On modernity – Hal Foster in LRB:

“This art history also appears entirely familiar and yet so distant: familiar because it is of a part with the social art history that Clark did so much to reanimate in the 1970s and 1980s, and distant because his approach has undergone a sea change since then. In 1973 he published two companion volumes, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution and The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51, which soon became essential reference points in 19th-century art history. These were followed by his equally influential The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers(1985), a recasting of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in Situationist terms as ambivalent responses to the becoming-spectacle of Paris and its environs during the Second Empire and the Third Republic. While the first two texts were written, as Clark later remarked, ‘in ignominious but unavoidable retreat from the events’ of 1968, the third could be read as an indirect attack on the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s. In all three books, then, he worked to keep modernist art in critical parallax with contemporary politics. This tense connection was given a different twist in his next volume, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), which claimed that, though modernism and socialism had belonged together as co-antagonists of capitalism, this uneasy rapport was rubbished by ‘the new world order’ after 1989. In fact, Clark argued, the very modernity that modernism had once engaged critically had now ruined it: modernism had become ‘our antiquity’.”

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“Perhaps this is also why Clark uses the term ‘uncanny’ as often as he does. It is his way of signalling the many moments in Cézanne when his ‘strangeness of vision ... refuses to take anything for granted.’ Although the repetition of the word sometimes renders it a floating signifier, connoting ‘disquiet’ here and ‘unreality’ there, that may be just as Clark intends it. For many of us the uncanny is overdetermined by Freud, who defines it as the return of a familiar thing made strange by repression. For Clark, however, the uncanniness in Cézanne is a matter less of his psyche (there is no shortage of such readings) than of the world around him. The effect of estrangement may be psychological, but the cause is social, a corollary of the ‘uncertainty’ that modernity brings with it (the line about capitalism from The Communist Manifesto, ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ is in the background somewhere). In short, Clark pushes uncanniness in Freud towards estrangement in Marx to get at the particular weirdness of the Cézanne world: a piece of fruit that is a ‘non-pear [and] non-apple’, a surface in one of The Card Players paintings that is a ‘non-wall and non-window’, folds of cloth that are ‘liable to take on a life of their own’, landscapes that somehow get ‘familiarity and unfamiliarity, nearness and apartness’ to co-exist. It is a world of ‘deathly animation’, Clark insists, ‘and isn’t this the basic scandal – the aliveness and deadness entwined – that gives a Cézanne its power?’ As we may guess, what Clark detects in Cézanne is a world touched with the black magic of the commodity, a world in which (to cite Marx again, this time from Capital) ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’ has begun to displace the ‘definite social relation between men’.”

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“And he understood that a very great deal – almost everything – about painting would have to be reconstructed if that knowledge was to be given form.’ Giving artistic form to modern formlessness: Clark has offered this thumbnail definition of modernism before, and he doubles down on it here. It draws on an old-school idea of modernity: Max Weber on ‘the disenchantment’ of a rationalised world, Georg Simmel on the ‘indifference’ of a money economy, and Lukács on the ‘homelessness’ of the modern novel. Clark sees a ‘no-whereness’ in Cézanne too: ‘Modernity is loss of world. Cézanne is the painter who makes that cliché draw blood.’ Yet Cézanne expresses ‘elation’ as well as ‘horror’ at this state of affairs. Clark carries this formula for modernist ambivalence about modernity over from Farewell to an Idea; it is how his preferred artists respond to the creative-destructive energies of capitalism. He sees these effects translated into pictorial terms in a typical Cézanne: ‘groundlessness, airlessness, absence of contact, lack of distance but also of proximity, lack of the sense of a palpable shared world, uncertainty and a strange false vividness’ (that synonym for uncanniness again). ‘Modern experience just is this evenness and disequilibrium in high tension,’ and Cézanne delivers it. At the same time Cézanne was no Marxist, and he was far more conservative than the anarchist Pissarro. Yet this very conservativism, when embedded in the paintings, may make them critical in another, romantic anti-capitalist way, even if this resistance necessarily fails: ‘The Basket of Apples hates the object called modernity. It sets up a whole impossible anti-modernity to stave it off ... a peasant world, a natural world, a world of endurances and irremovables ... But not for a moment does the painting ask us to believe that its set-up will stave off the reality of the 1890s.’”

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“‘Everything in the painting is falling – and where it falls to is where we are,’ Clark writes of The Basket of Apples at the outset. Is this book, then, a truly final farewell to an idea of modernism? It arrives 23 years after the original Farewell to an Idea, and at a time of disaster exceeding that of the 1990s. Yet the tone of If These Apples Should Fall is not ‘melancholic’, as Clark admitted Farewell to an Idea might seem, and neither is it a collection of fragments shored against his ruin, as the earlier book could also be understood. Clark once called the young Greenberg an ‘Eliotic Trotskyite’, and Malcolm Bull referred to the Clark of Farewell to an Idea, also oxymoronically, as a ‘Greenbergian Situationist’. Neither term applies to this book, but an equally contradictory formulation is needed. If These Apples Should Fall follows Farewell to an Idea chronologically, but it seems to come before it in the sense that the fate of Cézanne, of modernism, isn’t yet sealed here. Perhaps Clark never did bid farewell to modernism, or maybe the ‘falling’ in this book qualifies the end suggested in Farewell to an Idea. Clark gives us a clue to this complicated, somewhat inchoate thought when he cites a line, attributed to Nietzsche, about late 19th-century art being ‘the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism’, and comments that since this ‘assumption is a thing of the past’ (he means the phrase in its original Hegelian sense that an activity must be completely concluded before it can be fully understood), writing on Cézanne exists ‘in a strange, maybe fruitful, limbo’. This signals that ‘the Cézanne problem’, the modernist question, isn’t over and done with but waiting to be – what exactly? Not solved, let alone redeemed, but maybe kicked around and tripped over à la Beckett. We can’t go on, we go on.”

Read the article here.

The old-school idea of modernity is not yet a thing of the past. Art is by no means the last metaphysical activity in European nihilism, art has become in its search of meaning the extension the social work and alternative medicine. Another sort of nihilism.

But the modernist question and the modernist, yes, they are still alive. Going against all odds.

Or as Herbert Achternbusch put it:

‘Du hast keine Chance, aber nutze sie!’