How would you describe modernism in art, literature, and thought, and further, does it still exist?

Modernism is a state of mind, embodied in the attitude of certain paintings and poetry from the birth of the French avant-garde in the 1880s until the 1960s — around the beginning of Abstract Expressionism. Minimalism was the extremity of modernism. Until recently art historians saw modernism moving in a historical trajectory from Symbolism and Post Impressionism, through Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Writers and poets were open to the idea of cross-influences and the intrinsic value of art rather than its historical place or classification. Now, it’s accepted that the ideology of progress in art is a historicist notion. We need to take from modernism the intrinsic value of its art and literature — its fresh methods, raw energy, lack of embellishment, rejection of 19th century seamless narratives, and its insistence on the viewer’s direct engagement.

We need to take from modernism the intrinsic value of its art and literature — its fresh methods, raw energy, lack of embellishment, rejection of 19th century seamless narratives, and its insistence on the viewer’s direct engagement.

Look at the relationship between Cubism and surrealism. While each movement has been studied in depth separately, each is seldom looked at together. Dig deep, and you find that they are connected in the use of contradiction or ambivalence. While Cubism creates visual ambivalence through multiple points of view, surrealist art creates psychological ambivalence, evoking attraction and repulsion simultaneously. Modernism in art and literature embraces contradiction and simultaneity. The ambiguity and ambivalence create the meaning. It evokes a complex state of mind in which we must hold various meanings and images in tandem. Modern literature — from the poetry of Eliot, Pound, to Stevens and Ginsberg, uses a right-angled and disjunctive approach in its use of different voices, which the reader has to connect, in the way the viewer has to connect the disparate elements in a painting. There no longer remains a seamless, sequential narrative — modernism offers a prismatic perspective. This is what links cubism and surrealism, although modern art history tends to see these as sequential movements in the upward rising spiral staircase of art.

Modernism exists every time we experience the sensation of simultaneity and contradiction in art. But to evoke contradiction, modernism requires a familiarity and ease with the Western canon — with the humanistic “big picture”, so that one ‘gets’ all the associations, and get pleasure from their disruption. It requires a certain fluency in literature or art to practice it, as well as a sense of tactility, materiality, pleasure and personal taste, all of which are spurned by the current art establishment. As a practice, it has been flattened to shock and innovation without content — conniving for press coverage, and a reduction of the motive to épater la bourgeoisie. But art can surprise us with its resilience.