360
PARTISAN REVIEW
There are no categorical judgments. Valuing comes with the
experience of art: one cannot establish rules as to what makes things
good or bad . There is some very fine art now being made, and if pro–
portionately there is less good art today than in early modernism, all
one can reasonably conclude is that too little art accepts the challenge
of the standards of the past at a moment when the modern past itself
seems problematic. But there were similar situations in the past ,
such as in the 1930s through early 1940s. A similar eclecticism, hy–
bridization, and historicism obtained - as did a popularization of the
modern in the
moderne-when
the cubist tradition and its geometric
and surrealist aspects were waning and combining at the same time .
The comparison is not, of course, an exact one (for history does not
really repeat itself; it is historians who repeat each other), but it does
serve to remind us that modernism has seemed to be in danger of
collapse before.
Renewal, it seems, always begins in regression. When modern–
ism recovered in the 1940s, it did so after a primitivist , overtly ex–
pressionist interlude. The current popularity of neoexpressionist art
suggests an obvious parallel- except that current neoexpressionism
appears as an intrinsic part of, not an opposition to, a period of
stylistic confusion .
It
is too ' early to say whether modernism will
recover , or whether it will
need
to recover- and whether
from
or
through
neomodernism. But those who survived the 1930s through
early 1940s and renewed and revised modernism - that is to say, the
abstract expressionists - did so through a radical act of remem–
brance : by means of a visionary reconstruction of the past that
remade cubism and surrealism in a way that had never existed
before . Those who fell by the wayside - and many did, despite what
one hears from neomodernist historians - relied merely on memory
of the past, and preserved the status quo .
Current neomodernism is to be applauded for refusing to rely
on memory: it vigorously opposes repetition of safely established
forms. At times, its own visionary reconstructions have been strik–
ing, authentic and highly original. But since it all too frequently
mistakes citation for remembrance, it tends often to replace repeti–
tion by parody, innovation by novelty, and true revision of the past
only by revisionism. That modernism is in crisis now is not in ques–
tion. Memory cannot renew it. Citation cannot revive it. The act of
remembrance has always been difficult, and few have the vision it
requires .
