On her book Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme
Cover Interview of May 21, 2018
Lastly
If my book could contribute to a dismantling of modernism as
primarily masculine, autonomous, and French, it will have achieved a great
deal. Paris is important, of course, but the thriving networks discussed in the
book operated relatively independently of it. Further, it is not that there
were not a lot of male artists, it is that many conventionally feminine
characteristics were actually welcome, if not constitutive of modernism. This
is where my two books come together, because in the first I argued for the
essential relevance of the feminized decorative in the art of Paul Klee and
modern art at large. In the second book the feminine appears in the emphasis on
domesticity but also on the relational quality essential to these artists’
relationships with each other and with their art. Some feigned autonomy, but
most actually sought out interdependence. Metaphor highlights and compounds
these relations, as you need to “get” what the other (or the art) is presenting
literally and figuratively. You need to adjust your understanding and
expectations to the presented model and passively accept it before you can
actively assert something else. Metaphor is not autonomous. Awareness of the
relational, finally, renders the contributions of more women artists visible.
A corollary would be the debunking of the belief that
abstraction is pure and wholly independent of the world in which we live. A lot
of the art in this book is abstract, and all of it is indebted in one way or
another to metaphor. Metaphor is always a double register, and abstract art is too.
Abstraction is not about itself; it is an analog of the real world. It is a
metaphor.
Finally, I would be pleased if architectural historians paid
closer attention to translucence instead of assuming universal validity for
transparency. The terms are relevant again today, so the non-specialist might
pay heed to them in this context. Our culture values transparency, yet it might
behoove us to approach the concept more cautiously, because its promise of
complete openness and revelation also entails a compromise of privacy, if not
the reality of surveillance. Modernists wrestled with this conundrum, finding
their freedom in translucence, and we might have something to learn from them.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Lastly
If my book could contribute to a dismantling of modernism as primarily masculine, autonomous, and French, it will have achieved a great deal. Paris is important, of course, but the thriving networks discussed in the book operated relatively independently of it. Further, it is not that there were not a lot of male artists, it is that many conventionally feminine characteristics were actually welcome, if not constitutive of modernism. This is where my two books come together, because in the first I argued for the essential relevance of the feminized decorative in the art of Paul Klee and modern art at large. In the second book the feminine appears in the emphasis on domesticity but also on the relational quality essential to these artists’ relationships with each other and with their art. Some feigned autonomy, but most actually sought out interdependence. Metaphor highlights and compounds these relations, as you need to “get” what the other (or the art) is presenting literally and figuratively. You need to adjust your understanding and expectations to the presented model and passively accept it before you can actively assert something else. Metaphor is not autonomous. Awareness of the relational, finally, renders the contributions of more women artists visible.
A corollary would be the debunking of the belief that abstraction is pure and wholly independent of the world in which we live. A lot of the art in this book is abstract, and all of it is indebted in one way or another to metaphor. Metaphor is always a double register, and abstract art is too. Abstraction is not about itself; it is an analog of the real world. It is a metaphor.
Finally, I would be pleased if architectural historians paid closer attention to translucence instead of assuming universal validity for transparency. The terms are relevant again today, so the non-specialist might pay heed to them in this context. Our culture values transparency, yet it might behoove us to approach the concept more cautiously, because its promise of complete openness and revelation also entails a compromise of privacy, if not the reality of surveillance. Modernists wrestled with this conundrum, finding their freedom in translucence, and we might have something to learn from them.