Conditions of Modernity

Jeannene Przyblyski, talked about the conditions of Modernity, to specifically locate them within a discussion of the experience of novelty and newness, and then talk a little bit about how that relates to art practice and the way that artists might choose to position themselves in the world.

The Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's, View of the Boulevard du Temple, from 1939, one of, we think, the first photographs that was ever taken. And we looked at this photograph as an example of the experience of a kind of optical repositioning of human relationship to the world. That is to say that, through a conjunction of optics and chemistry, the way, that is, light is refracted through a lens, and the way that the effects of light are captured on sensitized chemical materials, we have what was seen, at the time, as a more exact and real transcription of the world. And it wasn't just that it was more exact and real, but that it allowed us to see and experience things that the naked eye, alone, couldn't see and experience.

So, the difference between certain kinds of stillness and movement, the way that the photographic eye or the human eye captures movement and understands and registers movement, or does not, and the way in which a sensation of the human visual command of the world might be extended through photography.

So, the view out the window, a fleeting moment in the course of human experience, captured and preserved forever on the photographic plate. And the dream that photography could extend one's knowledge and experience of the world in all sorts of foreseen and unforeseen ways.

The great engraving by Maurisset called, Daguerreotypomania, from December 1839, I love because it demonstrates just how quickly photography was assimilated into the collective unconsciousness of a modernizing society. And that's maybe a big way of saying that one of the interesting things about photography is that people knew what to do with it even before it was invented. And so its assimilation into the way people thought about how they knew and experienced the world was very quick. So, we see this popular caricaturist, in the mass press, imagining that photographers might go up in the air in balloons and allow human beings to see a god-like view of down below from above. The Google view, if you will.

We see an imagination that photography will put an end to the work of engravers and illustrators. And there's a series of illustrators who are hanging themselves in response to the invention of photography. We see people flocking to the portrait studios to have their pictures taken, and we see all of this conjoined with other new inventions of the time that radically transformed the way that we understood humans' ability to traverse time and space. So, a locomotive steam engine going across the background of the picture, steamboats traversing the lake in the distance. And this sense that we were poised in the 19th century, in modernizing and industrializing countries in particular on the brink of a new experience of the understanding of cities, the understanding of how quick change could happen, and the understanding of how great a human being's reach over the world around them might be.

And we can see a little bit about how artists in other media try to respond to that experience of rapid technological change and the impacts that it had on our ways of knowing and understanding and experiencing the world. And, certainly, Impressionism is an excellent example of that, because I don't believe that impressionist painters lessened their grasp and their interrogation of reality as a result of the invention of photography. I think they were challenged by photography to think about reality in new and specifically optical ways, so that Monet's interest in capturing the effects of light, the ephemeralness of the Gare Saint-Lazare which was one of the new train stations enclosed in a glass arcade that were built in the 19th century in France, is all about exploring not the heaviness and solidity and permanence of the locomotive, but of exploring those kinds of effects of merely optical sensation reflected, refracted light, the smoke from the locomotive smokestack, the movement of people in a public urban space as being optical effect.

And that is very much born of the influence of photography, and born of the influence of all sorts of new technologies in the 19^th century, including train travel, that made the world seem smaller because distances could be covered more quickly.

And also more, for lack of a better word more analytical, at the same time. Because the other thing that train travel and photography did, in different ways, was alter people's quantitative experience of time.

Which is to say that photography depended upon a more exact, increasingly exact understanding of exposure and developing times.

And, on the other hand, successful networks of train systems depended upon countries adopting a standardized measurement for time. Because if all the train conductors and engineers weren't moving according to the same timetable, well, you can imagine what would happen, it just simply wouldn't work. Everybody would crash, and so a uniform, standardized experience of time was a product of the 19th century invention of all sorts of modernizing technologies. At the same time that people's understanding of the world in the 19th century was being radically transformed by these new technologies, their understandings of how they related to each other were being transformed by new economies of working, new demands for labor force that altered and impacted all kinds of relationships and, most particularly, the relationships between men and women.

So, when we look at a painting like Édouard Manet's, Olympia, from 1863, which, I'm sorry that this is only the first time we're seeing it, it's a painting that I hope reminds you a little bit of those odalisque postures that we saw in Carrie Mae Weems's photographs. And, for sure, Carrie Mae Weems had this canonical image in mind when she was posing her young models for that photograph. When we look at a photograph like this, it is all about referencing tradition, that is to say, the tradition of the reclining female nude that could be traced back through the 16th and 17th century to the work of artists like Titian and Velázquez that Monet would've admired very, very much.

And, on the other hand, demanding that tradition of a genre of painting, a formal genre, the reclining female nude, needed to be radically transformed by the experience of the contemporary moment.

So, we don't feel like we're looking at some mythological goddess or some generic figure, we feel like we're looking at a specific woman who's looking back at us in a rather confrontational way. We know the name of the model. Her name was Victorine Meurent, and she was a model that appears repeatedly, in a number of guises and masquerades, almost Cindy Sherman-esque, in Manet's work. And she is a model who appears, here, as someone who is even more explicitly awaiting her male customer, and sort of taking the measure of their worth, than the barmaid in Manet's painting, Bar at the Folies-Bergère. She's attended to by a black female servant. And that raises questions about racial hierarchies, as well as gender hierarchies, in 19^th century France, and it also signals those other kinds of migrations and territorializations that were a part of colonial and imperial movements of the 19th century by which European nations, in particular, expanded their reach to Africa and to the Americas.

And did so, in part, because they were enabled by all these new modes of technological mastery of time and space.

Betty Boop is a sister, if you will, in some ways, of Manet's Olympia. It's another version of the Modern woman, eroticized, and Betty's certainly curvaceous and oddly made-up for someone who is pictured, here, as an ostensibly young female character. She is located within an immigrant culture in the United States so, just as her inventors the Fleischer brothers and character artist Grim Natwick were part of an American migration in the time between the World Wars in Europe, an American migration specifically from the Slavic countries, and very often, of Jewish peoples, as well. She's also this sort of uncertain marker of the Modern woman's place in the world.

And the early 20th Century is a time that sees movements towards rights to vote, and rights to increasingly equal roles of citizenship in the United States and in the European nations.

It's a time in which women claiming the ability to own their sexuality in public was very much a part of a general sense of cultural uncertainty that marked the times between the Wars.

And so, Betty Boop's novelty and her modernity are all bound up in trying to puzzle out and reposition everyone in a time of uncertain social hierarchies and uncertain relationships between people.

This does, indeed, have a nationalistic context, as well, and a violent context, as well, because all of those technologies that could be used to enhance human reach over the world, to master time and space, could also be used to conquer time and space and to contest ownership of time and space.

So, war becomes highly technologized and highly mechanized in the 19th and 20^th century, and the experience of devastation that could be wrought by war ratcheted up to an even more massive scale, at the same time.

And so, this is a work that we've also seen before, Pablo Picasso's, Guernica, from 1937, an image of protest in response to one of the first saturation bombings in the history of military warfare. And we need to have this view of mechanized and technologically leveraged warfare in view, as well as the expression of human outrage against it.

Because certainly the capacity for destructiveness is the other side of the fascination with newness and the valuation of newness and novelty and technological invention and technological progress that informs the 19th and 20th century.

That growing understanding of humankind's capacity for self-destruction is accompanied by a growing awareness of its mediation through technology.

So, it's important to know that, Guernica, was shown at the World's Fair at a moment where these large, state-organized expositions were a place to bring all of human innovation and all of human productivity together and put it on spectacular display.

That's the place where this work was first exhibited, even as, when we turn to something like Martha Rosler's series of photo montages called, Bringing the War Home, from 1967 to 1972, we see the thoughtful way in which Rosler is using collage to dramatize the ways in which a media culture, enabled by television, brings the wars of the 20^th century into everyone's living room, into everyone's living room, as experiences that are greatly disturbing and graphic.

And yet, because of their locatedness within an everyday domestic interior and we have this sort of amazing Modern housewife with her vacuum cleaner slung over her shoulder sort of like a military weapon, wielding it against the brocade drapery even as the drapery's pulled back to see American soldiers in the battlefields of Vietnam.

When we look at these images, we're being asked to confront the duality of the celebration of newness and innovation that remains a part of contemporary culture to this day.

The media and television and social media today has had the effect of making the world even smaller, and has also exacerbated the degree to which people have become increasingly habituated to interacting with each other, and knowing about each other, and relating to each other through commodified images rather than through direct social interaction.

We are mostly in an experience of mediation these days. Anyone who thinks of being in a restaurant and watching everybody on their portable electronic devices talking to somebody else who's somewhere else, at the same time that they're with their family and friends, just understands what a powerful thrall media culture holds over us.

So, all of these technological developments have shrunk the world at the same time that they've prosthetically enhanced human reach over the world, enabled nearly instantaneous communication, enabled us to, actually, in some ways, feel a great deal of empathy with people that are very distant from us.

We can think of any number of natural disasters, over the course of the last decades, in which great efforts at offering relief, and help, and financial assistance, and other forms of assistance, had been mobilized through the media, for a greater good. And, at the same time, we can all begin to enumerate all the ways in which these new technological innovations and new ways of expanding human power, in real, physical ways have been used to great catastrophe.

So, what is the artist's role in all of this?

Is the role of the artist, in Modern times and in contemporary culture, to further the culture, or to question it?

There's no right answer.

And this work is ongoing.

So, how do you choose to position yourself as an artist, as a creative thinker, and as a feeling person, in relationship to that?

I think novelty for novelty's sake, more often than not, turns out to be novelty in the service of a dominant power structure.

Our desire for the latest technology increases wealth for a few.

Video games that are used to recruit for the military are another example in which the efficacy of the design and the seductiveness of these new forms of interaction pretty readily yield to uses that reinforce the dominant conditions of national antagonism, of a militarized society, and of confrontation, that inform much of our interactions and much of our anxieties about contemporary life, as well.

So, that's one set of possibilities that artful work works in the service of reinforcing dominant belief systems, mainstream ideologies, and habitual confrontations.

Another way of thinking about it is this that the acknowledgement of the experience of an ongoing iterative process of newness requires that artists continually interrogate these emergent conditions of contemporaneity, and continually improvise new solutions to addressing them critically. That's another form of newness.

Well, however you decide to position yourself in all of this, your choices can't help but take part in this larger dialogue that consistently meets contemporary experience with a range of solutions that draw upon the immediate past, and then try to find ways to keep going.

Try to find ways to adapt what we know to the conditions of uncertainty that currently confront us.

Jeannene Przyblyski

Jeannene Przyblyski, claims that In the Modern and contemporary period, in terms of – isms. there is one – ism that we should perhaps confront directly, since, still, many of its assumptions inform our contemporary understanding of art today.

And that -ism is Modernism as a whole. The image of Alfred H. Barr's wonderful and terrible diagram for the exhibition catalogue “Cubism and Abstract Art”, in 1936, that set out to try to make sense of the real welter of influences and interventions in art practice that characterize the late 19th and early 20th century, and to do it in such a way that it conformed to a progressive notion of history.

That is to say that history, in teleological terms, means one thing after another, and that those things hopefully add up to progress, add up to a place that values improvement and what comes next, rather than tradition and what has been known.

And, in that sense, also values novelty and newness, as well. So, all of the sometimes contrary and competing influences and interventions in Modernism, in Barr's view, boiled down to two possibilities in 1936. And they are sort of reassuring possibilities, in a weird way, for people who want certainties.

That is to say that he saw art moving toward abstraction in either case but a kind of geometric investigation of abstraction, on the one hand, or a kind of non-geometrical anthropomorphic investigation of abstraction, on the other hand.

This is an artificially neatened up version of history. It's a version of history that privileges one particular perspective, that of European and, by the mid-20th century, American artistic production and aesthetic points of view. And it's worth saying that it is not a version of art history that would, by and large, sit easily with artists. And so, it's not surprising that we find, in relatively short order, the American artist Ad Reinhardt, whose production included both abstract painting, and a pretty aggressive and pretty interesting practice as a kind of caricaturist, illustrator, commentator, in visual form, on the circumstances of Modern art production and reception in the United States and elsewhere. Precisely as a rejoinder to Barr's diagram, Ad Reinhardt pictures modern art as a sort of really unruly ancestral family tree, with its roots in various categories of production, with Braque, Matisse, and Picasso becoming the strong trunk from which many branches and leaves might ensue. But all of that is weighted down with preconceptions of what art ought to and ought not be, with the interventions of a public that is more or less sympathetic or questioning.

And those are the circumstances of the value of newness and novelty, as well, that an artist working to further traditional conventions might expect a comprehending and mutually reinforcing relationship with his or her audience or community.

But an artist and art movements that are always looking to what's next, always looking to the future, might then reasonably expect to encounter, from time to time, uncertainty or derision. And, certainly, Matisse was burned in effigy at the Armory show in 1913. And some of Barr's efforts, while they can seem really flattening and homogenizing, were also efforts to diffuse that kind of tension around Modern art practice.

Well, so what is the self-identified Modern artist to do in the face of the apparent contradiction between these two versions of newness?

On the one hand, the notion of advanced thinking, of advanced practice, of being ahead of the game, of being always on the lookout for the newest rejoinder in a grand conversation about the conditions of contemporary art. And on the other hand, mere novelty, the newest or merely fashionable as nothing more than wanting the latest automobile model or make, or the latest cut of a suit in a department store.

In that context, abstraction takes on a new value because abstraction is precisely not the language of advertising and the language of novelty.

The language of advertising and the language of everyday novelty is the language of an increasingly hyper realism, the language of commercials, the representational language that will show you a bottle of beer, for example, and every single drop of moisture clinging to that ice cold bottle of beer, to make you want it even more.

So, if a kind of hyperreality is the language of novelty, then abstraction becomes, in response, the preferred language of advanced art.

But it's not sort of like, Abstraction, it's worth saying, is equally hard to organize as a visual field, and especially as a painting, and it needs to have its own kind of motor force and its own set of questions.

So, one of those questions might be the very basic question of how do you keep a mere novelty out of the frame, especially as it is manifested through the language of realistic, illusionistic representation, when every time you put a mark on a canvas, you create a figure ground relationship?

You're almost always verging on the realm of representation and, in fact, it is a really hard thing to make a purely abstract painting — a painting that doesn't set up some kind of relationship of being something.

And so that's why, when we look at — this work is, perhaps, one of the grandest and notorious examples of mid-century Modernism.

This is Jackson Pollock's, No. 1, 1950. Lavender Mist, it's also called, given that title by the critic Clement Greenberg, who was a great interlocutor of Jackson Pollock's work.

We can see these paintings as, on the one hand, a sort of random collection of drips and drops, and that's certainly how they were often satirized in the press.

Satirizing of Modernist practices, 'Oh, my child could do that.' 'Oh, anybody could do that.' 'Oh, this seems to be some kind of prank that's being played on us by those cranky and arrogant Modern artists.'

But on the other hand, one could look at these paintings as precisely records of the great effort it takes to cancel figuration, to negate it within a practice of painting.

So that all of that web-like criss-crossing of schemes, of painted drips and lines, can be seen as an effort to repeatedly cancel out those figure-ground relationships until they become absolutely undecipherable and untangleable, until they become a kind of immeasurable and all-encompassing, all-over kind of experience.

So, on the one hand, one can read a painting like, Lavender Mist, as a really principled and labored rejection of the conditions of representational painting, an effort to absolutely refuse to give the viewer a thread of illusionism by which to anchor themselves in certainty in confrontation with this painted field, and to insist, instead, that it was the absolute unrepeatableness of this performance, in many ways, it's absolute boundedness to the unique hand and body of the individual artist, that gave the painting its authority as abstraction.

And, on the other hand, that sort of relationship to newness was carefully managed by the artist himself.

And we see it as nowhere more apparent than in the very well - known series of photographs of Jackson Pollock that were done by the photographer Hans Namuth.

Photographs that insistently picture Pollock as a heroic loner, isolated in his studio, doing battle with the canvas as if it is a battlefield lowered to the ground to be traversed and subdued by the artist with the mere materials of stick-like brush and bucket of house paint.

And yet, after this battle, when the painting is elevated to the wall, a wondrous kind of optical field of infinite complexity remains for the viewer's experience.

Yes, but that other side of newness — in mere novelty and kitsch, haunts Pollock's work, as well. It haunts it in the incessant caricaturing of his practice that is a part of the popular press.

This is another confrontation between the human subject and Pollock's painted fields, not the artist alone in his studio at work, the painting in process on the floor, but the painting finished, installed in the gallery and become a backdrop for a photo shoot by Vogue magazine in 1951.

But why does an artist and his dealer present their work in this way?

Well, because, on the one hand, paintings – Modernist or not – are luxury objects in a modern economy. And it takes a moneyed consumer to go into the upper and high-end galleries of New York, or Paris, or Mexico City, or Beijing, or Shanghai, and come out with a purchase of substance.

So you have to cultivate those viewers, and Pollock was willing to do so.

So, this in some ways, I have to give credit to the art historian T.J. Clark, who introduced me to these photographs, and whose work on Jackson Pollock I find really important. He said, 'This is Modernism's worst nightmare, in a way”, that after all of that principaled grappling with the very premises of painting, it becomes sort of mere wallpaper for the fashionable set. And it does its job pretty well, in that regard. That, on the one hand, this is a painting that could stun the perplexed viewer into a kind of fury over what art might be.

'Does art amount to this?'

And, on the other hand, it can go quietly into defeat, right?

The mural wallpaper for this lovely model with her amazing architectural dress that's colors turn out, lo and behold, to be quite complementary to Pollock's, Autumn Rhythm.

What is it to be?

Is Modern art yet another form of novelty?

Or can it take its principal distance from precisely the world that it must engage in to perpetuate itself in terms of the artist's career?

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the rejoinder to abstract expressionism as a form of Modernist practice will constitute a fork in the road for Modernism, if you will.

That, on the one hand, some artists will entrench in more extreme examples of abstract work, more conceptual practices that principally refuse to create high- value objects in their wake. And on the other hand, a group of artists that will plot themselves, for lack of a better term, right in the midst of this dilemma about the kitschy and the commodity form, and begin to interrogate the status of those images in terms of both process and practice, and in terms of subject matter. And, probably, the example of that that first comes to mind is the work of Andy Warhol.

And this is his, 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, from 1962, a work that says, 'Well, if art is due to be wallpaper, if there is no holding at bay the relationship between elite culture and popular culture, then I am going to put that dilemma squarely on the wall.' 'I am going to create works that are not about the celebration of individual creative genius and uniqueness, but about the factory-like replication of familiar forms.' 'I am going to refuse, almost insistently, to have that kind of existentialist artist's struggling, heroic personality that was so much a part of the discourse of abstract expressionism, and I am going to fantasize that I could be merely a machine.' 'And I am going to refuse to believe that I could make an end run around kitsch, but, instead, I am going to confront the viewers squarely with it again and again and again, in nearly endless repetition, to almost the point of numbness.' I do think we can look at Warhol's, Soup Cans, as one rejoinder to Modernism's bad dream, that is to say, the image of the fashion shoot in front of the heroic abstract expressionist's paintings.

I also want to turn around and ask a different question of that image of, Vogue magazine, of the image of the female model in front of abstract expression. But I want to say this: certainly, another dilemma that has been much written about, in terms of the rhetoric of abstract expressionism, was the urgency with which it aligned abstract expressionist process with a mode of creativity that was insistently gendered as male.

And I think we can see that in the real gender tension between the Namuth photograph of Pollock as a kind of heroiccreator whose practice is almost a form of prolifically and generatively ejaculating on the canvas, the brush being a sort of extension of the phallus, and, on the other hand, the negation of those modernist heroics by the positioning of the body of the female model in front of the painting, which neutralizes it as a kind of wallpaper.

There were other female interrogators and female tests of abstract expressionist rhetoric, and I think Pollock's wife, the artist Lee Krasner, was perhaps one of the most illuminating, and yet sometimes overlooked.

The painting by Lee Krasner, Three in Two, from 1956, which I think is an address to abstract expressionism and the question of how to deconstruct figuration as a practice of abstraction, is an address to Pollock's testing of himself against the work of the artist that he revered as a kind of master Pablo Picasso.

And I think this is Krastner's address to Picasso, as well. And I think, in a strange way, also, it's a deconstruction of that fashion imagery, that test of the female proximity to abstraction as a kind of undoing of it's painterly agency.

And so, Three in Two, is a work that allows its traces of figuration, its traces of relationship to the body, to be seen and yet not precisely named. It allows the painting to exist in a process of simultaneous becoming and undoing at the same time.

A becoming of abstraction, and an undoing of figuration. It plots it's art historical linkage to Picasso's great unfinished work, the Demoiselles d'Avignon, and in it's fleshy tones and the kind of pointed triangulation of the composition, it seems, to me, to have a lot to do with the Demoiselles d'Avignon and, instead, it asks that confrontation between representation and illusion, figuration and abstraction, fermininity and masculinity, to be understood as completely contained and renegotiated again and again on the surface of the painting as a matter of process, and not as a matter of a circuitry of looks and desires.

And that circuitry of looks and desires is the circuitry of commodity fetishism, and of the desire for novelty. And that is not, most vehemently, what this painting is about.

Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan University President

Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan University President, claim that the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last two hundred years.

The Modern and the Postmodern traces the intertwining of the idea of modernity with the idea of art or culture from the late 18th century until the present. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Western cultures have invested heavily in the notion that the world can be made more of a home for human beings through the development of culture (and technology). Throughout this period there has also developed a strong, sophisticated counter-movement that sees the Enlightenment effort as a disaster – destructive of both art and of the world.

The Western idea of modernity is linked to but not the same as the idea of modernism.

Modernism in painting is often identified since the work of the great art critic Clement Greenberg now more than 50 years ago.

A modernism is often identified as a movement in aesthetics that calls attention to the artwork's own status as an artwork. In this case, the paintings own painterliness.

It is not, the painting isn't just a way of seeing the world, the painting is an object itself.

The way in which the painting, calls our attention to its status as art. Rather than trying just to give us a moment of entertainment by letting we look into the world and that reflects of dimension.

Art talking about its own artiness or art talking about its own aesthetic dimensions that will be part of the modernist stream right into the middle of the 20th century.

There are lots of ways of defining modernism, but one of the most important ways is the investigation within a medium of the most important qualities of the medium you're working in.

In painting will often be an exploration of painting itself, even though the object may be different.

Whatever the subject is, the painting also is an exploration of painting, of painterliness of the canvas.

That reflexive dimension, art commenting on art, is part of modernism from the last quarter of the 19th century, the last half of the 19th century up through the middle of the 20th century.

The modernist had a critical relationship to bourgeois or conventional culture.

Trying to find the angle on the world that would allow you to see it properly, to see it as it really is, to see it in a fundamental way, this would be characteristic of a modernist art project.

You can't just see it any old way. You're seeing it in a critical way to reveal what's wrong or what's shaky about. The conventions of seeing and acting normally. And you’re seeing in a way that should lead you to a core truth.

Pollock create a new process for painting making, by dripping the paint on the floor on the canvas is to intensifying the act of painting.

This kind of incredible rush of energy to the surface of the painting and that sense that the surface of the painting is just a clinging to its own existence.

But Pollock in doing this is an example of a modernist, an artist on a quest for, a painting surface that is adequate to the energy of the modern age.

And a painterly service that is adequate to the energy of his own psyche.

Pollock was an artist who was trying to dredge up from himself the kind of, the core elemental energetics a fantasy and desire, exploding into the making of painting.

And this is a post-World War II painting that tried to be alive to the energy of the world out there and alive to the tormented energy of the internal world as well. But, in both cases, trying to get beyond convention, get beyond polite painting. Get beyond polite society. Get beyond bourgeois norms, to something both more intense and perhaps more fragile, by producing this, offering a critique of the kind of eye candy and easy to look at work that one might find in corporate showrooms or family living rooms or in advertising.

Pollock offering something that would be challenging to the status quo. But also offering something that would really get at the really real. And he arrives at these drip paintings, he's arrived at one of the final stops of modernism.

Pollock is looking for essence not irony he's looking in within modernism.

The philosophical discourse of modernity

Habermas, Jürgen – The philosophical discourse of modernity. Texto Editora, 2010.

The word "modernization" was introduced as a "terminus" only in the 50. The concept of modernization refers to a bundle of cumulative processes that reinforce each other: capital formation and mobilization of resources, the development of productive forces and the increase in labor productivity, the establishment of centralized political power and the formation of national identities, the expansion of rights of political participation, urban life forms and formal school education refers to the secularization of values ​​and norms.

The first philosopher to develop the concept of modernity was Hegel. We have to go back to Hegel to understand what the internal relationship between modernity [Modernitat] and rationality. Hegel began to use the concept of modernity in historical contexts as epochal concept: the "new times" are the "modern times". This corresponded to contemporary usage in English and French of the terms "modern times" and "temps modernes"; designate by 1800 the previous three centuries. The discovery of the "New World" as well as the Renaissance and the Reformation – the three great events around 1500 – is the epochal transition between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. While the Christian West the "new times" appointed time yet to come to the man that opened only after the Final Judgment, the profane concept of the modern age expresses the conviction that the future has already begun, the mean epoch headed for the living future, which opened the new things that are to come. Thus, the caesura of the start of new shifts to the past, precisely to the beginning of the modern age; was only in the XVIII century that historical threshold to 1500 wheel was retrospectively recognized as being in reality this beginning.

The new world, the modern world differs from the old in that it is open to the future. Hegel also believes "our time" as "the most recent season". Places the beginning of his present caesura in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution represent for men with more discernment living at the end of the XVIII century and beginning of the XIX century.

It is initially in the field of aesthetic criticism that we are aware of the problem of a foundation of modernity from itself, and this becomes clear when one traces the history of the concept of "modern". The separation process paradigm of ancient art starts at the beginning of the XVIII century famous by the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. The modern call into question, with arguments of critical historical sense of imitation of ancient models, according to the standards of absolute beauty, seemingly disconnected from time, draw up the criteria for a beautiful and conditioned by time and thus articulate self-understanding of the French Enlightenment, as an epochal beginning. While the modernist noun (along with the antithetical antiqui / moderni) were used in a chronological sense since late antiquity in European languages ​​of the modern age just too late, more or less, from the midle of XIX century, the modern adjective noun was, and again for the first time in the field of Fine Arts. This explains why the terms modernity, moderne, modernitat, modernity, even today retain a kernel of aesthetic significance marked by self-understanding of avant-garde art.

For Baudelaire aesthetic experience blended with the historical experience of modernity. In basic experience of aesthetic modernity is becoming more acute the problem of self-justification, because here the temporal horizon of experience is reduced to the decentered subjectivity, which departs from the conventions of everyday life. That is why to Baudelaire the modern work of art occupies a unique position at the intersection of the axes of today and eternity. Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, is one half of art the other half being the eternal and the immutable. This understanding of time, radicalized again by the surrealism, based affinity of modernity with fashion.

Baudelaire says that beauty is formed by an eternal and immutable element and also a relative and circumstantial element, which is represented by the season, the fashion, the spiritual life, the passion. Without this second element, which is like the bright and attractive cover that opened the appetite for divine cake, the first element would be indigestible to human nature. Baudelaire, in his capacity as an art critic in modern painting highlights the aspect of beauty fleeting, ephemeral gift of life, the nature of what the reader allows us designate by modernity. Baudelaire wrote the word modernity between quotes because it is fully aware that this word is new and is a terminology used in a particular way thus the authentic work is radically attached to the moment he is born; precisely because it consumes at present is that it can stop the steady stream of trivia, disrupt normalcy and indulge for a moment, the moment of ephemeral eternal fusion with the current, the immortal longing for beauty.

The eternal beauty is revealed only in disguise costume of the time; Walter Benjamin refers to this later using the expression of the dialectical image. A modern masterpiece is marked by the union of authentic with the ephemeral. This character of the current also underlies the affinity between art and fashion, with what is new.

Hegel is the first to raise the category of philosophical problem separation process of modernity normative cues from the past that are external. While modernity awakens to a consciousness of itself it comes a need for self-certification, which is understood by Hegel as the need of philosophy. He sees confronted with the task of translating the thoughts in your own time, for Hegel means modern day philosophy. Hegel is convinced that somehow can’t grasp the concept that philosophy makes itself without regard to the philosophical concept of modernity.

For Hegel modern times are characterized in general by a structure of self-relation what he calls subjectivity: the principle of the modern world in general is freedom of subjectivity. When Hegel characterizes the physiognomy of modern times (or the modern world) explains subjectivity through freedom and reflection. What gives grandeur to our time is the recognition of freedom, ownership of the spirit, the recognition that the spirit itself is being with you. In this context the term subjectivity mainly involves four connotations: a) individualism in the modern world infinitely particular peculiarity may assert their claims; b) right of criticism, the principle of the modern world requires that it should be recognized by every one if he presents himself as something legitimate; c) autonomy of action, is characteristic of modern times that we want to blame us for what we do; d) finally, the very idealist philosophy, Hegel considers task of modern times which philosophy perceives the idea that knows itself. Historical events key to the establishment of the principle of subjectivity are the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. With Luther's religious faith has become reflexive in the solitude of subjectivity the divine world transformed into something postulated by us. Against the faith and tradition of preaching Protestantism proclaims the sovereignty of the subject that makes it worth its discretion. Soon after the Declaration of Human Rights and the Napoleonic Code consecrate, to the detriment of the historic law, the principle of free will as a substantial foundation of the state, it is considered that the law and ethics were grounded in this land of the will of man since previously only a divine commandment emanating from outside, written in the Old and New Testament .

The principle of subjectivity determines moreover the settings of modern culture. This is what happens in the first place, with science objectively that undresses the Nature of magic and simultaneously releases the knowing subject: then challenged –  all miracles; because Nature is now a system of laws known and recognized, the man feels good inside her and only tells what he feels right; knowledge of Nature becomes free .

Modern art reveals its essence in romanticism; the form and content of romantic art are determined by an absolute interiority. The expressive self-realization becomes the principle of art that presents itself as a way of life.

In modernity therefore religious moral life, state and society as well as science, and art became so many incarnations of the principle of subjectivity. Its structure is enclosed as such in philosophy, namely as an abstract subjectivity in cogito ergo sum of Descartes, in the form of absolute self-consciousness in Kant. It is the structure of the self-respect of the knowing subject which focuses on you as on an object to understand as precisely reflected in a mirror, a speculative attitude picture.

To the extent that the theory of modernity is guided by the basic concepts of the philosophy of reflection, knowledge of the concepts of awareness and self-consciousness, it becomes evident the internal connection of this theory with the concept of reason or rationality.

Memory of my father

Manuel Pereira da Silva was extremely methodical in arranging his day-to-day, geometric, like his designs. Every day rose at 6:00 am, did his gymnastic exercises in the room, was followed by a walk of half an hour and was at school at 7:30 am, an hour before starting classes, was the first to arrive, in order to read the news in the press and talk with friends and colleagues.

At school he was known as the white coat, because he used a white coat in his classes, this white coat who also used every afternoon in his studio. Because he had classes in the morning, every afternoon went to the studio, before passing the downtown Oporto cafes, to chat with friends and play some snooker billiards, and only then went to his studio, sometimes in company of friends, they also artists like the sculptor Aureliano Lima, the painter Reis Teixeira, sculptor Fernando Fernandes, the sculptor Arlindo Rocha, among others.

The Sunday was the only day that he didn´t go to the studio, as well as the entire month of August, when went to the beach with the family. The evenings, after dinner were spent sleeping when "watching TV" or friends came to fetch him home to go to meetings: of Firemen department, the various Avintes authorities, the Socialist Party, who was militant, the Avintes Village Council, he arrived to be President, for three months, instead of the President who had fallen ill. Always refused to play senior positions in any of the institutions of his homeland, which has never left, except for a brief period after his degree at the Oporto School of Fine Arts, had been in Paris for over a year in company of some fellow students. Never felt the need to travel, the places he frequented in his daily routines and the imagination was his world.

One of the traits of his personality was never talking about himself, to avoid talking about himself inundated people with questions, this of course, with all those people who approached, sometimes on the street, on the bus, whenever he was. Another feature was never complain about anything, never complained of students, colleagues, friends, family, health, life, lack of money, the government, in short, what people usually complain.

Manuel Pereira da Silva had always the notion that the artistic life was incompatible with marriage and having children. Today I see that his artistic creation had three distinct phases:

The 1st phase, which lasts until age 40, when he married and a year later was born the daughter and the following year his son, before the wedding period was of great artistic creativity, staged after the Bachelor in the sculptor Henrique Moreira studio, where he worked with Sousa Caldas, Lagoa Henriques and Mário Truta at the Monument to the Heroes of the Peninsular Wars, in the Boavista square, in Oporto, participated in several group exhibitions, at the Oporto Comercial Athenaeum, with the Independents group, three consecutive years, in Caldas da Rainha, in Viana do Castelo, SNBA (National Society of Fine Arts), the Portuguese World exhibition in Mozambique, the Portuguese State had orders: to Angola (Luanda), for Guinea-Bissau (Bolama), to the Oporto Justice Palace, also had orders of the Church: to make evocative fresh of "Passion of Christ" in the Santa Luzia Church, in Viana do Castelo, Our Lady of Areosa in the Areosa Church, in Oporto, and some busts of priests;

The 2nd phase, of build a family, forced him to be a secondary school teacher and accept all kinds of orders, not all, because he never accepted to do saints, some immigrant communities in France and Canada, specifically, made this request and this was perhaps the few things he refused. Because for the friends he always accepted their requests in a generous way, i.e. never charged a penny for his work he made for all Avintes institutions, including for the Avintes Church, despite being an atheist, always had an enormous respect for people and institutions at various stages of his life, curiously, drew several pictures of Christ, without being per order. In this particular period made ​​busts of Avintes people and public figures such as the journalist Fernando Pessa, Professor José Hermano Saraiva, Major Valentim Loureiro, many priests and businessmen, moreover, and this is another trait of his personality, made ​​busts of all the artists who worked with and his whole family: grandfather, father, children, grandchildren and his own bust in stone;

The 3rd phase comes after retiring from teaching, there began again to have large orders, such as the Tribute to the Industrial Furniture, made ​​by the Paredes City Council, the abstract figure to the gas station on the A1, in Gaia, among other. But it is mainly in his studio, in the morning and afternoon, which he delivers with passion to his artistic creations. These are works that never came to be exposed, unless two years ago at the invitation of Casa Museu Teixeira Lopes who wanted to do a retrospective of his work and it showed a small part of these works. Another trait of his personality is that since the 50s, that is, for about 60 years, refused all invitations to participate in exhibitions, both in the House Museum Teixeira Lopes, who invited regularly, wants the Soares dos Reis Museum, or from some galleries, especially that of his colleague and friend Jaime Isidoro.

While visiting the Museums and Galleries regularly in Oporto, by the invitation of friends and colleagues for their exhibitions, always held fondly these catalogs with dedications of those artists.

I Can’t fail to mention the only exposure that he ever mentioned that was when the Gulbenkian inaugurated the exhibition of the sculptor Henry Moore in 198, in Lisbon. It was a shock to him, because he thought that those sculptures he saw for the first time, had similarities to his own, he judged to be the first to express in that kind of language, reclining women, human figures with holes, human figures with geometric shapes. It was at this point that he no longer express this way, thus had a long period in which only drew, and then he began to pay attention the sheets of paper lying on the ground could be worked and acquiring human forms, sometimes women, sometimes men.

As a final note, it is more a concern of mine, and a challenge to those who might be reading this blog, whenever I ask this question to all my colleagues in the school where I work, who graduated at the Faculty of Fine Arts, painters, sculptors, architects, designers, which is as follows:

Tell me what is the style or art movement of the works of Manuel Pereira da Silva?

The answer has often been a shrug, a silence, a don’t know!

Initially I was disappointed, pursued a better answer, until I realize that this was indeed the correct answer. Manuel Pereira da Silva never intended to represent an era, an artistic period, a movement, as some of his colleagues and friends when they created the "Independent" group in the 40s, in Oporto, at the time were students, which the group intended to break with the past and at the same time free themselves from all the "isms" of all currents and trends and create their works with full freedom. I note that is precisely what the artists currently intend to do, each artist represented himself, without country, without current or movement creates its own artistic language.

Manuel Pereira da Silva had a creative proximity to some fellow artists and friends, as Aureliano Lima, Reis Teixeira, Fernando Fernandes and Arlindo Rocha, with whom he shared his studio, a relationship marked by passion with the work of art, are what could be called a compagnons de route. Reflected the taste of working together, sharing, exchange of ideas, and interaction outside the studio space in the downtown Oporto cafes.

Manuel Pereira da Silva began his activity as a sculptor in the sculptor Henrique Moreira studio, while intern recently graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Oporto, this place where he met my mother, niece of Henry Moreira.

Henrique Moreira was at that time in the 40, 50, 60 and 70 the only artist in the Oporto city, he lived exclusively on his artistic activity, all other artists were mostly secondary school teachers. Has devoted a lifetime only to the sculptural production in Portugal. After his graduation went to work in the studio of Master Teixeira Lopes. His work, figurative, and academic centered representation of distinguished and popular figures, the largest and most substantial part of his vast work was produced for the Oporto city, is therefore rightly considered "the Oporto sculptor".

Manuel Pereira da Silva during the period he worked in the atelier of Henry Moreira collaborated with him in the realization of low-reliefs at the Rivoli Theatre and Oporto Coliseum, and even the "Monument to the Heroes of the Peninsular Wars" in the Boavista square.

Manuel Pereira da Silva has abstract aesthetic tendencies, whose main theme is the human figure and as subthemes: the man, the woman, the couple, the family, the motherhood. Generally the creative process begins with one or several drawings on paper, A4 paper, which can then move to a larger format, bristol board, then can move to the canvas, first drawing with pencil on the canvas and then painting, using various materials: gouache, watercolor, Indian ink, or oil, finally can convert to a sculpture, first made ​​in clay, then in plaster in aluminum structure, just passing the bronze if orders. The purpose of all these studies prepared in drawings, mostly with the pen (Bic) could be made in pencil or crayon, is turning them into sculptures.

Manuel Pereira da Silva intended only to develop a personal project, sought the uniqueness, sought leverage all mankind in him without imposing anything on anyone. Never offered as a gift is works, as is the case with many of the artists he knew, was common they offer as birthday present their work.

However had a peculiar habit at Christmas every year sent a postcard to his friends with a poem of his own. When did eighty, the Gaia City Council together with the Avintes Village Council, honored him with the Medal of Cultural Merit, in a dinner, one of his friends met all these postcards and surprised us all exposing them in a cardboard on the walls of the restaurant. Only at this moment the family had knowledge of it.

The Pereira da Silva collection has about 700 drawings, 280 paintings and 140 sculptures. With the release of this collection I intend to share with the general public the legacy left by Manuel Pereira da Silva to his family, in time thereby perpetuating his artwork.