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Clark's Modernism. - Review - book review
Art Journal, Winter, 1999 by James D. Herbert
If T. J. Clark is right about modernism, then Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism is a very modern book. The historical phenomenon of modernity, according to Clark (who is borrowing a phrase from Weber's borrowing from Schiller), consists in "the disenchantment of the world" over the past two hundred years or so. Which is to say, it involves humanity's loss of its aptitude to believe in the comforting totalities--religions, myths, and such--that had served to explain the workings of the world during premodern days of yore. The artistic movement of modernism, in turn, both relishes and bemoans this historical breakdown. Clark's book finds itself sharing certain characteristics with both modernity and modernism: it repeatedly engineers its own incapacity to deliver on its promised totalities, but maintains toward that circumstance a relatively constant tone of anguished regret.
T. J. Clark. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 451 pp., 92 color ills., 160 b/w $45.
Promised totalities here take (at least) two forms. First, the flyleaf text explicitly declares what the broad chronological and geographic sweep of the project--with chapters on David, Pissarro, Cezanne, Picasso, El Lissitzky, Pollock, and Abstract Expressionism--implies: that Farewell to an Idea will serve as a grand summation of "the work of a lifetime." This is an odd claim to make of a writer at mid-career (Clark is in his mid-fifties), and it should not be too much to hope for a continuing stream of provocative essays from this illustrious and insightful scholar. Moreover, Clark attempts to incorporate his own post as well as his future into the present of the book. As a means of bridging the hundred-year gap yawning between the revolutionary David discussed in Chapter 1 and late Pissarro treated in Chapter 2, Clark, in his introduction, claims that the reader may safely interpolate the author's earlier books on Courbet and Manet into the narrative delivered here. This tactic effaces the distinct progr ession--itself a telling index of broader methodological developments over the past two decades--which can be mapped onto Clark's corpus. In the twinned volumes The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People, published in 1973 at a time when external reference within the practice of the social history of art still maintained relatively unproblematic purchase (such reference is complex and multiform in early Clark, but always there), Courbet's paintings at mid-century truly threatened to reveal to the citizens of Besancon and Paris certain troubling truths about the rural bourgeoisie. That the likes of emperor-to-be Louis-Napoleon managed to pull an ideological veil over these uncomfortable truths, that the revolutionary potential of Courbet's canvases failed to be realized, lent to Clark's account the first instance of his oft-repeated profound lament. By 1985 and the publication of The Painting of Modern Life, the veil of false consciousness had annealed into the hegemony of the society of spectacle, much be moaned by Clark. And, rather than rending that veil asunder, Manet's paintings could do no more than detect the traces of its distortions and repressions by emphasizing the folds and flaws marking its reprehensible surface. [1] We may attribute this shift from the first set of books to the second book either to the ever-increasing commodification of French life from 1850 to 1870 or to Clark's more explicit recognition of the inherent mediation of the visual sign. In either case, the moment when art grasps truth by its short hairs had clearly been set at a further remove. From the perspective of Farewell to an Idea, Manet's predicament as recounted by the author a decade ago may well prove to have been overly optimistic. In this latest volume, modern art forgoes even the prospect of assured engagement with the accumulation of society's other signs, let alone whatever social reality may subtend them. The possibility of registering loss with any certainty has now itself been lost. And with this gradual shift fro m nostalgia to a type of "meta-nostalgia"--a regret that we can no longer be sure of what we need regret--the prospect of a uniform and timeless analytical totality named "T. J. Clark" crumbles as well.
Second, the scope of Farewell to in Idea, as its subtitle aptly expresses, portends the totality of a "modernism' from which Clark's wide-ranging "episodes" will be drawn. (Make no mistake: Clark locates modernism unambiguously in a collection of cultural artifacts that actually are conjoined in some coherent manner; it is no mere analytical device imposed after the fact for the sake of making sense of those artifacts.) "What is modernity; what is modernism; and what is theft interrelation?" the book asks repeatedly throughout its four hundred pages, as it queries artifacts spanning two centuries and two continents. And Farewell to an Idea proposes to find a consistent, unifying answer to that running interrogation. The underlying constant of artistic modernism, maintains Clark, lies in the fact that no sooner does some visual (or, for that matter, verbal) proposition forward itself than it immediately generates its own refuting, opposing claim. Farewell to an Idea overflows with such auto-confounding contra ries. Modern art is inward-turning yet outward-facing. It is an uninflected image yet bears the burdens of writing. It is immediate yet discursive, nihilistic yet painstaking. It searches for some solid bedrock for the sign yet insists on the sign's social character. It plays with fantasy yet also strives for the real. It is mere ground yet it also proffers the figure. It is flat yet carves out an illusion in depth. And so forth. We might be tempted to imagine some sort of straightforward analogy between these inevitable ambivalences in art and the type of social contradictions that have brought on "the disenchantment of the world." In this account, such social contradictions take a variety of forms: conflicts between classes or groups within classes; the staking out of antagonistic positions within the political debates of fin-desiecle French anarchism or early Soviet communism; and, above all else in these pages, in the deceptions and bad faith brought into this world of things by the metastasizing practice of commodification. This is precisely the temptation in which the earlier books tended to indulge, and with which Farewell to an Idea flirts during the introduction, when Clark finds (and then immediately qualifies) significance in the rough chronological congruence of modernism in art and socialism in politics.
