On her book Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme
Cover Interview of May 20, 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.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
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.