Modernism, Post Modernism

"If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again"
Raymond Williams "when was modernism"

But of course, this alternative mode will also soon be absorbed into the cultural apparatus and be readily "become the easy iconography of the commercials" as Williams states earlier. The artists' problems will never be solved if they seek to distinguish themselves apart from this cultural apparatus, this mass culture. There is no escape from it. There is no 'empty (sacred) place of the Thing exempted from the circuit of everyday economy' as Zizek says. There is no special void that art specially fills. We live in the immense void and everything that is produced within it is a small thing that joins the circuit of everyday economy. No art has enough power itself to be sacred or powerful enough to amount to anything significant enough to influence culture. By itself it cannot do it. That is why artists now join movements, contribute to already existing causes and ideologies. We are unable to create our own and affect our own break from modernism or post-modernism. Positing a "future in which community may be imagined again" for the sake of breaking from a certain formula or artistic era is futile and meaningless. It becomes art for art's sake, even if it appears to be more than such at first. Artists instead are contributing their voice to the larger dialogue in the discussion of global warming, capitalism, feminism, globalism, etc. If it means continuing the production of images that "become the easy iconography of the commercials" or not-breaking from previous traditions, artists do so anyway, because the causes now take greater priority over theorized artistic practices. In short, perhaps what I mean to say is that the past few decades of artistic production are still too recent to accurately analyze.


The emptiness of things and the filling of their emptinesses by art: