When new is different, and old is old again

In conceiving modernity and its identification in modes of art, there is an implication that for something to be regarded as modern and noteworthy there must inherently also be something left behind, something now superseded or otherwise made mundane. ‘timeless’ pieces of art or objects of discourse are of course exceptions to this rule, but that is exactly what imbues them with this sought-after power of appearing fresh and new and avant-garde. There is a cool detachment, a confident and swaggering attitude in the way new art severs (or merges) itself from tradition. It is an inert rendition but is nonetheless complementary to the particular mannerism recognised in the original African-American jazz players in the ‘deep south’ of the United States (painfully underrepresented in O’Connor’s Wise Blood) who would stand on the stage at functions and play - with their backs to the audience – the kind of music that was incredibly hard to anyone in the immediate vicinity to notate...

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As we can see, new or hybrid media are strange and rarely comprehended, nor is the reason for their existence fully formed. Is that why there are not more? The anthropologist is always wary of that which he tries so hard to prevent but which he must ultimately concede. He taints all that he records. The documentation of phenomena always dates it, makes it ‘past new’ and enforces a rate of decay upon it. Especially with technology (or in the state of the recording-of, is that a kind of self-reflexive act?), which even if we try to make it seem futuristic, it always ends up looking like the cardboard cut-out mainframes and hulking terminals from old Star Trek reruns or even the latest episode of Dr. Who, bleeping and blooping in the background.

The advertisement is the definitive example. Those we’ve viewed in our ENGL 3604 class of television ‘promos’ and other such early experiments with the televisual such as product placement appear to us now to be absolutely and inadvertently hilarious, though they must surely not have been then. Maybe they just haven’t aged well. So to play against this trap of appearing old before one’s even out of the blocks, I want to position on the other side of the ring the proverbial avant-garde work (if ads are avant-garde, then they age better..). This work for us is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). Utilising the camera-obscura, Holbein adds another layer to the semiotics of the work by including above the floor the warped picture of a skull, disregarding the perspective plane. The eye cannot immediately discern the shape of the skull, but if we view it from the side – there it is.

Is what defines art as art this ability to avoid appearing ‘dated’? If we could ever suggest that we’ve moved past modernism and into post-modernism, then can modern artefacts appear to be old or out of date? One must account for personal or cultural tastes, the cycles of fashion and conceptions of the exotic, for these complicate things. If we can suggest the nucleus of contemporality is the city, (Rutman’s Berlin, Dupont’s Picadilly, or even the freshly melded New York seen in various Actualities) the place where things are eternally modern or always up to date, then the suburbs – the deep south - balance this out by being left by the wayside, unkempt, with potholes in the roads and too many red-brick apartment blocks from the 60’s. They could never have been modern!