the enigma of arrival

My name is Jerry Cullum and I am an a...rt critic. But a recovering one.

I am also, as anyone who has googled me knows, many other things. (And so is any man, though few will own up to all of the things they are.) I am not, however, the young athlete from a midwestern college, nor am I the lifetime bowling aficionado from the Midwest. A few extra clicks and keywords will get you to my resume and indeed to my e-mail soon enough, though not on LiveJournal. I'm more public than I would like at times to be.

However, in addition to poems and to words about art that seem to be cited in more peculiar locations than I would think possible, I write a fair amount of theoretical prose that never sees print. Friends have said I need to start a blog, both for these and for whatever else comes to mind that ordinarily is restricted to one person. (This tendency to universalize observations originally meant for close friends seems like a late corollary to Howard Nemerov's lines about extemporaneous lecturing: "They've got you down on tape because / Later they'll want to waste the same time twice.")

Anyway, this morning I found myself producing a document that makes as good a start as any for the joculum blog. Here 'tis.

Re-Reading Early Modernism: A Proposal for a Blockbuster Show of Art and Archaeology (Gustav Klimt Meets the Gold of Troy!)

Jerry Cullum

A quarter century or so ago, George Steiner began one of his New Yorker reviews with the observation that there was a book to be written about the many different aspects of the birth of modernism in Vienna circa 1900. Within six years, there were a slew of art exhibitions and catalogues on that very topic.

In the age of digital reproduction, it ought to be possible to throw something together even faster, at least in terms of a prototype catalogue, so I’m putting this out there in hopes some curator will run with the idea, or someone else will tell me that someone has already done it.

Why has there been no show that combines the theses of the notorious 1984 “Primitivism” exhibition and those of “Vienna 1900”? more accurately, why has there been no exhibition about the impact of not just anthropology (or colonial exploitation) but archaeology on early modern art?

The (pseudo-) discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, the discovery of Buddhist texts and monuments such as Borobudur and Angkor, and the birth of anthropological theory at the same time that archaeological plunderers were sawing frescoes out of caves in Central Asia and Ethiopia and bringing them home to Paris and Berlin altered the European aesthetic imagination as much as the appearance of African masks in Trocadero flea markets. Picasso was first inspired by archaic sculptures from the Iberian peninsula.

Joseph Conrad tossed out his offhanded “this also has been among the dark places of the earth” in “Heart of Darkness” because it was beginning to be realized that Europe had sprung from even dicier ancestral practices than had previously been known. (Or rather, the practices became more contextualized, and the deeper-engrained they seemed, the harder it was to dismiss them as “primitive” beginnings, rather than as some rot embedded at the core of the European psyche. Hence Kurtz’s heads on stakes at the station upriver in Conrad’s anti-colonial fantasy.)

Gustav Klimt incorporated newly discovered motifs from archaic Greece into his portraits of Viennese society ladies. The fact that he was having affairs with the women in question fitted prettily into the incipient notion that the European imagination was driven by instinctual forces that hadn’t changed in millennia. Freud collected archaeological memorabilia (mostly Greek and Egyptian, that being the most available as well as most appropriate to his theories and research interests) as analogues to his model of the unconscious as incorporating the oldest drives and forms of thought.

So why not at least a virtual exhibition that places the then-newfound artifacts from Europe’s newly discovered past next to modernist art that clearly reflects not just the look of the material, but altered opinions regarding European mastery?

The nineteenth century began with a different version of Enlightenment cross-cultural prejudices, one in which Egyptian wisdom and the newly (re)discovered wisdom of India sat alongside a differently read version of the previous century’s China. What came from Japan was more than just woodblock prints stuffed as filler in boxes of export porcelain. (The last-named, of course, gave rise to the styles of Van Gogh and Gauguin, among others. The other elements of japonerie take us too far afield, into American poetry and such like.)

The paradoxical paths of the neo-Asian theosophical enlightenment (and how ironic, by the way, that impulses born out of enlightenment rationalism ended up sunk in occulitst enthusiasms) existed alongside post-Romantic sensibilities. Here, too, a century that begins with Caspar David Friedrich expressing the death of God (in singularly bleak symbols of a wavering Protestant faith) ends with Victorian fairy paintings and Symbolist and Decadent art. Afer that, up pops the modernist revolution, which in 1900 was scarcely even on the horizon (as Robert Rosenblum’s exhibition demonstrated).

But even Symbolism and Decadence look different if we think of themt as romanticism altered by the slipstream of the theosophical enlightenment on the one hand and the shivery intuitions brought forth by archaeological fact on the other. Arthur Machen incorporated then-recent Romano-British discoveries into both horror fiction and a memorable if minor novel of romantic-minded displacement, The Hill of Dreams. French Symbolist aesthetic deliquescence owes as much to the new visual richness of archaeological reconstructions as to the notions of the occult depths of the anti-mechanistic psyche.

Now, yes, all of this stuff also evolves out of the good old tradition of the Gothick nightmare of the previous century, as has just been demonstrated by an exhibition in London. And thanks to Marsha Keith Schuchard’s new book on William Blake, we know about the bizarrely Freudian (avant le lettre) visions of Moravian devotional painters that probably fed into Blake’s imagination. So it isn’t just the new sense of a more complex and precise recovered past that finds its way into the European imagination.

But the fact remains that writers and artists were more inclined to see the newly conquered colonial subjects differently because they were seeing their own cultures differently. Now, this new information was also being used by social evolutionists to argue for the inherent superiority of Europe, where beginnings even more barbaric than previously suspected had been transcended. The colonial project of “spreading civilization,” and incidentally of also making a bundle on ripped-off raw materials, could be made to seem like historical inevitability.

But the thread we would like to follow here is not the colonial-quest-and-primitivism one; it is the subversive visual, literary, and theoretical uses of the newly rediscovered European past. That is one side of the early-modernist revolution, one that re-reads the present by deflating its sense of skeptical superiority. The other side is utopian and future-oriented, and based on the notion that yes, we are superior now, but once we get rid of the remaining restraints of irrational social organization, all humanity will come to adulthood at last. That way lies Russian constructivism. The other way leads to…what? To interesting and largely overlooked side trips in visual art, but also to Picasso. The Impressionists come via an entirely different route, and there is not much archaeology in evidence in the painters of shifting lights and weathers.

So maybe this is a dorky idea. But I maintain that the various fragments of knowledge regarding how Europeans thought of themselves circa 1890 have been read in far too fragmentary a fashion. If we study the biographies of individual artists, we are left with the feeling (okay, I am) that they were hearing conversations and reading forgotten newspaper articles in the cafes, things that affected their imaginations in ways that no one has analyzed properly. Putting together the existing visual evidence would help confirm or disconfirm my theories. It would also make a cool blockbuster show, at least online.

But my day job is to write about what the galleries think they can sell to buyers this month, as well as to report on “neat stuff to look at around town.” So I am highly unlikely to follow up on my announced project and anyone who wants to steal the idea and run with it is likely to get further than I would have.

I have written this off the top of my head and mostly without embedded footnotes, but anyone who wants clarification of where one or another idea came from, I’ll provide a bibliography. Almost none of these ideas spring from my own head. I only wonder why no one has tried to connect the ideas systematically and realize that they add up to a modest but I think significant alternate reading of some crucial decades of art history.

I also have a parallel set of reflections regarding world’s fairs and the ironies of globalization, but I’ll hold on to those because someday I still hope to organize my visual materials on a not yet launched website.