The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

24The passage from modernity to postmodernityGerman design unit founded in 1919, .initially took much .of itsinspiration from the Arts and Crafts Movement that Morns hadfounded, and only subsequently (1923) turned to the idea that 'themachine is our modern medium of design.' The Bauhau was abe toexercise the influence it did over production and desIgn precIselythrough its redefinition .of 'craft' as t . he skill t .o mass-produce goodsof an aesthetically pleaslllg nature wIth madllne effiClency.These were the sorts of diverse reactions that made o modermsmsuch a complex and often contradictory affair. It was, wnte Bradburyand McFarlane (1976, 46),an extraordinary com pound of the futurist and te .nihilistic,the revolutionary and the conservativ, the naturahstlc and hesymbolistic, the romantic and the classIcal. .It was t?e celebra:IOnof a technological age and a condemnaton of It; an excItedacceptance of the belief that the old regImes of cultlre wereover, and a deep despairing in the face of that fear; a 11!lxtl1:r ofconvictions that the new forms were escapes from hlstonClsmand the pressures of the ti,?e with convitions that they wereprecisely the living expressIOn of these thlllgs.Such diverse elements and oppositions were composed into quitedifferent brews of modernist sentiment and sensibility in differentplaces and times:One can draw maps showing artistic centres and pr . ovinces, theinternational balance of cultural power - never qUlte the sameas, though doubtlessly intricately related to, the balance .ofpolitical and economic power. The n:aps change a the aestetlcschange: Paris is surely, for M?derlllsm, the outngh d?m ,lllntcentre, as the fount of bohemIa, tolerance and the emIgre hfestylebut we can sense the decline of Rome and Florence, therise nd then fall of London, the phase of dominance of Berlinand Munich, the energetic bursts from Norway an Finlan, heradiation out of Vienna, as being essential stages III the shlf .tlnggeography of Modernism, charted by the movemnt of wr .ltesand artists, the flow of thought waves, the explOSIOns of slgmficantartistic production.' (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1976, 102)This complex historical geography of modernim (a tale et to befully written and explained) makes it doubly lfficult to llltrpretexactly what modernism was about. The tenIOns between ltr·nationalism and nationalism, between globahsm and parochlahsl.Modernity and modernism 25ethnocentrism, between universalism aI}d class privileges, were neverfar from the surface. Modernism at its best tried to confront thetensions, bt at its wrst either s:wept them under the rug or exploitedthem (as dId the Umted States m ItS appropriation of modernist artafter 1945) for .cynial, political advantage (Guilbaut, 1983). IModemismlook qUlte dIfferent depending on where one locates o "ll eselfand when. For while the movement as a whole had a definite internatioalistnd universalist stance, often deliberately sought for andconceIved, It also clung fiercely to the idea of 'an elite internationalavant-garde a:, .hld in a fructifying relationship with a strong-feltse? se of p 1Ibld ., I:'. 157) . .The particularities of place - and I herethmk not ori'iY'tf the vlllae-hk .e communities in which artists typicallymoed but also of t? qUlte dIfferent social, economic, political, andenvronental condItIOns that prevailed in, say, Chicago, New York,Pans, VIenna, opnhagen, or Berlin - therefore put a distinctivestamp on the dlverslty of the modernist effort (see Part III, below).It also seems that modernism, after 1848, was very much an urbanenoe, hat it existed .in a restless but intricate relatIoI1ship 'wnntIie expenence of explOSIve urban growth (several cities surgingabove the mllio marḳ by te. end of the century), strong ruralto-urbanmlgratlOn, llldustnahzation, mechanization massive reorderigsof built envronments, and politically based urb:n movements,of whIch the revolutionary uprisings in Paris in 1848 and 1871 werea clear bt ominus symboL The pressing need to confront thepsychologIcal, sOIOloglcal ? tchnical, organizational, and politicalproblems of maSSIve urbamzatIon was one of the seed-beds in whichmodernist movements flourished. Modernism was 'an art of cities'and evidently found 'its natural habitat in cities,' and Bradbury andMcFarlane pull together a variety of studies of individual cities tosupport the point. Other studies, such as T. ]. Clark's magnificentwork on the ,art of Mane: aṇd his follo ,:,"ers in Second Empire Paris,or Schorske s equally bnlhant syntheSIS of cultural movements infin e siecl Vienna, confirm how important the urban experiencewas III shaplllg the cultural dynamics of diverse modernist movementsAnd t v . :as, fter all, in response to the profound crisis of urbaorgalllZtIOn, lrr:poverishen .t, and congestion that a whole wing ofmodernIst practice and thmkmg was directl y shaped (see Timms andKelley, 1985). There is a strong connecting thread from Haussmann'sre-shaping of Paris in the 1860s t .hrough the 'garden city' proposalsof Ebenezer Howard .(1898), Damel Burnham (the 'White City' construtedfor the ChIcago Wrld's Far of .1893 and the ChicagoRegl?nal lan of 1907), Garmer (the llllear llldustrial city of 1903),CamIllo Sme and Otto Wagner (with quite different plans to trans-