Small masked figure, balsa, 2014
I have only just got round to catching up on this year's issues of London Review of Books, thanks to having had such a busy year to date, and was interested to come across Evan Kindley's review of the History of Modernist Magazines series, Oxford Press - January issue!!
Publications familiar to me are Blast, Die Sturm and Dada, and I imagine every art student learns how the influential Futurist Manifesto was first published in Gazzetta dell'Emilia in 1909. I suppose it is no surprise to read that "the true enemy of the modernist magazine is .... ideological indiscrimination, or pluralism. In this sense, it seems right to speak of the modernist tradition as an essentially anti-liberal one." This is because "the force of modernity is largely centrifugal, drawing a hundred disparate ideas away from the centre until it's not clear that it even makes sense to speak of a 'centre' any more; the dynamic little magazine does its best to provide a centripetal counterforce, even at the risk of simplifying and reducing the real complexity of the modern world."
Publications familiar to me are Blast, Die Sturm and Dada, and I imagine every art student learns how the influential Futurist Manifesto was first published in Gazzetta dell'Emilia in 1909. I suppose it is no surprise to read that "the true enemy of the modernist magazine is .... ideological indiscrimination, or pluralism. In this sense, it seems right to speak of the modernist tradition as an essentially anti-liberal one." This is because "the force of modernity is largely centrifugal, drawing a hundred disparate ideas away from the centre until it's not clear that it even makes sense to speak of a 'centre' any more; the dynamic little magazine does its best to provide a centripetal counterforce, even at the risk of simplifying and reducing the real complexity of the modern world."
Post-modernism might have set out, in contrast, to embrace complexity or at least challenge the viewer to face up to the consequent ambiguity of our identities. But watching Tracy and then Grayson recently delivering their familiar performances of identity on television, I wondered if it is done in a knowingly ironic mode, in the intellectual sense, or whether it hasn't become something else altogether......... personalityism, perhaps
