When Modernism Went Bust

Classical 89 Thinking Aloud Interview: http://www.classical89.org/thinkingaloud/past.asp?d=7/17/2008

Exhibit: Turning Point: The Demise of Modernism and the Rebirth of Meaning in American Art July 17, 2008 – January 3, 2009 BYU Museum of Art

Campbell Gray and Jeff Lambson could have said oodles more. We hosted them for the usual half hour on-air … woefully insufficient time to expound upon the ideas behind the new BYU Museum of Art exhibition titled Turning Point: The Demise of Modernism and the Rebirth of Meaning in American Art, on display through January 3, 2009. (Our TA interview aired July 17, 2008, and can be heard here [link to audio]).

Before the interview, Gray and Lambson graciously walked me through the yet unopened, unfinished exhibition—along with Brent, Anna, Katherine and Robynn of our TA staff. Around us … a mad scramble of technicians frenetically finishing the exhibition with the clock ticking. Here are some musings I came away with … ideas that occurred to me as we chatted in the museum, but which may not have made it into our interview. Caveat lector: these are my private distillations and highly prejudiced views. I do not make either guest responsible for any expression or perspective in this post.

Turning Point— the whole kit and caboodle beyond the mere “pieces on display,” including curatorial signage or “wall talk,” associated educational video, the forthcoming lectures, future elucidations of individual museum docents—is calculated, I believe, to draw us into theory. Not just draw us in … perhaps actually to make of us a community of theorists … a community that values participation, even if minimal, in theoretical discussions about all those time-honored questions about art. Turning Point puts out the welcome mat for any and all who have a hankering for the intellectual acrobatics of art philosophy … those endless discussions about aesthetic experience… you know, heady stuff from semiotics to significations, from reader response to post-modernism. I can’t imagine my grandmother would have cared for this nor recognized it as a welcome mat. In fact, I was brazen enough during our walkabout to mention this impolite truth—a truth I shared somewhat gingerly, of course. I don’t believe either Gray or Lambson took offense, because these two museum personnel (the director and the curator of contemporary art) know that grandmothers like mine actually do come into the museum. Neither one of them would want any visitor to feel like a fish not only out of water but miles from the nearest stream. Even so, Turning Point requires careful explanation, and I expect many visitors will sense this. How could they not? The fellow who just saunters in hoping to enjoy something, using this exhibition like a TV remote when there’s time to kill … well, that was more Cliché and Collusion.

I could be very wrong. After all, visitors to Cliché and Collusion seemed to engage readily with that intellectually provocative exhibition … even visitors without all the high-brow jargon necessary to explain art. Explaining is the thing. Turning Point is fundamentally not an exhibition at all, but an explanation. The subtitle alone (The Demise of Modernism and the Rebirth of Meaning in American Art) foreshadows some coming pending explanation. Death and rebirth have always made for a great story. For this story, you need to personify art. By the way, this story, as it happens, boasts a happy ending. The plot goes something like this:

Once upon a time, one kind of stuff prevailed … but only for a while… then it went away… It was called Modernism …. And now there is a new generation, a new regime, a new kind of stuff … better and more democratic stuff … But actually, this regeneration isn’t about the stuff per se, not about die Dinge an sich. It’s not about objects. It’s about a new way of being and relating with each other in the presence of art. Art may be only the foil for the more ethically rich activity of inhabiting the palace of art. Behold the throne room. The artifact has been dethroned. Oh it’s still in a throne room, to be sure. But regeneration in this story means that our consciousness is no longer about stuff, but about all of us: the artist who engages an audience, the audience that countenances or even welcomes the presence of the artist along with the dialectic that ensues.

I kind of like this story, though I find it sort of predictable. So many people raise toasts to the joys of dialectic and the human aspect of artistic interaction that I hardly need to add my toast to what everyone else is imbibing in our post-modern free-for-all. If I find some of this slightly passé … I mean, these conversations are generally only new to undergraduates at the academy … I still am sold on the exhibit. Why? Because of the authority issue. How can any art be American if it relies too heavily on the authority of convention, the authority of the elite, the authority of the insider, the authority of the cognoscenti. If Americans are going to consume meaning in a fair and equitable way, then Modernism was thoroughly un-American.

So the arbiters of good taste are dead: long live the new arbiters! This exhibition tells us that the arbiters were once authorities, far too few in number, and offers a gentle reminder of the generally healthy practice of questioning authority. I came away from Turning Point thinking, more than anything else, not about art but about the Boston Tea Party.

-Marcus Smith