to their own expressive needs, and apply and modify them in a host of different ways. The expressive and formal potential of the new, originally unknown paradigm is ultimately exhausted. Despite repeated attempts to regenerate it, it gradually, inevitably loses credibility and appeal until it is finally supplanted by a new vision, a new paradigm.

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The process is familiar. Humankind, forever confronted with the frightening vastness, uncertainty and mystery of nature and the cosmos,16 has always tried to plumb the mysteries of existence, to approach the unfathomable, to conquer the diversity of a boundless universe, and to grasp the essence of being through interpretation.

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The discovery of a radically new approach, a new paradigm, inspires the impassioned hope that the eternal mystery can be solved after all and lends momentum to new developments. In the initial stages, the new paradigm seems to fulfill its promise; it proves to be a fruitful and compelling principle that leads to unsuspected means of approaching the heart of the matter. But the more these means are explored and exploited from every conceivable angle, the more unavoidable the realization that the distance from ultimate knowledge has not diminished, that the mystery of being has remained untouched.

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Giacometti described reality as being behind a curtain that must be swept aside, only to find another reality, and another. It is as if reality were behind the curtains, he writes, You tear them open and there's another reality [...] and another, I have the impression or the illusion that I make progress every day. That motivates me, as if it were indeed possible to grasp the essence of life. You keep going despite the knowledge that the closer you get to the 'matter', the more it recedes. The distance between me and the model keeps increasing. [...] It is a never-ending quest.17

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Once the illusion of making progress every day begins to fade, the cycle draws to a close. The paradigm of the age has been revealed and integrated into the collective conscious; it has become part of the society's cultural heritage. The human mind begins to look for new dimensions, for new promises. Cultural development is characterized by a general attitude of anticipation and an almost manic delight in experimentation. The time is ripe for a new paradigm.