why modern art matters now

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Why Modern Art Matters Now Author(s): Kirk Varnedoe Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 147, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 128-

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Why Modern Art Matters Now' KIRK VARNEDOE

Professor of the History of Art Institute for Advanced Study

I T'S A FAMILIAR PLATITUDE, ostensibly consoling, that we share a common humanity in matters ultimate and fundamental. The imperatives of death and sex, for example, are famously dis-

dainful of all our various, carefully constructed defenses and dignities. The corollary cliche is that big events, like 9/11, are-or should be- occasions for a heightened solidarity, a salutary forgetting of our differences and a loss of selfishness. This leveling is taken-along with the defeat of irony, the silencing of subversive pessimism, and the suppres- sion of trivia in favor of nobler concentration on big impersonal ideals- to be a good result of a bad thing.

A few months back I had occasion to test this truth, when, thanks to the MacArthur Foundation, I got to be a fly on the wall at a special meeting to discuss September 11th, among high achievers in various fields-historians, dancers, poets, photographers, and so on. And I found out there that, in some sense, the received wisdom is exactly right-big problems like this are leveling, in that they seem to reduce us all, whatever generals we may be on our own turfs, to a common, buck-private level of pasteboard political inanity, cliched thinking, and depressed frustration. More telling, though, were the sharp individual differences among this group, on either side of the policy ventilating. On the one side, in the utterly personal stories of immediate reaction- from the Japanese dancer scarred by Hiroshima to the novelist who used the Trade Center as his children's playground, from those who saw it as grandparents to those who saw it as gay people, and from viewers who found themselves on the day too near, to those who felt too far away. All these particulate glimpses were then complemented on the other side by a parallel potpourri of sharper expertises-the seismolo- gist who brought the impact graphs, the human rights advocate with

1 Read 27 April 2002.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 147, NO. 2, JUNE 2003

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WHY MODERN ART MATTERS NOW 129

perspectives on the perils of American exceptionalism, the historian of antiquity who related the destruction and memorial rebuilding of the Athenian Acropolis-each person measuring the shock differently, with the instrument they had learned uniquely well, gauging its tremor, listening for its echoes. And at the end, what had altered and expanded me as a participant was precisely not the soft pap of shared generalities in that room, but these specific singularities and hard differences, both private and professional-what was most them and least me.

So chastened and instructed, I will try now, in my turn, to speak to you as seems most effective to do-as all I can in fact do-through what seems most me, walking the confessedly narrowed horizons of my own dual viewpoints, as a personal witness on my ground and as a professional observer in my field-a resident of lower Manhattan, and then a curator and historian of modern art. It is only in these local terms that I could feel at all licensed to talk of what concerns us all, the unimaginably larger national and global concerns of fear, and of consolation.

My wife, Elyn, and I have a loft in Soho, about twenty blocks from the World Trade Center site. We heard American Airlines Flight 11 roar over our heads in its final instants, and later stood in the middle of West Broadway and watched, incredulously stunned, the towers pour smoke and then race down to dust, in seeming silence below a westerly wind, against a baby-blue sky. Initially I, too, dissolved into inchoate anxiety. But by nightfall, closeted in my untouched cocoon of running water, electricity, and cable television, virtually next door to the impact, I had formed a very specific set of worries. It seemed vividly clear to me, and I was at pains to try to convince others in endless phone calls, that what I had seen was-though grotesquely unprece- dented and in senses unabsorbable-also something utterly unique, and ultimately quite manageable. I argued that this was a spectacular one-off and un-repeatable stunt, cleverly worked by ju-jitsuing our own advantages-our powerful technologies, our permissive civil liberties-against us. What it had yielded was a globally spectacular, violent imagery, but in fact only a strongly localized injury to the city, much less to the nation, and not by far the worst that could happen. I argued further my intense conviction that what would really count in years to come would not be what they had done to us, but what we would do to ourselves as a result. And worse than another occurrence, I feared fear itself, the inflation of rhetoric on every channel, the instant recourse to a language of war, and the mass aestheticizations of instant history, in orchestrated grief and whistle-in-the-dark cowboy bravado. I longed instead for a steel-eyed leadership of calming focus-something like the Ed Harris persona in the Apollo 13 movie, the mission control



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chief who insists against panic, in the face of what seems lethal disaster, "let's . . . work . . . the . . . problem."

But by nightfall, as I realized from those countless conversations how completely out of step and almost alien my obsession with this stoic realism appeared, I also looked inside myself and saw that I was dealing with the event through the powerfully deforming, initially unconscious filter of my own condition-that is, a recently diagnosed recurrence and spread of cancer, for which I had entered treatment and with which Elyn and I were then, and still are, struggling to come to terms. The need to bind in the horror of the event, to localize it and control it, the need to contextualize and see that there were worse things, the imperative not to yield to fear in a way that deformed the rest of life-all these I realized were selfish, born within me, of a ran- dom malignancy. And yet I felt, and cannot help feeling still, that this particular warp in my lens offered a privileged focus on a truth worth uttering, a less occupied but no less valid position in the debate, from which I might convince others-of which, indeed, I would still like to try to convince you, if time allowed.

But let me turn instead from fears to consolation. Disheartened as I was then by the disjunction between the ashen, siren-punctuated void outside my door and the horror vacuui babbling of the tube, it was perhaps predictable that I would eventually seek refuge in what I knew best, in static objects of immediate, obdurate physical presence, with no evident message. In other words, in art, and-no surprise here-in modern art especially. That autumn brought by fate or luck two impor- tant exhibitions of modern sculpture in New York-Alberto Giacom- etti at the Museum of Modern Art and Richard Serra in Chelsea. Of course, these were wildly different on the surface: Giacometti's post- World War II, post-Auschwitz, stripped-down stick people have become our classic emblems of the diminishment of the human condition into existential isolation-while Serra's post-1960s, famously austere and intimidating minimalist sculpture was opposite in its reputation for overweaning industrial brutality and bullying macho toughness. But now, seen through the eyes of the autumn of 2001, both pathos and power seemed changed.

Seen whole, with early surrealist objects as well as the later figures, and in the immediate context of truly tragic experience, Giacometti seemed so human on so many other, different levels-a poet equally of malice and tenderness, haunted nighttime palaces and scurrying rainy- day streets, and of keening desire commingled with bleak, often black humor, and a self-deprecating irony as sharp as a cutthroat's shiv and as earthy as the slouch of a loping hound. And the huge Serra plates of rusting steel, in recent years bent by sophisticated, computer-driven




programs into sliced arcs of higher geometries, now moved in bellying curves and labyrinth spirals whose nimbleness seemed to match their gravity, with elements of surprise, pleasure, and delight for the children I saw dashing among them, yet also bound indissolubly to a high and still daunting monumental sublime. More than ever, too, I felt how elegiac these mammoths were. In their steamship monumentality, the metal passageways and overhanging curves embodied a grave lyricism, a memorial nobility leavened by a living, enveloping kinesthetic immediacy-in other words, and in this altered autumn context, something like a fresh embodiment of the paradoxical term, an amazement of grace. Just as Giacometti seemed no longer only the charred skele- tons but also the resilient sinews of humanity, so minimalism's reduc- tive, puritan ideal of an emptied, present-tense experience, seemed here to have yielded a sensual, emotional, and intellectual plenitude of enduring force.

This account of solace may seem to point only down the private path to a self-indulgent retreat from politics, in the soft refuge of art. But I would insist again, in a different and I hope expanded way, that an implicit politics may come into focus through the limited lens of such a personal experience. A life lived in modernity involves not just one but a constant series of shocks, of diverse intensity, that often force our attention to the shifting balances of obsolescence and innovation, loss and gain. What I was experiencing in these exhibitions, where the personal and the professional blurred into one another, was the orches- tration of my losses through a renewed sense of gain. Along with the thousands of people who in growing numbers in October and Novem- ber were drawn out of themselves and into these two shows, I there re- learned some recurrent lessons of modern art-not only that stripping- down can lead to new forms of grandeur, but also that it is often the apparent ironists and subversives who wind up being the most effective creators of new ways of seeing, and ultimately the best transmitters of the deepest values of the modern tradition. In modern art we have gained, and will continue to gain, so much in the risky, seemingly bad bargain of putting our culture and its traditions up for grabs, and opening its vulnerabilities to such individuals and their disparate, peculiar ambitions and obsessions, even their pathologies. A crazy Dutch- man in Provence who sets the night sky to spinning, or a hot-eyed young Spaniard in Paris who punctures painting with newsprint and wallpaper, have wound up giving us forms we find indispensable to the expression of ourselves in our age. And still now, for the freedom to scorn and demoralize the conventions of received ideals, individual imaginations constantly recompense us by rendering what seems too known and shopworn-like the isolated human figure-or too inert



132 KIRK VARNEDOE

and intractable-like hulking plates of steel-into things newly myste- rious, resacralized, making secular modernity not only a condition of unrelenting disenchantment, but one of constantly refreshed mysteries and puzzles.

Yet modern art is precisely not a substitute religion, and lacks precisely those consolations. It is a source not of absolutes and enduring truths, but of uncertainties constantly exacerbated, of pieties constantly exploded, shock and surprise, doubt and irony and perversity and at times cruelty, and destruction-without these, indeed, no art could be adequate to our lived experience of the modernity we inhabit. Only that which is credibly hardened against, yet also authentically open to, the fuller, bittersweet ranges of human experience, can, I think, finally be consoling for a broadening range of people, over the long haul. The way into such things is not soft, not easy. The implicit social contract by which we have gotten such peculiar achievements is not natural or normal; it has had to be learned, and it always has to be re-learned. Nor does it bring everyone together. Even within its adepts (even within this room, no doubt) it creates, and draws its very life force from, bickering micro-communities of argument, of taste, and- regardless of our religions-of beliefs with a small b.

Understandings of the world are irreducibly disparate, often seemingly irreconcilable; but above all, if we work at it and allow others to do the same, they are not a closed set. And just as by individual cultural reductions and destructions we hope to increase the collective sum of meanings in the world, and keep our ends open, so it is only by the opposites of monolithic solidarity-by mutations and hybrids of seemingly incommensurable fractions-that we will sustain the special kind of coherence and viability in our particular, modern ideal of a shared culture.

Modern art writ large presents one cultural expression of a larger political gamble, on the human possibility of living in change and without absolutes, and on the individual human consciousness, for all its flaws and deforming optics, as our prime resource and treasure. This notion of freedom is something I deeply believe in, and something I have since last September felt most pointedly threatened, from outside and from in. Please don't tell me any more about God blessing Amer- ica, and don't tell me about getting above politics, because politics with a small p-that is, never-ended negotiations toward changing defini- tions of equity-is, for better and worse, what we've uniquely got. And that "we" itself is crucially open-ended and in flux. With this kind of openness in a society, as with masses of individual artists struggling to innovate, one also gets a lot of apparently inefficient, useless, and fre- quently tedious or annoying crap, but it is the only way we know; and




it has the huge advantage that we don't finally know that way either, but constantly try to change it and criticize it. It's at a time of big abstractions and high rhetoric that we need to try hardest to remember that it's the s appended to the word "truth" that whistles our anthem, and that it's things with small letters that wind up being capital. This- not the pious solidarity of an enclosing, natural, god-given national or religious identity, but a piecemeal-made, imperfectly incomplete and open-ended experiment available to be shared and tinkered with by all human societies-is the exasperation of our enemies and the uncom- fortable faith with a small f that we defend and protect; and it is, it must be, more than enough to sustain us not just against the fierce cer- tainties of others, but, equally importantly, against the quieter and more comfy treacheries of our own needy ideals of simpler wholeness.



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