World in Motion

An aesthetics that seemed contaminated by stale historical dogmatism has emerged looking as fresh and relevant as ever. How did this paradigm shift come about?

One thing is obvious: the new sensibility marks a distinct break with the Postmodernist strategy of invoking modernity as a metaphorical authority figure and then turning it into an object of scorn and ridicule. Today this Oedipal struggle with the avant-garde no longer seems necessary. Artists such as Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger have done a good job - their mission has been accomplished.

By the same token, critical theory has successfully undermined the claims to power made by Modernist universalism, and post-colonial criticism has made us aware of the variety of different versions of modernity created by different political realities around the globe. As a result a new sensibility has emerged from the shattered remnants of the original idea of Modernism - one modelled no longer on a linear timeline but rather on a complex topography of different histories in specific places. It has become clear that there is not one modernity but many - each of them representing a particular space and experience. There are the colonial and post-colonial modernities of the African nations and the tropical modernity of Brazil, the modernity of state socialism in the Soviet Union, (interpreted differently by each of its satellite states), the socialist modernities of the European welfare economies and many more. To some extent the international proliferation of high Modernism has established a common currency in the areas of art, architecture and design, but it is also true that this shared stylistic language has been modified to suit the specific characteristics of each place and, most importantly, charged in each case with representing the particular lived experience of that social and historical context. There may be family resemblances between the various Modernisms, but the individuality of each is becoming increasingly visible.

At least three possible approaches to Modernism and its relation to modernity can be made out. The first involves research and mapping. Florian Pumhösl's exhibition 'Humanist and Ecological Republic' (2000)1 contrasted a series of concrete structures typical of the modular Functionalist architecture of the International Style with the documentary Lac Mantosa (2000), about the colonial and post-colonial history of Madagascar, as reflected in the changing uses of a modern factory complex. Sean Snyder's work Bucharest/Pyongyang (2000-2) similarly explores the surprising affinities between the Modernist monumentalism of the socialist state architecture in Pyongyang and that of Bucharest. With just a few juxtaposed photographs and texts Snyder shows how Nicholas Ceausescu's overblown plans for modernizing the Romanian capital were in fact inspired by the megalomaniac architectural programme of Kim Il-Sung in North Korea. The unsuspected eccentricities of Yugoslavian state Modernism, meanwhile, are the subject of Marco Lulic's project Modernity in Yu (2001-2). In his sculptural replicas Lulic embraces the awkwardly heroic Formalism of local partisan monuments and the marriage of state socialism with the hedonism of hotel architecture on the Adriatic.2 Here Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's ongoing fascination with what she terms 'tropical modernity' springs to mind. For Documenta 11 she created an outdoor environment (A Plan for Escape, 2002) out of architectural elements taken from parks in Brazil, the Copacabana or Chandigarh, in an attempt to revive the concept of an undogmatic, hedonistic version of Modernism.

These artists re-stage specific mo-ments from local modernities against a global backdrop, in each case with a critical, humorous or poetic twist. The second approach differs from the first in that the artists who adopt it focus less on the particular geo-political and architectural manifestations of various modernities than on the reinvestment of individual desires into the seemingly anti-subjective formalism of Geometric Abstraction. In the summer of 2002 the Modern Institute, Glasgow, staged the exhibition 'My Head is on Fire but my Heart is Full of Love' at the Charlottenborg exhibition hall in Copenhagen. The show took a hallucinatory text written by Robert Smithson in a drugged-out state as a point of departure to highlight the excitement at the heart of the Modernist vision of pure form. The work of artists associated with the Modern Institute - such as Eva Rothschild, Jim Lambie, Richard Wright, Martin Boyce, Joanne Tatham and Tom O' Sullivan - was shown alongside pieces by Isa Genzken, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tom Burr, Urs Fischer, Katja Strunz and Anselm Reyle. Historic points of reference were provided in the form of works by Rodchenko, Sol LeWitt, Danish psychedelic graphic design hero Sture Johannesson and Czech furniture designer Josef Gocar. By reconnecting the experimental and transgressive dimension of Formalist art with the spirit of sex, drugs and progressive music the exhibition projected an individualized version of a trippy Modernism.3

Despite their differences, both these approaches keep their distance from one of the key principles of early Modernism, namely the claims made by the avant-garde for the universal validity of their visions for art and society. While the first group of artists objectify and scrutinize these ideas as historic ideologies, the second group seeks to bypass the issue of universal validity by relocating Modernism within the realm of personal experience. If there is a 'third way' for artists, then, it involves asking whether the universal claims of the avant-garde can be renegotiated. Is it possible to separate utopianism from ideology and to rediscover programmatic propositions as a way of both making art and as a tool for progressive thinking? Is it not a challenge which inevitably arises? Whenever people discuss how global diversity can be adequately represented in biennales and how the divide between East and West is to be bridged in an expanded Europe, the ideal of internationalism, the linchpin of the avant-garde ethos, is back on the agenda.

In his curatorial statement for the Second Manifesta biennial in 1998, Robert Fleck tackled this issue head-on and claimed that the art of the 1990s had overcome the barriers of the Cold War and established a new International Style. He conceded that the expansion of capitalism was a precondition for the global vernacular. Still, he welcomed the new artistic internationalism as a 'return to the normality of this century'. By this he meant the 1920s and '30s, 'when constant travel and exhibitions all over the continent were natural for artists of the Classic Modern style.'4 To explore these ideas further may seem like indulging in questionable Eurocentric romantic fantasy. Yet in order to propose an alternative to the generalizations prompted by the enlargement of the EU, it might be worth redrawing the map of Europe used by the international avant-garde as a fragmented topography made up of interconnected local singularities and nomadic trajectories.

Fleck hints at one possible point of departure for such a critical project: the history of Europe's first museum of modern art, the Muzeum Stucki in ´Lód´z, Poland.5 It was founded in 1931, only two years after the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by members of the artists' group a.r. (artysci rewolucyjni): W´ladys´law Strzemi´nski, Katarzyna Kobro and Henryk Sta.zewski. Through donations from artist friends and acquaintances around Europe the group acquired a substantial collection of avant-garde works, which they in turn donated to the city as the a.r. International Collection of Modern Art.6 In so doing they altered the cultural topography of the whole continent, putting ´Lódz on the map as a link between Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow. Equally radical was the idea of a museum based on international exchange between artists. The museum now houses a collection of works by Kobro and Strzemi´nski in a space designed by the couple in 1948, the Sala Neoplastyczna. While Strzemi´nski has been credited as a spokesperson for the Polish avant-garde, Kobro still has not received the recognition she deserves as one of the outstanding abstract sculptors in the history of Modernism.

Kobro set out the principles on which her work was based in a treatise on 'Un-ism', where she defines the relation between sculpture and architecture as a fluid continuum.7 The central idea behind her work was to create structures for an imagined social space that would promote an ideal 'space-time rhythm' for human movement. Emblematic works such as Kompozycja przestrzeni (6) (Spatial Composition 6, 1931) are small-scale three-dimensional geometric com-positions, rectangular and curved planes in primary colours that suggest a grammar for a possible architecture. The influence on Kobro of Vladimir Tatlin and Kasimir Malevich in Moscow is clear. Yet her work is unique in the un-dogmatic appeal of its light, speculative aesthetic. In particular, the two mobiles Konstrukcja wiszaca 1 (Suspended Construction 1, 1921), a small black cube and an oblong attached to a white egg-shaped object, and Konstrukcja wiszaca 2 (Suspended Construction 2, 1921-2), a ring and a rectangular bar attached to a twisted metal strip, are breathtakingly beautiful. In her version of Geometric Abstraction, Kobro goes beyond simple distinctions between the synthetic and the organic, the calculated and the contingent, taking formalist logic to a new level of poetic rationalism. The recovery of different Modernisms might similarly reveal an alternatively gendered definition of the Modernist rationale.

Another artist whose life and work suggest the need for a critical reappraisal of the avant-garde's ambiguous affiliation with politics is El Lissitzky.8 A visual rendering of the topography of Lissitzky's career would show a complex map of journeys criss-crossing Europe. Each location marked a specific artistic project, of which there are surprisingly many. After World War I Lissitzky was forced to return from Darmstadt (where he studied engineering) to Moscow (where he graduated in architecture). He joined Marc Chagall at the art school in Vitebsk in 1919 to work on a programme to promote modern Yiddish culture, started work on his ongoing Proun project and, under
the influence of Malevich and Bolshevism, produced propaganda material in a Suprematist style. In 1921 he left for Moscow and then Germany and co-founded the International Faction of Constructivism at the International Congress of Progressive Artists in Dusseldorf in 1922. From the late 1920s Lissitzky lived in Russia and worked on Stalinist propaganda, although his work as an exhibition designer involved frequent trips back to Germany.

Lissitzky's undoubted proximity to the ideological machinery of state power, reinforced by rumours that his travels were facilitated by papers supplied by the Cheka (Soviet secret police), could well be seen as a reason to discredit his political commitments. Yet the sheer frequency with which Lissitzky joined or helped found avant-garde movements, together with the uninhibited, imaginative nature of the manifestos he produced, tells a different story. What this version of events suggests is that he treated utopian ideas less as rigid convictions than as vehicles for speculative thinking, experimental tools for the projection of artistic and social scenarios. This anti-fundamentalist account is supported by the communicative dynamic of his work. A fascinating example is the magazine Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet, two issues of which Lissitzky produced with the Russian writer Il'ia Ehrenburg in Berlin in 1922. The magazine's commitment to internationalism was reflected in the fact that it was in three languages and included translations of texts by Theo van Doesburg and Le Corbusier previously published in De Stijl and L'esprit nouveau. Here communication, mediation and translation come together. (Call it Relational Aesthetics, if you will.)

A third reinterpretation of the avant-garde came in a recent collaboration between Lucy McKenzie and Paulina Olowska. In 2003 the two artists took over an arts society in Warsaw to stage a salon, Nova Popularna (in collaboration with the Foksal Gallery Foundation and Lukasz Gorczyca). The space was filled with Vorticist wall drawings, Charles Rennie Mackintosh-patterned curtains and dark wood furniture covered with graffiti. Working as barmaids in uniforms designed in a cool 1920s Functionalist style by Beca Lipscombe, the two artists hosted nightly concerts and performances. McKenzie and Olowska used the utopian agenda of Nova Popularna as a vehicle to create a speculative scenario that allowed them to test the potential of the avant-gardist role model of the female Constructivist artist as social engineer proposed by figures such as Kobro. Their artistic role-play served as a mechanism to revive the historic utopia of an avant-gardist salon, linked to a set of highly specific yet transnational Modernist references.

Yet another approach to renegotiating the universalist claims of Modernism can be seen in the work of two more artists from Glasgow and Warsaw, Toby Paterson and Monika Sosnowska, who reinterpret the Modernist dream as a phantasmagoria of unconstrained adaptability. In his mural The Workplace (2000), for instance, Paterson presents the image of a modular concrete staircase of thesort used for council estate fire escapes and pedestrian overpasses, set against a monochrome red background. The construction unfolds into an empty infinity. In an untitled installation at the Villa Arson in Nice in 2003 Sosnowska constructed a mix of upright and tilted models of black staircase units in various sizes, twisting the architectural module like a Rubik's cube. In The Corridor (2003), a life-size construction that creates the illusion of an endlessly receding corridor, the artist creates a surreal vision of anonymous public architecture expanding into an infinite space of its own making.

Both Paterson and Sosnowska work with ornaments. In New Façade (2003) Patterson spread abstract shapes reminiscent of a 1950s design across a mural, as if they had been thrown on the wall like dice on a table. In The Woman with Hens (2001) Sosnowska transformed an ornament used in local Polish rustic furniture painting into a light purple pattern repeated across the façade of a building. In both cases the historic reference is charged with specific memories and local experiences. Still, as the original ornament is already a replica it can be subjected to a process of unregulated transmutation that turns it into a cipher for an otherworldly Modernity. The universal form becomes a ticket for a trip to a hallucinatory universe.

But what does this connection between Glasgow and Warsaw have to do with the attempt to renegotiate an avant-garde internationalism? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest that the proximity between two points in space is determined not necessarily by physical distance but by the mutual relationship between the people at those points, reciprocally observing each other. They call this relation a 'neighbourhood'. In this sense the efforts of the avant-garde and of contemporary artists to set up international links can be described as the creation of 'neighbourhoods' between places and people. This definition pushes internationalism beyond ideology, stressing instead that such links are produced as artists' project scenarios of alternative topographies, positing internationalism as a practice in which global connections are established by travelling observers and through individual networks of communication.