Modernity Without a Project

MODERNITY WITHOUT A PROJECT MODERNITY WITHOUT A PROJECT Essay on the Void Called Contemporary C.B. Johnson punctum books ¬ brooklyn, ny MODERNITY WITHOUT A PROJECT: ESSAY ON THE VOID CALLED CONTEMPORARY © C.B. Johnson, 2014. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2014 by punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com punctum books is an independent, open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assem- blage. We solicit and pimp quixotic, sagely mad engage- ments with textual thought-bodies. We provide shelters for intellectual vagabonds. ISBN-13: 978-0692351260 ISBN-10: 0692351264 Cover Image: detail from Superstudio (Frassinelli, Magris Alessandro e Roberto, Toraldo di Francia, Natalini), The Continuous Monument: New York Extrusion project. Aer- ial perspective. 1969. Cover design by Katherine Johnson. Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ http://punctumbooks.com/about/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490-1500) Table of Contents k Image Credits 01: Introduction: “The Contemporary” :: 1 02: Modernity without a Project :: 23 03: Remaking the Museum of Modern Art :: 63 04: Complacencies of the New Architecture :: 117 05: Endgame: Consequences of Contemporaneity :: 175 References :: 185 Acknowledgments Image Credits O Figure 1 (Cover/Back Flyleaf). Superstudio (Frassinelli, Magris Ales- sandro e Roberto, Toraldo di Francia, Natalini), The Continuous Monument: New York Extrusion project. Aerial perspective. 1969. Unbuilt. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Graphite, color pencil, and cut-and-pasted printed paper on board, 38 x 25-3/4' (96.5 x 65.4 cm). Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation. © 2014. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. Figure 2. Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (1902-1981), ‘Torpedo’ diagrams of the ideal permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, as advanced in 1933 (top) and in 1941 (bottom). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Prepared by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the ‘Advis-ory Committee Report on Museum Collections,’ 1941. Offset, print-ed in black, 8-1/2 x 11’ (20.3 x 29.2 cm). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 9a.15. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. MA70. © 2014. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. Figure 3. Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944), Charrette Submission for The Museum of Modern Art Expansion, New York, NY. Aerial perspective. O.M.A. (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), 1997. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Mixed media collage on vellum 11 3/4 x 16 1/2" (29.8 x 41.9 cm). Gift of the architect. © 2014. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Flor- ence. [I]t is time … to consider some final return or reinvention of the outmoded in full postmodernity, a recurrence that is doubtless the most paradoxical of all since it proves to be the very concept of modernity itself, which we had all naively assumed to be long since superseded. But it is in fact back in business all over the world . Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity Most people, me included, are most comfortable conceptually living about ten years back from whatever point in time we’ve reached. I think we all have these moments that are vertiginous, and terribly exciting, and very frightening, in which we realise the contemporary absolutely. And it induces terror and ecstasy, and we retreat from it because we can’t stay in that state of panic, which is the real response to what’s happening to us. We’re more comfortable with an earlier version of who we were, and what we were, it makes us feel more in control. William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories 01: Introduction “THE CONTEMPORARY” Contemporary art, sure, but contemporary with what? Paul Virilio No global city today is ideologically complete without an offi- cial museum of contemporary art, no art is “cutting edge” unless it is contemporary art, and no proposed architecture is deemed worthy of construction unless it is contemporary. But what does this label, used so authoritatively by today’s institutions, mean exactly? Being “contemporary” appears to have become, in the twenty-first century, a new universal right. Communication technologies have driven the present from the temporal divides of modernity toward a condition the anthropologist Marc Augé described as a shared planetary “contemporaneity” of diverse worlds, in which the “parame- ters of time, like those of space, are changing, and this is an unprecedented revolution” (14). The idea that drives this volume is to resituate the apparently consensual discourse of “the contemporary” within history and thereby see it in a critical light. The emerging view will not be as celebratory as that used by proponents of the phrase. This means boldly reflect- ing upon the history of modernity and postmodernity, just as these periodising hypotheses are eclipsing after the second 2 MODERNITY WITHOUT A PROJECT millennium. By way of initial observation, the discourse of “the contemporary”—which is often just used as a shallow synonym for newness—is neither explosive, as was the discourse of modernity, nor melancholy, like the discourse of the postmodern, with its apocalypses and simulacra. It is also not very new. The background of these earlier projects will be instructive in il- luminating one of the most ideological aspects of the common occurrence of “the contemporary”: its value as a signal of widespread cultural change used to label, and naturalise, the era that succeeds the postmodern. Throughout the ages of modernity and full postmodernity, the word “contemporary” had been used mostly in subordinate fashion to “the modern” and “the postmodern”, or in synchrony with these terms, un- critically shifting to the order of the day. It was a subservient term. Only relatively recently did it begin to preoccupy cultural institutions as a central value. The term had not—until about the 1990s—been used to imply that the situation it named was somehow more advanced or unique to the times than that offered by “the modern” and “the postmodern”; these hereby became associated with an old guard. If the modern meant to transcend others in time, and the postmodern meant to transcend the modern itself, then the contemporary means to transcend the modern and the postmodern taken together. Yet, parasitically and arbitrarily, “the contemporary” feeds off the projects of the modern and the postmodern. The mapping and illustrating of the uses and ideological ramifications of “the contemporary” is in its infancy. This is particularly true in the context of commanding institutions and disciplines invested in giving a sense to the present moment. This volume offers a strong articulation of how “the contemporary” has been used much in the spirit of commen- taries on “the modern” and the condition that the poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire, as early as the 1860s, called mo- dernité. In “The Painter of Modern Life”, Baudelaire used the term to indicate a revolt, an attitude against the classical, the name for an experience unique to metropolitan and industrial life and art. After Baudelaire, “modernity” came to describe 01: INTRODUCTION: “THE CONTEMPORARY” 3 not just an attitude against the past and tradition, focused on historic and revolutionary breaks, but the multiplying effects of that attitude on the world; indeed it was extended to describe the whole historical period encompassing the twentieth century’s cataclysmic changes, which were technological, so- cial, political, cultural, and aesthetic. Postmodernity— modernity’s critical twin or ironic sequel—arose to reflect upon and resist the projects of high modernism that had wrought such breathtaking change by the middle of the century, which projects had so radically brought the future crashing down upon the present. Taken together, these terms, as or- ganising concepts of the present today, have become relatively used up—historical rather than contemporary. Few serious reflections exist on this discursive shift from the postmodern to “the contemporary”, which it would be unwise to ignore, given the valuable accumulation of knowledge under the ru- brics of modernity and postmodernity. The questions that these movements posed must not be junked with their terms. The junking of the terms is synonymous with the loss of a sense of a different time before ours and a different time after, which is, worryingly, the very loss of our historical context

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