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The Strange Art and Literature of Modernism

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The Strange Art and Literature of Modernism The Strange Art and Literature of 2 Modernism Radical Strangeness in Early Modernism S A THEORY of the experience of art, aesthetics is closely linked with artistic production. Different types of art enable different experiences. It is therefore necessary to show that Modernist and Postmodern art imparts in the first place an experience of the strange in the sense of the alienating Other, before explaining theoretically and more precisely the particular nature of this experi- ence as an independent aesthetic of the strange alongside of the beau- tiful and the sublime. Not that this is particularly difficult or even new. From the enraged reaction of the bourgeois public to avantgarde art, through the pessimistic cultural visions of conservative critics, Theodor Adorno’s negative aesthetic and the existentialist celebration of the absurd, to the apotheosis of the radically ‘Other’ in Postmodern theory – Modernist and Postmodern art is recognized as being an art of the alienating Other. Despite this, it seems necessary to recall the variety of ways in which twentieth-century art enabled the experience of strangeness and by which means this was achieved. The visual arts and literature shall serve as examples for this for reasons partly subjective, partly objec- 20 MAKING STRANGE u tive. As a literary scholar, I turn, of course, to the art form that I know best; and as most art movements of the twentieth century were initi- ated by and named after new developments in the visual arts, it would not make sense to discuss twentieth-century aesthetics without them. The Shock of the New, the title given by Robert Hughes to his over- view of visual arts in the twentieth century,1 was a defining charac- teristic of avantgarde art and literature of early Modernism. However, it was not merely their novelty which caused this effect – not all that is new is necessarily shocking – but their extreme strangeness. Visual arts and literature of this era broke so radically with all conventions (of what is presented, how it is presented, and the implied conception of art) that it could not help but appear very strange indeed – and the artists and authors were not only aware of this, they aimed for this effect. They intended indeed to shock or at least to surprise by strange- ness. From our perspective today, it is hard to believe that the works of the Impressionists, which later became extremely popular, shocked viewers when they were first exhibited in 1874. If one considers, however, the ‘wild’ use of colours by the Gauguin-inspired Fauvists and German Expressionists at the start of the twentieth century, the following geometrical stylizing of form in Cubism, the first abstract paintings, and the dissolution of the traditional boundaries of what was considered art in the ready-mades of Duchamp and Man Ray, then the shocking effect is easily understood. The avantgardist art of the Dada- ists and Surrealists as well as the American Abstract Expressionist of the 1950s were also bent on creating a stir by means of varying types of strangeness – even if one had become used enough to this strategy to no longer be totally shocked. In the realm of poetry, the phantasmagoric visions of the city in Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal from 1857 were already strange enough to shock both literary critics due to the violation of the conventions of 1 (London: BBC, 1980). .
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