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For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain-as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic-and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists. McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished. How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.
List of contents
Introduction: the Surpassing Paradigm
PART ONE
Chapter One
What Are We Talking About? A Landscape in which Nothing was the Same Except the Clouds
Chapter Two
Petty-bourgeois Revolutionaries: Reflections on Polke's
Wir Kleinbürger! (We Petty Bourgeois!)
Chapter Three
What is Art Supposed to Do? The Modernist Legacy, the Arab Spring, a Censorship Case in Sharjah, and Artist Arrests in the Year of the Protestor
Chapter Four
Inversions, Conversions, Aberrations: Visual Acuity and the Erratic Chemistry of Art-historical Transmission in a Transcultural Situation
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the author
Andrew McNamara
Summary
For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain—as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic—and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists.
McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished.
How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.
Foreword
A critical re-examination of the legacy of modernity within artistic, cultural and political debates.
Additional text
McNamara’s critical examination of the wish to “surpass” a period or movement defined as “modernist” argues that such redundant one-upmanship is futile. A new critical vocabulary is needed to avoid conceptual dead-ends. Analyses of practices defined as “anti-aesthetic” or “contemporary” take us from Sigmar Polke to Mustapha Benfodil, from Pussy Riot to Ai Wei Wei, from Doha to Sharjah and Australia. Biological or chemical ways of thinking can push art history beyond the surpassing mode. McNamara is always passionate, infectious, challenging and brilliant. Surpassing Modernity will leave a lasting mark.
