The War Room; Murdering Modernism (2010), GCGCA(i)

Murdering Modernism

The War Room, The Pentagon

23 Sep - 21 Dec 2010

Modernism is generally understood as either an 'art movement' or a movement in philosophy. For a time, it appeared to have been put to death by the concept of the 'postmodern'*, the plausibility of which began to collapse during the course of the 1990s, making way for the concept of the contemporary** as a critical category.

Modernism represents a break with the terms of the philosophy of history, and the installation of ‘the new’ as the permanent demand of an absolute, self-transcending present (a demand that continues to impose itself on contemporary art). The logic of modernism is essentially a temporal formalism of 'the new'; an abstract temporal formalism that affirms the temporal logic of 'the new', through an openness (whether it be philosophical discourse or artistic practise***) to the present as a whole.

'The modern', as a temporality of 'the new', has been complicated internally by 'the contemporary'. Contemporaneity is the temporal structure of global modernity; the temporality of global modernity 'as' the temporality of contemporaneity. Contemporaneity is an intensifier of modernity. The concept of the contemporary spatializes novelty, by making co-presence the condition of the conjunction of the times that it holds together.

Staged in the underground War Room of the Pentagon, this exhibition investigates the association of modernist art and architecture with fear and death in films of the 60s and 70s, including the use of artist Herbert Bayer's work Double Ascension (1969) in the film Marathon Man (1976), the modernist buildings, paintings and mobiles that feature in the work of the film director Alan J. Pakula, as well as the modernist production design of Ken Adam for James Bond films and Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964).

ARCO Plaza; Murdering Modernism (2010), GCGCA(i)

The attempt is to make conceptual crossings between different prevailing conceptions of 'the modern' and 'the contemporary', and to produce a unity of relations between them 'in the present', via the novelty of this constitution (or staging) of new relations between ideas and things - a novelty derived from their determinate negation of the existing conceptions via a reassertion of the essential temporal logic of negation, producing 'the new' by way of a questioning or antiquation of now 'old' or existing conceptions (of 'modernism' understood in a restrictedly chronological manner as a passing movement, one that was supposedly superseded by the 'post-modern', and of 'the contemporary' in its reduction in meaning to indicate merely that which is 'up to date').

*T. J. Clark bid 'Farewell to an Idea' of modernism as a movement in 1999. The internal logic of the concept of the 'postmodern' already projected its future death, since its utilisation of the 'post' prefix underscored the self-transcending logic that constitutes the concept of modernism itself, which is thereby reaffirmed, rather than negated, by the self-confused concept of the 'post-modern'.

**A critical concept of the contemporary understands it in its basic form as the bringing together of times within the present - a unification of disjunctive times: a living, existing, or occurring together 'in' time; a coming together of different but equally 'present' times, a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times; a projection of unity onto the differential totality of the times of human lives that are, in principle, present to each other.

***The actual history of artistic modernism is the establishment of artistic meaning via specific relations of negation - a modernist series of subsequent determinate negations of the artistic field that derive their intelligibility from the critical mediations thereby produced (the challenge is to theorise the unity of the generic concept of art conceptually, as the distributive unity of a historical process of determinate negations).

ARCO Plaza; Murdering Modernism (2010), GCGCA(i)