An In-concluded Modernity Project (II)

Having laid out a worldview that is not based on the traditional oppositions of West/East, North/South, I’m now in a position to look at modernity and its emancipation program in a different way. The emancipation program of modernity calls for the freedom of the individual from economic restraints and the oppressions of society and its moral conventions. The discourse of modern art revolves around the ideas of identity and personal expression. The aim of the artist is to find, by giving form, the authentic self buried under a thousand layers of cultural history.  In the words of one of its paradigmatic figures, Paul Gauguin, Modernity’s aim as a movement is to realize where do we come from,  what are we and where are we going. Questions that in a cold war context were easily answerable but that in today’s situation are almost impossible to do so. Unless we look at modernity as an in-concluded distorted project, laid stray by forces of ideological interests.

The modernist discourse has been based on the duets liberal/conservative, capitalist/socialist/, revolutionary/reactionary. This Modern construct has become hegemonic. May I pose the question of how much conservative, right win, Republican art can we see at museums and galleries today?  How many painting, sculptures, installations or performances have we had witnessed in the past decade praising the glories of capitalism, conservatism, the war in Iraq, George W. Bush and Republicanism? Is not rather the opposite, that every single piece we look at in every gallery or museum today is rather an indictment against capitalism and the institutions of society? The most recent example, Banksy and the Simpsons episode have been highly criticized by Nelson Shin and other South Korean cartoonists as stereotyping and false. This is the proof that the modernist anti-hegemonic discourse has become hegemonic, it permeates our life and it covers not only the museum and the high arts but also the media and the so-called popular culture. But I may point out that this hegemonic Modernism is the kind of modernism that has been favored since the WWI until today? What I'm trying to promote today is a new kind of Modernism, one that doesn’t wither away with the illnesses and intolerance of the old Modernism. One that doesn’t exclude and oppose but that includes and fuse. This new Modernism doesn’t accept the old view that separates capitalism and socialism, first from third world, west from east, white from black from yellow from brown.

At the level of language the lack of clear-cut geopolitical, oppositional conflict structures indicates that is not possible to find answers in positive/negative; foreground/background; form/content terms. It also means the end of clear-cut boundaries between the disciplines and specializations started by Modernity. The divisions between the scientific, moral, juridical and aesthetic domains start to fall apart. These disciplines blend together. The practice of isolated artists struggling with formal solutions in his/her canvases gives way to a completeness realized in an interdisciplinary practice. The aesthetic producer is also a social scientist, a political activist or even a psychologist or a neuroscientist. The domains of the aesthetic, the moral, the legal and the authentic and truth are covered by the same individual who refuse to limit his/her life to the workings and solution of one specific problem circumscribed inside the aesthetic domain. The practice of art must not be separated from the theory of art --as it already happened in conceptual art. Fragmentation is put to an end. Art comes closer to life.

Call to nationalistic impulses and emotions of all kind must cease since nationalist “national purity and monolithic cohesion is only achieved at the cost of literal and figurative death of cultural hetereogenity and the distortion of history. (Homi Babha).

Canvases and papers are also Facebook and Twitter. Medium and turpentine are also interfaces and the Internet, paint and brushes are also Photoshop and Ilustrator. Every word an artist trace into social media is a mark of art. Every enunciation is an extension of a personal expression and an affirmation of an orange, red, yellow, blue or green individuality against the grey of a homogenising society. Share and Like buttons function as a link to a shared “life world”. Social media is the arena where private opinion is discussed and public opinion start to take shape. The post-modern argument of loss of shared space may not hold anymore in view of social media and the Internet.