THE ARTIST OF 'NEWNESS'

The following extended quote about Modernism is from Chris Jenks's excellent text 'Transgression'. These paragraphs registered as worth quoting in full, detailing as they do the source of so many continuing preoccupations, from personal anxiety and dissatisfaction, to wider frustrations with contemporary art and popular culture. Jenks's thoughts seemed well worth sharing.

"Modernism carried with it an acute response to the developments that focused our attention upon the conflicts, meaninglessness, upheaval and ultimately the damage to the human condition that were wrought by the structural condition of modernity and the concrete processes of modernization. Modernism has come to signify the powerful clustering of intellectual trends - most particularly artistic initiatives - that emerged around the mid-nineteenth century. It is also apparent why the deeply rooted association of Marxism with critical tendencies in European thought can be seen in modernist terms – Marx was, after all, offering the disassembly and disposal of capitalism, industrialization and alienation. Indeed, Berman has described Marx as the ‘first and greatest of modernists’."

"Baudelaire saw Modernism as a new object for artistic address but also a new quality, experience and understanding of modern being. So, modern art becomes preoccupied with newness, with breaking rules, with stepping outside of constraint and convention. Such art inevitably moves towards the conceptual as it is dedicated to critically considering its own position in relation to the past. However, the artist of ‘newness’ is beset by an original set of problems, both intellectual and technical, concerning how possibly, let alone best, to record that which is ephemeral?"

“…in trivial life, in the daily metamorphosis of external things, there is a rapidity of movement which calls for an equal speed of execution from the artist……Observer, philosopher, flaneur – call him what you will; but whatever words you use in trying to define this kind of artist, you will certainly be led to bestow upon him some adjective which you could not apply to the painter of the eternal, or at least more lasting things, of heroic or religious subjects.”- Baudelaire.

Chris Jenks - 'Transgression' (Routledge, 2003)