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Published on: 10/6/2008
Last Visited: 10/7/2007
A review of T J Clark, Farewell to an Idea: episodes from a history of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999), £30
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Tim Clark's contribution to the remaking of art history has been extraordinary.His work on the painting of 19th century France has explored with great sensitivity the struggle that great events set off within artists.What is remarkable in his writing is the combination of an exploration of the painting itself with a microscopic eye and a powerful sense of the great historical forces that invade, in one way or another, even the most secret corners of the canvas. 'The artists that matter come at the facts of politics sideways, unexpectedly, taking themselves by surprise,' Clark says in the conclusion to his brilliant exploration of art and politics in France between 1848 and 1871, The Absolute Bourgeois (1973).Its companion work on Courbet, Image of the People, written in the same year, is equally as powerful.
The crucial thing about Clark's insight is his insistence that 'the making of a work of art is one historical process among other acts, events and structures'.Art is not autonomous.At one level it is a form of labour, shaped by the prevailing conditions of production, artistic or industrial.At another, Clark insists, it exists in the realm of ideology--it is part of a process of understanding, of making sense of the world.At times it can have a direct political role, subverting and undermining the prevailing ideas.At others it may resonate with fury or despair at its own inability to subvert, especially when, as in the modern age, that act of defiance can so quickly be sabotaged itself by the work of art's conversion into an object of consumption.
So art movements do not have their own history but share the common experience.How they mediate or respond to that is a different issue, of course.Some 25 years after writing those two remarkable books, Clark has published a hugely ambitious overview of Modernism, an attempt to trace--in an avowedly Marxist framework--the fate of art in its conflict with the forces of history.
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Clark is an absolute master of the art of travelling into and through an art work (in particular, in my view, when he discusses Picasso and Pollock).It seems at first sight to be a very early place to start, except that the key to Modernism, as far as this writer is concerned, is its absolutely central grasp of the contradictions of economic progress under capitalism. 'Modernity', the development of industry, the evolution of the commodity, the forging of a fully fledged proletariat, is both a creative and a destructive process.That was at the core of Marx's understanding of capitalism's unfolding.Equally, art has provided a space where those contradictions have been explored.So Modernism is born with--but not out of--the construction of a modern economy.Clark finds the impulse to capitalist modernisation enough to produce the Modernist question.
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It is a well trodden argument that art suggests universals--moral, philosophical, religious at different times--whereas the restless materialism of the modern age dispenses with such things. 'Modernism turns on the impossibility of transcendence,' Clark says--and should have added, to explain the nearly 400 pages that follow, 'but refuses to accept that impossibility.' So, in his exploration of Marat, Clark finds a David whose dead revolutionary is caught in a moment of writing (he holds a letter).The empty upper half of the painting is full of possibility.The suggestion is that this work is not, as so many others were, designed to freeze the image of Marat into a symbol of the French Revolution (as David himself did elsewhere), but rather to disengage the qualities of a revolutionary leader from that particular life, that particular body.So even now, the argument is about what Marat represents, rather than what he was or is.
The long chapter that follows centres on Pissaro's We Field-Women.Clark's discussion ranges eloquently across the canvas and across the historical moment.He moves without effort through politics, music, art and architecture, and sometimes, I have to admit, loses me in the complexities of his argument.
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In 1891, Clark suggests, a burgeoning modernity was producing a moral crisis of extraordinary depth.
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Clark puts it in rather more complex ways, as ever, but there is no disagreement as to the extraordinary significance of the years from 1906 to 1910.In his immediately prior work, the Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso tried to repaint Velázquez, to rescue something from the classical tradition.He toyed with 'primitive alternatives'--African masks or the paintings of the Douanier Rousseau--perhaps in search of a metaphorical language that could speak of an imagined otherness.
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Clark is less confident, I believe, though his assumption throughout is that Modernism has an inextricable relationship with utopia and revolutionary thought.His unease, and I suppose that this anticipates his conclusion, is that reality drags the dreamer back to the horror of the present.The First World War threw horror upon horror against the dreamers.It proved beyond any doubt the savagery upon which capitalism rested, but it also engulfed everything and destroyed all morality, and the prophecy at the heart of Cubism seemed to sink without trace in Flanders' fields.
And then came 1917.Clark chooses to address the revolution in art that accompanied the Russian Revolution from the perspective of 1920 and War Communism.Perhaps, as he suggests, it was a key moment in the work of UNOVIS, the movement led by Malevich and represented most familiarly by El Lissitsky's ubiquitous Flying Red Wedge.But perhaps there is another reason, to do with Clark's own resolute hostility to Leninism.Curiously this moment of what he calles 'the absolute zero of all indices', an unimaginable social and economic catastrophe imposed by conscious will on the nascent Soviet Republic, was a high point in the process of 'imagining otherwise' so central to the Modernist enterprise.It was, in Clark's words, 'both apocalypse and utopia'.In his view, the commitment to industrialisation and modernisation necessarily carried that 'calculation and contingency' which was always the enemy of dreaming.It was in a sense much simpler than that--necessity stood over Soviet Russia with dripping fangs.Clark recognises how little choice there was, but also underlines the barbarity of it.
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For Clark there is little doubt that Jackson Pollock's extraordinary creations are a limit-case.He represents, at a social level, the most extreme marginalisation of the artist.The many photographs of Pollock in his studio and Namuth's film of Pollock at work show him embedded in a world entirely built of paintings in which he works with a kind of madness.He is the confirmation of how the bourgeoisie sees the artist, and the expression of the way in which that world has driven artists to the very edges of the social world--an act of rejection and refusal on their part that has become a kind of exile.Is it accidental that Pollock's drip paintings suggest imploding dark stars, the line between the world and the void, the known and the unknown?Is it any wonder, too, that they are so obviously angry and aggressive?
For Clark, what drives Modernism is the need to explore the unknowable, with its concomitant refusal to accept that what is is all there is.There is an argument that sees the development of Modernism as a process towards formalism, towards the exploration of pure form.Malevich's 'White on White' paintings might, at first sight, seem to justify that conclusion, until (as Clark shows so convincingly) you approach them and see their movement, their displacement of the eye, their assertion that within an apparent one dimensional reality there are many other lines, dimensions and masses.There is certainly a journey into form as a metaphor, a search for other complex totalities.There is also perhaps an attempt to disengage that experiment from the demands of the material world, but that of course is impossible, partly because the painting is a material thing (which is why it can be commodified) and partly because it has meaning only when it is seen from a place within the world.So Pollock's Starburst meets the edges of the canvas, and though his canvases grow bigger, they can never lose their edges.
'There is a line of art stretching back to David and Shelley that makes no sense without its practitioners believing what they did was to resist or exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy.This is the line of art we call Modernist,' writes Clark.
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Tim Clark himself is a product of the generation that lifted the cobbles of the Paris streets and found the beach beneath.Graffiti, like them or not, have become the utopian architecture of the inner city.And so on and on.
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