21 - Modernism, modernity, modernisation

Summary

Modernism has always been a confusing and disputed term. In architecture it has been used to describe a design strategy based on rationality and functional analysis, such as those found in industrial architecture in the United States or in the Bauhaus projects of Germany, and it is most often distinguished from a vague ‘traditionalism’ that was its predecessor, and an equally ill-defined postmodernism that succeeded it. In music modernism refers most often to those composers who broke with the conventions of tonality and recognisable rhythmic patterns and structures, introducing instead musical style marked by dissonance, discontinuity, fragmentation and experimentation in sound and form. In dance the notion of modernism has been employed in connection with twentieth-century practitioners whose work reflected themes of contemporary life, but also with dance that focused on movement and form inherent in the human body. In pictorial art we find modernism emerging as a break with traditional and academic styles; in its incipient years it often served as commentary on social life, but as it developed, it came to explore visual representation as such, rather than any specific subject or topic. Literary scholars have most often viewed modernism as part of a reaction to both historical changes in the social order and aesthetic imperatives inherited from the nineteenth century, in particular those adopted by classicists and realists. Literary modernism eventually seems to reject representation as an artistic exigency, resorting instead to experimentation in forms and with words, although it often does not wish to relinquish an impact on readers. It is difficult to determine precisely what unites these various forms of modernism, but one suspects that if a unifying principle does exist, it is to be located in a specifically European consciousness that emerged in the late nineteenth century and continued into the decades of the next century.