The other argument depends on the anachronism
involved in the experience of works of art, the awareness
that regardless of the moment of their creation they still
have the power to affect the present. p1
Translation is as impossible as it is necessary:
impossible because, as Walter Benjamin points out, every translation from
one language into another involves the creation of a third that corresponds
with neither, and necessary because there is no other way of conceiving the
possibility of transcultural communication or the potential of relating the
image to the word.
As Johannes Fabian argues, it was only possible
for Western powers to aspire to control the rest of the globe's cultures
if they were characterized not only as spatially exotic but also as temporally
backward
heterochrony (many times existing
at the same time)
p2
The logic of chronology, traditionally history's overriding concern, is guaranteed
by the sense that time has a purpose and a goal. p. 3
the impact of time on reading and meaning of images
If the time of the work is not to be restricted
to the horizon of its creation, then its status as an agent in the creation of
its own reception, its anachronic power, shines through. The "presence" of
the work of art-its ontological existence, the ways it both escapes meaning
yet repeatedly provokes and determines its own interpretation- comes
to the fore.
p3
The tension between
these apparently conflicting demands-the recognition of the specificity of
a work's aesthetic presence and the interpretation of its social and cultural
significance- has productively animated art historical literature in the past,
as it continues to do today.
p4
A work can stop us in our tracks,
so to speak, and insist that we acknowledge a form of perception that differs
from that of the context in which it appears. Difference thus attempts to
capture the perceptual awareness that temporalities precede our presence
and depend on it. It gestures toward the to-and-fro of experience, the sense
that what is called objectivity only receives that label as a consequence of its
encounter with a subject.
p5
In the aftermath of colonization,
economic, technological, military, and cultural factors still serve to maintain
the time of Western Europe and North America as that against which
all others are calibrated. Whether these hierarchies are accepted or challenged,
it is utopian to pretend they do not exist.
p5
Does our awareness of the presentism of historical writing undermine
a commitment to understanding the deep past?
p38
Do we need a new modern? When is it time to change your voice or let go of a past obsession or problem- when you are satisfied. Are we satisfied as in it is solved or that it cannot be soved and we are bored with the prospect. What was the question of modern post-modern?
It was a rethinking of space content form color economics audience... What was found what are we interested in finding out or searching or researching now? Is it a different question than the modern or post modern questions?
Modern art was inherently revolutionary,
and thus antitraditionalist, antimimetic, and antihumanist. It explicitly
set itself against the established conventions inherited from earlier
ages. Rather-than see modern culture as the continuation of practices established
in the Renaissance as the late nineteenth century had done, the artists
of the early twentieth century aspired to a total break. If the Renaissance as a
period was discovered as part of a historical progression inexorably leading to
the naturalist and realist achievements of nineteenth-century art, it was now
possible to see the modernist attack on the naturalism and realism of the previous
period as part of a teleological movement toward greater and greater
abstraction.
p38
[ from endnotes: 4. One of the most enduring articulations of this ideology is found in the work of
Clement Greenberg. See his Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press,
1989). For reflections on art history's modernist moment, see Thomas McEvilley,
'~t History or Sacred History?," in Art and Discontent: Theory at the Millennium,
133-67 (New York: McPherson, 1991).]
the world wars forever changed the global consciousness
changed the question
Speed of transformation biggest transformation.
Jean-Francois Lyotard suggested that modernism
itself has come to an end, and that postmodernism was its successor.6
This claim produced a furious response, and the value of the term postmodern
is still debated today. The discussion proved so exhausting that it is difficult
to use the term without a degree of irony.
p39
more about Lacan, Derrida, Fucault and Barthes, arguments are all just constructs of the capitalist regime.
Capitalism and modernism,
in other words, are synonymous.
p40
