Modernism
and Its Media: Between Old and New
Mellon
Vertical Seminar
Washington
University | Fall 2012
Seminar
Directors: Vince Sherry | Lutz Koepnick
Seminar
Time: Tuesdays 3 -5:30 pm | Location: Ridgley 321.
Project Description
If
the suffix in �modernismÓ attributes
an ideology or self-consciousness to oneÕs experience of being Òmodern,Ó the
appropriation by artists of a specifically new and characteristically modern
set of media in the early twentieth century will provide a suitable context and
ground for the work of this seminar, which seeks to analyze the developing
understandings of aesthetic modernism in its flourishing time. And while new
media such as radio and cinema and the developing technologies of photography
and the phonograph provided areas of artistic invention on their own, an
equally important aspect of this advance is the powerful impact these new and
enhanced technologies had on the practice of the traditional media of
literature, painting, and music. It is of course the challenge that these novel
technologies precipitated in the understanding of traditional artistic
conventions that defines the kinds of cultural crisis that modernism takes as
its enabling moment: these innovations provided a dramatic indication that a
demonstrably ÒnewÓ set of conditions existed for the practice and experience of
art. Accordingly, this seminar will examine the activity and attitudes of
artists in the new or developing media and it will graph the interaction of
these new possibilities of aesthetic experience with the sometimes resisting,
sometimes reciprocating energies of writers, visual artists and musicians. It
is an openness to this watershed moment and a participation in its defining
crises that we may take as the establishing and identifying mark of the
ÒmodernistÓ artist—not a specific or predictable set of textual,
chromatic, or acoustic practices but, rather, an attitude or temperament that
registers with especial acuteness the energy of change. Our materials will
combine primary and secondary resources, including the artistic work being done
in both new and old media and the statements of polemical attacks and values
that accompany these practices, all of which will be put in perspective through
our collateral readings of the most important and relevant work of modernist
scholarship.
A
key emphasis in the understanding of this subject and the organization of its
issues as well as our syllabus is the material basis of the aesthetic
experience of modernist art and, concomitantly, the insistence on the sensory
specificity of each of its media. One of the identifiably radical gestures in
aesthetic modernism is the extrapolation and exaggeration of the material bases
of aesthetic experience, which (instead of some putative set of references that
are external to the work of art) tend to center the action of artist and reader
or viewer or listener. Painting turned modernist, in this critical account,
when painters abandoned representation and focused anew on the sheer
materiality of paint and brushstroke; poets became modernist when their
attention veered toward nothing other than the sounds or visual appearance of
the individual word; photography and film defined themselves as modernist
through their effort to pursue compositional principles in terms of a pure play
of shadow and light; and musician entered the era of aesthetic modernism when
they aspired to concentrate primarily on the acoustical properties of
individual sounds and noises and in so doing challenged traditional harmonic
and chromatic principles. The advances of the new media of
sight—photography and, before the Òtalkies,Ó cinema—and
sound—radio and the phonograph—worked each on its own and
separately to isolate and radicalize the primary sense of each art, and so
these new media locate an area of aesthetic pioneering that provides at once an
example of aesthetic newness and a test and challenge for the other arts of the
century whose newness was being defined by these new artistic emphases. Thus we
will follow the processes by which artists and critics
respond, variously, to these defining provocations. For some, the investigation
of medium specificity offered the key to aesthetic autonomy in the modern age,
and they worked either to exaggerate the primary sense or combine the senses potential
to a range or plenum of aesthetic experience in a work of art. Other critics
and modernist practitioners embraced such reflexive gestures of sensory
self-consciousness as part of a much larger program of addressing and
recalibrating the presumed separation and autonomization
of sensory perception in the modern age. In each of these cases, however, the
modernist attitude was unthinkable without oneÕs eagerness to explore a
mediumÕs particular logic of expression and put this to work in the material
condition of representation specific to it. The motives, presumptions,
implications and consequences of this activity will provide the wider framework
of analysis and discussion in our seminar.
The
aim of our vertical seminar is twofold. On one hand, we will be addressing the
ways in which modernism constituted itself around issues of medium specificity,
in particular with regard to literature, painting, music, photography, and
film. On the other hand, our seminar will discuss various junctures within the
history of aesthetic modernism at which visual artists, writers, and musicians
either sought to transgress the confines of their respective media or
–polemically, radically—tried to mobilize their medium against
others. The role of artistic media in aesthetic modernism, we will find, was
always precarious and contingent. It was deeply embattled, and in order to
track modernismÕs battle over the meaning of older and newer media in all its
diversity, we will discuss how advocates of newer media such as film tried to
denigrate the users of older media such the literature as backward and
un-modern; how practitioners of older media confronted new media as vehicles of
voided substance and mere distractions; and how highly ambitious artists sought
to re-integrate various media of expression into new synthetic wholes and thus
hoped to resolve the very dialectic of old and new. In pursuing these aims we
will be providing a range of content that draws on the special resources of the
two seminar leaders, which feature separately and together the Anglo-American
and pan-European compasses of aesthetic modernism. The critical perspectives
and materials are decisively transatlantic; they are meant to help us examine
similarities and crucial differences in how modernist artists in Europe and
North America approached the logic of their respective media and coupled their
approaches to larger aesthetic, social, or political agendas.
Accordingly,
the syllabus for this seminar will include three parts, each of them comparing
and contrasting the work of artists and theorists from either side of the
Atlantic, all of them exploring modernism as a site of ongoing struggles over
the autonomy of various media of artistic expression in face of the rise of
modern mass culture and distraction. Part One will be concerned with a number
of paradigmatic positions in writing, music, and the visual artist eager to
explore medium specificity as a principal conduit to what it might mean to be
both modernist and modern. Part Two will address key confrontations between
various media in modernism (word vs. image; word vs. sound; image vs. sound;
still image vs. moving image, etc.) in order to discuss the larger social and
political dimensions of modernism quest for aesthetic autonomy and self-reflexivity.
And Part Three investigates various attempts to synthesize media and sensory
perceptions in aesthetic modernism, including the desire to create total work
of arts and to find viable expressions for synesthetic experiences.
The
seminar will be of interest for faculty and graduate students in departments
and programs such as American Studies, Art History, Comparative Literatures,
English, German, History, Music, and Romance Literatures. It involves two
co-directors to provide participants with a broad and
strong interdisciplinary scaffolding, which will enable us to address the
historical and conceptual multiplicity of aesthetic modernism as well as to
warrant sufficient expertise in our discussions of different media practices.
Readings and discussions will frequently point to modernismÕs unique ability to
speak to larger issues of aesthetic expressiveness and reception; the seminar
might therefore also be of interest to students and faculty whose primary
historical interest lies outside of early twentieth-century culture.
Weekly
Schedule
Week 1 (8/28): Introduction
Week 2 (9/4): Modernism, Media,
Speed
Week 3 (9/11): The Avant-garde and
Its Manifestoes
á Boccioni, "Futurist Painting: Technical
Manifesto"
á Boccioni, ÒTechnical Manifesto of Futurist SculptureÓ
á Breton,
ÒSurrealist ManifestoÓ
á Brger, Theory
of the Avant-garde (sel)
á Lewis et alii, Blast 1, ÒLong Live the Vortex!,Ó
ÒManifestoÓ (Blasts, Blessings), ÒManifestoÓ (I-VII)
á Malevich,
"From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism"
á Marinetti, "The Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism"
á Puchner, Poetry
of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes, and the Avant-Gardes (sel)
á Russolo, The Art of
Noise
Week 4 (9/18): Photography | Film
á Balasz, Visible Man
(sel)
á Kracauer, ÒPhotographyÓ (1927)
á Kracauer, ÒPhotographyÓ (1960)
á Moholy-Nagy, Painting
Photography Film & Dynamic of a
Metropolis
Week 5 (9/25): Film | Literature
á Arnheim, ÒThe New LaocoonÓ
á Skail, Cinema and the
Origins of Literary Modernism ),
1-92.
á Trotter, Cinema
and Modernism, 1-85, 181-98.
Week 6-9 (10/2, 10/9, 10/16,
10/23): Literature and Other Media
á literary readings, primary texts and commentary on media by
Eliot, Woolf, Pound, Wyndham Lewis: author by author reference in commentary in
subsequent chapters of Trotter and Skail. other European and American artists?
Week 6 (10/2): Joyce and Cinema
Week 7 (10/9): Woolf and Cinema
Week 8 (10/17): Eliot and Cinema
á ÒThe Love Song of J. Alfred PrufrockÓ
á The Waste
Land (facsimile edition; the full
text of the published poem, with the authorÕs notes, comes near the end of this
file)
á ÒThe Romantic Englishman, The Comic Spirit, and the
Function of CriticismÓ
á ÒEffie the Waif,Ó as excerpted from letters
á Trotter, Cinema
and Modernism, 125-58
Week 9 (10/25) Pound, H.D.,
William Carlos Williams and Cinema
á Pound, from Selected
Poems, pp. 18-39;
á Ezra Pound
and The Visual Arts, 98-99, 175-77.
á H.D. from Collected
Poems, as asterisked on reproduced pages; from The Cinema and The Classics,
II Restraint, and III, The Mask and the Movietone.
á Williams, from Collected
Early Poems, Spring and All, 239-287.
á McCabe,
Cinematic Modernism, 32-161.
Week 10 (10/30): Empathy,
Abstraction, and the Theatrical
á Koss, Modernism
after Wagner (xi-xix, 25-66, 67-95, 207-244)
á Fritz Lang, Metropolis
(1927)
á Fernand Leger, Ballet Mcanique (1924)
Week 11 (11/6): Total Work of Art:
Between Fascism, Stalinism, and Hollywood
á Benjamin, ÒThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical
ReproducibilityÓ (epilogue)
á Groys, Stalinism
as a Total Work of Art (sel)
á Huyssen, ÒAdorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard
WagnerÓ
á Smith, The Total
Work of Art (sel)
Week 12 (11/20): After Modernism?
á Bernstein, Against
Voluptuous Bodies (1-18, 46-77, 253-323)
á Greenberg, ÒAvant-garde and KitschÓ
á Krauss, ÒSome Rotten Shoots from the Seeds of TimeÓ
Week 13 & 14 & 15 (11/27,
12/4, 12/11): Conclusion
á Participant presentations @ 30 minutes each.
á Seminar visit by Enda Duffy
on 12/4/12