Lesson 7

A few weeks ago, a friend described me as being “recently old“, a witty contradiction which reminded me of a statement from Peter de Francia’s inaugural speech as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, Mandarins and Luddites, where he described the obsessive search for the modern and the novel, as “a man rushing into an antique shop demanding something new.” If this was true in 1971, it is even truer today, with the popular preoccupation with ‘appropriation’, re-contextualising, ‘retro’, nostalgia, parody, pastiche, cultural cannibalism, repackaging, rebranding, quotations and art historical reference. Within this pluralistic, ‘pick and mix’, free for all attitude to art production, it is difficult to recognise the innovative, creative, the new, as so much seems borrowed. Fine art has been described as doing new things with old materials, it could equally be described as doing old things with new materials. What is often proclaimed as the latest thing usually seems familiar, I often feel that I have encountered this ‘latest thing’ before, probably in the 1960s or 1970s and I remember it being done better in those days. Of this art you could say that it is recent but old.

In the arts the difference between old and new is not straight forward. We live in something  of a topsy turvy world, a carnivalesque world turned on its head, where things seem to change places. There is no longer any separation between high and low, good and bad, old and new, the political and the commercial or the classical and pop, all seem to be interchangeable. It is all show business these days.

For instance, we were told that the music at Princess Diana’s funeral, in 1997, was a mixture of old and new, that was – Verdi and Elton John. Considering Verdi and Elton, I wondered which was the old they were referring to and, indeed, which was the new. The answer might seem obvious, the arrow of time would clearly indicate that the newer, the most recent music was by Mr John, but this is a false assumption or at least questionable. Elton John operates within the 18th and 19th century major/minor musical key formate and inevitable chord sequences and resolutions. With its regular beat and key structure, all popular music ignores the radical musical experiments of the first part of the 20th century, the introduction of multiple and irregular patterns of rhythm by Stravinsky, Schoenberg’s revolution in tonality, Edgard Varese explorations of timbre, texture and space or the childlike back to basics experimental conceptualism of Cage.  This is not to say that there where no innovators in the development of popular music. Syncopation is central to popular music and has been described as a “contradiction, a kind of inner rebellion” and the diminished 7th also opened up many new possibilities, but the black blues artists who introduced so much were eclipsed by the pop music of the 1950s and 60s. In the 60s it was no coincidence that the Beatles songs were favourably compared to Schubert’s songs, that is, the 19th century Schubert, not the 20th century Schoenberg or Stockhausen! In this sense Lennon and McCartney were 19th century composers.

Within all this, Elton John conforms, he is musically conservative and predictable, whilst Verdi seems fresh and can surprise, the conductor Giandrea Noseda said that  “it is very important to talk, to be very close to the (younger) generation today and Verdi sounds as fresh today as it did in his time.”  Verdi’s operas question the status quo, bourgeois and organised religion. He juxtaposes passion, even ugly emotions with memorable and popular melodies, this unpredictable emotional content is surprising. Verdi’s Requiem is exceptionally tuneful and not what you might expect from a funeral hymn. Elton John is emotionally pedestrian in comparison and unsurprising. Ultimately conformity is dehumanising.

Only in  jazz do we see an equivalent development to classical music, what classical music took hundreds of years to achieve, jazz seems to mimic this process in a few decades. Within a post modern ethos, the notion of progress is questioned, yet it cannot be denied that both classical music and jazz developed, whilst all we can say about popular music is that it changes. These shifts in popular music are superficial, these transformations, due to fashion, boredom, built in redundancy, are not structural, basically not musical changes. But they are changes of style, fashion or ‘sound’. We often hear about this or that ‘new sound’, what was Glen Miller? Well, it was not jazz, but a new ‘sound’, referred to as the Big Band Sound. The major, minor stays constant with a regular rhythm of four beats (occasionally, three in a bar). Popular music has to remain unadventurous and familiar, it cannot disturb or challenge, though it might offend established taste.

I am not making any value judgments here, that new is good or old is bad, or visa versa. Simply I wish to examine what we understand by the new and the contradictions that inevitably arise. Whilst not denying the possibility of doing something new in painting and we would be very foolish if we really believed that everything had already been done, I believe that there is still a lot more  to be achieved within the traditional cannon. But nothing is absent of presidents, simply we might have just forgotten or not know what the presidents are. Everything has a history!

The problem with the ‘new’ is that it is always defined retrospectively, a thing being ‘ahead of its time’ is only confirmed or noticed in hindsight, as is – ‘breaking the mould’, making a clear break, the novel, the cutting edge, scaling new heights, pointing the way forward, the notion of progress, the absence of presidents and originality are all relative, they are mainly dictated by fashion and constructed in retrospect. If something was truly original we would not know whether to sit on it, eat it or look at it. Then again, we would probably not notice the original in the first place, it would be invisible. But everything has a history, maybe nothing is new any more. No such thing as originality then, everything comes out of an established methodology, a way of thinking, a way of working, an existing process, a clearly defined context, an established tradition and orthodoxy, or the classic paradigm shift, which by definition is from a known paradigm.

It seems that most major innovations in art and music, and for that matter scientific discoveries, happened in the first half of the 20th century. Since then no new forms seem to have been formulated. Cubism, Constructivism, Fauvism, Dada, Surrealism up to 50s abstraction, (along with amateur art, outsider art, aspects of the popular culture, street art, domestic processes and new technology), become the feeding ground of Post Modernism. Nothing new, no more revolutions in art. In science the first part of the 20th century was of physics, exploring the atomic world, the second part could be seen as the age of biology, the science of life. Yet the DNA structure was discovered in the early 1950s and the molecule was isolated in 1860. This is not to say that nothing has happened since the 1950s, we have cloning, GM crops, new techniques and research, however, these advancements, as in art, are elaborations, developments on established discoveries – embroidery. Does Fukuyama’s “End of History” also mean the end of the new and the modern?

In 1922 Andre Breton published a text concerning the upcoming final Dada congress to investigate the spirit of modernity; he proposed to discuss the question, “among the objects said to belong to modernity, is a top hat more or less modern than a locomotive?“

In Lesson 7 the exercise is to attempt to answer this question once again. Your final conclusion is less important than the endeavour to answer the question. The purpose of this exercise is to reflect on the process that you use to achieve an answer, this will inform on what you understand by the modern. You may wish to substitute a baseball cap for the top hat or for the locomotive, a bullet train or space shuttle, if you think this will make your investigations more relevant (more modern, dare I say!). It also should be noted that the new, recent, contemporary, modern, the Modern Movement, Modernity, Modernism, all have particular and different meanings and you should not confuse them. As a starting point you could begin by considering these different definitions that relate to the new.

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