A Spacious Hive

"A Spacious Hive well stock'd with Bees,

That lived in Luxury and Ease;

And yet fam'd for Laws and Arms,

As yielding large and early Swarms;

Was counted the great Nursery,

Of Sciences and Industry."

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1705

John Leighton - Plan for hexagonal boroughs - 1865 - via Kosmograd

Konstantin Melnikov - Melnikov House - 1927 - Moscow

Du Besset-Lyon Architects - Lons le Saunier Library And Cinémas - 2012 - via ArchDaily

Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

" 'O man-projected Figure, of late 

Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive? 

Whence came it we were tempted to create 

One whom we can no longer keep alive? "

Thomas Hardy, God's Funeral, 1908, in A. N. Wilson's God's Funeral

If you wonder whether or not you should buy this book, I will try to save you time: go and buy it now, read it first and maybe later come and read this post. In the following paragraphs I might appear more critical of the work than I actually mean to be, and that is only for a couple of reasons: first, reading -and writing- a review that has only praises to share is fairly boring, and second, criticism of such a dense and structured theory prompts, as it should, the groping development of my own ideas, and provide me with a platform to put them in form. 

When Stanley G. Payne writes this book is 'the most important to appear in the history of fascism in a decade or more' I think it is not only to keep his seat in the canonical assembly of the New Consensus, but because this is truly a step forward for his field both in terms of method and of content, a big step on the slippery slope of fascism studies that could have proven fatal to anyone less rigorous, well read and well established than Roger Griffin.

Roger Griffin has published four books, a collection of essays, edited a number of key sources in the area and, Iordachi tells us, written more than a hundred articles. In the process he largely engineered the emergence of a "new consensus" in the field of comparative fascism studies, essentially a definition and interpretation of fascism as an international phenomenon, including both Nazism and Italian Fascism, as well as number of other more or less embryonic related movements throughout the world, stretching from the early XXth century to contemporary examples. 

If you would like a better grasp of the notion, and how he differentiates it from previous accounts of the fascist phenomenon, you will find him unpacking his concept time and again, and summing up the state of scholarly research in the field (here for example) both online and offline - but for the time being, let us focus on the more condensed definition he provides, in its more concise incarnation: 

"Palingenetic Ultranationalism" he finds to capture the essence of the phenomenon, iin somewhat sibylline terms. But Griffin leaves nothing to chance and repeatedly proceeds to explore the meanings of both terms with great skills and minute precision; To keep it short one could define ultranationalism as a form of authoritarian and often violent concern with homogeneity - both ideological and biological - "palingenetic," on the other hand, present a bigger challenge, but also the true specificity of Griffin's interpretation, for it refers to fascism's alleged irrational, mythic and 'political religious' content, an area difficult enough to grapple with for historians already treading a narrow path, to the point it had often before been belittled or completely ignored. 

Palingenesis, more specifically, refers to the quest of (national) rebirth, that New Beginning the subtitle of the book refer to; And indeed, Modernism and Fascism, more than any of his previous books is partly abstracted in order to focus on concepts, and on palingenesis in particular, an elusive notion which Griffin confronts with an extended arsenal of concepts often lifted from studies of modernity and modernism, ranging from Zygmunt Bauman to Modris Eckstein, but also Frank Kernode or, as we will see, Victor Turner. This makes for a rather different book from what his readers might have been used to, stretching defiantly his field of expertise. Save the two central examinations of modernism in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, do not expect the dense, focused, surgical prose one finds elsewhere in his work: this is an ambitious work of theory, of 'reflexive narrative' as the author calls - and as ambitious his endeavour, it worked for me on at least two levels: both in providing a compelling and original analysis, and on introducing me to a entire range of sources and concepts carefully handpicked across many unfamiliar disciplines.  

I suspect an emerging trend of historians calling onto anthropological concepts to untangle difficult notions the 'post-modern' approach did not provide for (just yesterday I heard UCL David D'avray make a similar case.) Here and there they might be found raving defiantly against the Cultural Turn lobby, but it's armed with a precise conceptual apparatus (his signature Weberian 'ideal type' or the 'reflexive narrative') borrowed from very respectable authorities that Griffin sets out on the Grand Projet to provide his readership with an autobahn stretching from generic fascism to the roots of modernism, and even way beyond this into the age old 'psychodynamics' of mankind as a whole:

Umberto Boccionio - Fusion Of A Head And A Window - 1912 - 

via Futurism and the Past

"Destruam et Aedificabo"
Joseph Proudhon's motto, of contentious signification, 

quoted in James H. Billington's Fire in the Minds of Men

The book first attempt to produce a working definition of modernity, in anthropological terms, as a gaping hole left in the ideological fabric of the West, a 'black hole' absorbing mankind's virtus and high-minded ideals. This rotting corpse left over from God's aborted funerals exhale an angsty stench that has fueled many artistic and ideological movements since the Enlightenment. Escaping this dire metaphysical condition, Griffin's modernists experience sparse but intense epiphanic moments, timeless and overwhelming mystical experiences flowing often from Modernity's very heart, and, on the late, set out to construct a world that could render this extra-temporality permanent. 

The construction of atemporality is found to justifies the dual fascist (and modernist) imaginary, often perceived as paradoxical: futural and modernist on the one hand, arcadian, pastoral and sometimes primitive on the other.

Throughout the book he presents his reader with several compelling examples of the oft occulted relationship between modernism and fascism in art and design, from which, for example, I borrowed here. As confirmed by the rich bibliography he provides, the association of fascism with modernism is not as rare he sometimes make it out to be: the real and riskier thesis of his book lies elsewhere, namely in the atavistic interpretation of modernism itself, as the cultural dynamic that spawned and sustained fascism.

Modernism is a movement, loosely defined and certainly blurry on the edges, but none the less recognizable - where it becomes problematic is in identifying it's source and it's logic, since it is undeniably bound up to modernity, not unlike fascism itself: either through conscious identification, or as hostile reaction. Griffin attempts to outline an image of programmatic modernism that transcends the modernist/reactionary duality, but it sometimes feels like somewhat of a pragmatic reaction, attempting by the means of modernity to reconstruct a pre-modern ideal. In order to encompass the cultural pessimism admittedly axial to any interpretation of the development of fascism, Griffin I believe favours the second interpretation, that of modernism being a reaction, to modernity, and to that pervasive 'low-brow' form of secularization Weber coined the 'disenchantment of the world'. 

If modernism was often elusive a concept, modernity is one broad behemoth of a notion, that feels sometimes like it has been misplaced, like belonging to the 'theology shelf' rather than the 'sociology' or 'history' one: to put it differently, modernity might well have drained the world from much magic, but this only made modernity all the more numinous; 

For Griffin's fascists, modernity has robbed the West of it's certainties, of it's meaning and of it's purpose: deprived from an integrated, coherent and self-contained representation of the world, man cannot ward off any longer the ever-present existential terror inherent to his condition as a sentient being. Modernism, the author finds to be a nebula of attempted solutions to this spiritual crisis, particularly acute under the raging capitalism of XIXth century Europe. It manifests itself either in epiphanic form (essentially the contemplation of this numinous modernity I referred to earlier), or, more importantly for the subject of the book, in programmatic fashion, that is as an organized attempt at constructing wholly a re-enchanted world, to forge anew the 'Great Chain of Being' with which to fetter anew the world as it stands.

This is what Griffin calls political modernism, a concept that we could to define away from the ageing tropes of totalitarianism so as to integrate Zionism for example, or democratic nationalism in the colonies. In my eyes this notion, if indirectly treated, appear to be one of the cores of the book's many headed hydra, and it is easy to picture how comparative analysis of political modernism might bring crucial new concepts to the table. 

The other core concept I think is the characterization of fascism as essentially modernist - but a modernism that is not merely an isolated, self-conscious and indulgent aesthetic aping, but a 'primordial', universal and heartfelt reaction to an existential condition. This approach the author wants to be a solution to the perceived "aporias" of fascism, as resolving the paradoxes that have now for decades eluded or polarized scholarship.

This is a courageous stand point, the polar opposite of the still often encountered pathologisation of fascism, and if it by no means justifies or sympathizes with fascist ideology, it also ensures to keep at bay any assertions of fascism's "exceptionalism", in it's psychological or sociological forms. 
As to the resolution of fascism's paradoxes, I am maybe less convinced, as I have come to think of at least some fascist thinkers  as self-consciously, -perversely, even- paradoxical (NR in particular, but also cultural pessimists/traditionalists, and some of the artistic 'fellow travelers', all of which hold a preponderent position in Griffin's narrative). In his interpretation, the modernist, utopian drive, essentially pictures a sort of palingenetic Progress as transcending time to bring about a world where physical and cultural technology has largely been abstracted. This, to me, fails to address to it's full extent fascism's refusal of progress, and their embrace of paradox as transcendence  This would take into account the instrumentalisation of anti-enlightenment thinkers (Joseph de Maistre etc.) of many fascist or proto-fascist movements (for example Action Française) and the theological elements sometimes construed as rhetorical. 

The modernist and fascist peculiar fusion of utopian and arcadian imaginaries is not fully explained by their alleged striving for an extra-temporal, permanent civilization: anarcho-primitivists (by no means fascists!) for example offer an often immanent understanding of the future as a new past. In their case, as, I believe, in some manifestations of fascist (often volkish) thought, it is not progress that is understood to abstract from contemporary existence an idyllic pastoral, but it's very refusal, an epoch-making process not of innovation but of brutal regression. 

Caspar David Friedrich, Zwei Männer am Meer, 1817

"Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank"

Georg Trakl, quoted by Theodor Adorno in
Spengler nach dem Untergang, 1950

Anthropology sometimes reminds me of political theology: in Carl Schmitt's often quoted "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver," one can discern the same concern with distinguishing (or establishing) a permanent order of social relations, and an integrated model of both inner and social life.
Anthropology, though, for all it's concern with tribal societies, wrestle heroically a model of change, of transformation, whereas Schmitt, Evola or even at some extent Eliades, are in search of permanence to legitimize their own modern existences, or that of particular regimes.
What Griffin's interpretation, to my surprise, does not take into account, something central to my intuition as to fascist reflexivity, is the understanding of modernity as being essentially irremediable, permanent - In the fascist spectacle, the predominance of style, as is sometimes argued, evidence acute awareness of the sheer infeasability of its project, and fully embrace the subsequent tragedy. It does not so much attempt at re-enchanting the world, as it pretends it does: the true blackness and nihilism of the fascist movement is to be found in this half-acknowledged awareness of the futility, and hence ultimately of it's mere aesthetic character, of attempting any resistance in the face of modernity, 

Griffin here and there throughout the book shows he is quite aware of the uncannily parallel trajectory an historian is bound to follow when attempting to evidence (or to conjecture) the peculiar mindset that would have presided to the development of fascism: his own narrative of this emergence, in all it’s sweeping ‘trandisciplinarity’ and reflexive essentialism, is not without analogy with the very ludic recombination, he elsewhere found to characterize the autodidact intellectuals of the New Right. Sternhell, I hear, was often to be found on the shelves of NR and radical right, but I would not be surprised would his historical work soon come to be dwarfed by Griffin's volume.

This in and of itself does not strike me as problematic in the least, but if the outcome of an informed research work by the leading scholar in the field produce an ideological map so similar to that followed by the alleged fascists themselves, we might need to add on that map some sort of indication as to this peculiar fascist self-consciousness:

Victor Turner, whom I have before mentioned in the context of the ludic metaphore, provides Griffin with the master-key to his 'primordial' interpretation of fascism and modernism interrelations: Turner, an anthropologist (famed for his advocacy of performance studies, and a close collaborator of Richard Schechner) is often remembered for his compelling interpretation of ritual and performance interrelations. 

But what Griffin lifts from Turner's vast analytical framework is a less popular assemblage, a universal typology of crisis. Turner's theory advances that every institutional response to transgressions or conflict, be it in modern or pre-modern societies, takes place in  a peculiar isolated space and time, a land of symbols and rituals both escaping the routine and crucial in maintaining it. Crucially, this enclave Turner finds to act as the 'reservoir' of social and cultural change, providing both a framework and a justification for innovation and adaptation. 
In Turner's model, when a society experience a crisis that requires change, it is often unable to effect those changes itself in it's day to day process - it needs to call for the delimitation of a special time and place, somehow situated outside of the normative boundaries of tradition, a spatio-temporal state of exception if you will, where structural changes and innovation that would elsewhere be perceived as hostile, are allowed to take place. This space and time, that of rituals but also of organized justice, is what Griffin and Turner refer to as the liminal (when it aims at perpetuating the existing order) or liminoid (when it attempts at creating a new one.)

Unknown - Yesterday and Today - 1925

“Theatre is, indeed, a hypertrophy, an exageration, of jural and ritual processes; 

it is not a simple replication of the “natural” total processual pattern of social drama. 

There is, therefore, in theatre something of the investigative, judgemental, 

and even punitive character of law in action, and something of the sacred, mythic, numinous, 

even “supernatural” character of religion action – sometimes to the point of sacrifice.” 

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 1982

Griffin sizes the well formed anthropological model as the core of his reflexive narrative of modernity - modernity becomes an extended, permanent sense of crisis, and modernism's ritual and symbolic agitation an attempt at harnessing the power of the liminoid to put an end to the modern condition.
One is bound to agree that all consideration of such titanic concepts as modernity could hardly be pursued without a narrative of sort - yet as Griffin selected, from the gigantic interconnected body of work proposed by Victor Turner (stretching from such universal conceptions as Social Drama, all the way to performative praxis of rituals in school - which in Griffin case's would admittedly be taking "methodological empathy" a step too far!) one is surprised to find he leaves out Turner's emphasis on the relation between reflexivity and performance: in ‘From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play”, he for example advances the existence of a continuum stretching between ritual, a true ‘ideal type’ lost in the midst of conjectural history, and theatre or performance, reflexive and modern. 

Griffin is well aware of the collusion between modernist theatre and political praxis (see his ‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth' or his quoting from Falasca-Zamponi) - but to my surprise, the model through which the author analyses and deconstruct both fascism and modernism gives surprisingly little credence to the development of this reflexivity: whereas he is at pains to insist on the legitimizing presence of the said reflexivity in his own narrative interpretation of modernity, in modernism and fascism, it seems that for all his methodological empathy, he did not find in the fascist train of thought, nor, more surprisingly, in the the modernist one either, enough self-awareness to address nor question the ritual pattern, the ‘eternal return’ of an atavistic concern allegedly transcending time. Reasons and excuses abound when looking at the existing scope (and size!) of the book as it is written – but I cannot help but think that, for example, the Benjaminian debate over fascism manifesting the aesthetization / sacralisation of politics would be seen under a different light if modernism, political or otherwise, came to be interpreted as a spectacular and performative (if not downright parodic) re-enactment of a fabled, yet total and coherent golden-age.

But let's be honest: I am pretty glad he left that much out, because as those who will or have read the book might notice, there is little on this blog that could pass as anything else than a paraphrase of Pr. Griffin in general, and of this one book in particular! 

All That Is Solid Melts into Air - Marshall Berman

"Suppose, as Marx supposes, that bourgeois forms decompose, 

and that a communist movement surges into power: 

what is to keep this new social form from sharing its predecessors fate 

and melting down in the modern air?"

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 1982

Monolithic, solid, liquid - the ubiquitous and pervasive influence of modernity has inspired an array of metaphors, so many images that reflect the peculiar interpretations of the modern as a supra-historical force. If modernism's spirituality, as I suspect, is a mystique of history, the indefinable and evasive nature of modernity calls for poetic and negative definitions, not unlike the rich paraphrase that fueled two thousand years of Christianity. 

Marshall Berman - All That Is Solid Melts into Air - 1982

Marshall Berman in All That is Solid Melts into Air apply himself at identifying the history and typology of the modern phenomenon, at producing a different theology -and anthropology- of modernity, solidly rooted in his broad knowledge of literary and intellectual history. 

If modernism is religious in character, it asks from it's students a leap of faith: although the sweeping changes to all landscapes that are described artfully in the book are undeniable, many an interpretation can seem at time to read too much in those events, to find groundbreaking novelty were others could find only the insatiable repetition of age-old conflicts. But this is hardly specific to Berman's views, in fact, it is the rule of the game.The identity between modernism and modernity that Berman seems to presuppose made me at times uncomfortable, I will prefer Paul Greenhalgh's understanding of modernism as a self-conscious phase of modernity, but if such broad concept as a monolithic modernity is to be examined, we will have with to acknowledge modernity as a force, be it a "real" historical phenomenon or at least as a cultural one, undeniably reigning over our collective imagination. 

His understanding is, and this seems to be the originality of his work, intrinsically rooted in a geographical, as well as historical, understanding of the process: the book is structured around five cities, which he presents as five types and five epochs of modernity as a process, each with their own idiosyncratic appropriations and reactions to the cultural, political and social upheavals that characterize the new era. 

Theo Van Doesburg - Arithmetic Composition - 1930

The five sections: first we are guided around the historical phenomenon of modernization by Faust and his various incarnations whom Berman agreeably identifies as the foremost metaphor of the period. The very ambivalence of modernization, offering both unlimited power and insatiable corruption of the established order of things, is highlighted as mephistophelian and, in the process ascribed the fitting role of funding myth in the spirituality he outlines. We then proceed to examine the poetics, and latent spirituality of Marx's thought: beyond the obvious themes of eschatological revolution he identifies what I am tempted to call "gaseous modernity": all that is solid melts into air, and air itself keeps on melting further and further -from air to ether most likely- modernity is here defined as the unstoppable and universal process that brings all things to an end. The process, that is in my eyes, history, is the sole permanence in this world, and therefore the inaccessible source of all transcendence. 

"For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain."

Frederick Engels Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886

quoted in V.I. :Lenin, A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism, 1914

Next comes Baudelaire and Paris, which I found to be probably the most compelling section of book, maybe because it was the subject I was the least familiar with: once again the ambivalence of the poet is found to reflect the inbuilt contradiction of modernization, albeit here one that reflects a very material and physical process rather than spiritual or ideological: urbanization. Berman artfully outlines the new spectacles that radical changes in urban life brought to European culture: the confrontation between bourgeoisie and misery, the objectification of the crowds, their links with material and consumer culture and the blossoming society of spectacle. 

We then proceeds to examine, but with a different lens, the "modernism of underdevelopement" he finds in Saint Petersburg. Here is a world apart for Berman, where the spectacle of modernity he identified in the previous chapter take a life of it's own, split from the modernization process. He proceed to identify a form of surrealism he takes to be characteristic of Petersburgian literature  where everyone, from Dostoevsky to Biely, is an ardent humanist, whose ethical concerns are best expressed not in political statements or an ethical praxis, but in their tackling of the strange and the surreal. 

The shortcomings of the soviet regime are bundled together with the autocratic rule of Tsarist Russia in an attempt at imposing "from above" the appearance of modernity, that is, it's technical apparatus, without allowing the process to bring about social and political shifts that can support it. This of course, is reminiscent of the theories ascribing the rise of fascism to Germany and Italy's late modernization, and whereas the argument certainly hold some truth in economic terms it fits awkwardly in a work that belong clearly to cultural and literary history. This results in a very idealist distinction between modernization "from above" and modernization "from below", but more on this later - for now let me just say that his depiction of Tsarist Russia could well be ascribed to his own category of the "pastorals", of fictious and mono-dimensional representations which here allow for a slightly Manichean representation. Lastly a short chapter takes un around NYC which was a compelling read on a field I have virtually no knowledge of, and on which I will therefore refrain to comment. 

Henri Cartier Bresson - Arbres en Brie - Brie - 1968

As compelling a thesis as Berman's, one is bound to have qualms with anyone's interpretation of a concept as broad as modernity. Mine comes with his notion of "Modernization from below" which emerges towards the end, as the analysis take on a more decidedly political turn. The author largely eclipses his own political views in most of the book, as a genuine "theology of modernity" owes to do, keeping them checked in all of his analyses, but it seems that when acknowledging the failure of the soviet regime he feels the need to characterize the soviet project, so as to protect the ethical viability of modernist politics. 

For him, it seems, state-led modernization such as the soviet project, or other guises of authoritarianism he hinted at earlier in the book (Hausmann's urbanism, the Goethean Faust's pursuit of modernization, etc.) belong to the family of "modernization from above", a claim I would be at a loss to reject, but which he goes on to posit in opposition with what he calls the "modernization from below". 

But the paradox he seems willing to ignore is that modernization, if taken outside of the pure field of scientific history, and as he does throughout the book, in the field of cultural history, is essentially a collective phenomenon: modernizing has been done on smaller scales throughout history, but modernity arise with the awareness of the process, an awareness that propels the phenomenon on a cosmic scale (or at least a "suprahistorical" one) and feed onto the very self-reflexivity he so compellingly outlined.

There can only be a "modernization from below" if the said "below" is taken as a group, as a collective, else none of the crucial awareness brought about by modernization will be allowed to exist. To presuppose that the "below", the undifferentiated mass of individuals undergoing modernization, can do so and reflect on the process, requires a "methodological collectivism" allowing for collective identity, wich in my eyes is bound to bring about the very normative and monolithic modernity he is also so eager to reject:

Berman attaches himself at bringing to light what he understands to be a humanistic modernity - an excruciating task no doubt, given the permanent striving of modernists to surpass the boundaries of what they perceive as an outdated concept - this leads him to focus on the self-reflexivity to be found in many of the thinkers he examines, highlighting their shared anguish and something akin to humility, in their restless criticism of everything that surrounds them, including themselves. 

The problem I perceive is that this emphasis relegates a large section of modernity, and of modernism in particular, to the realm of the pathological or reactionary, from the futurists to the CIAM. One could be tempted to absolve him on the grounds of writing in the era of post-modernism, but his animosity towards what I find to be the most stalwarts, unequivocal proponents of modernism seem to be largely an ethical biais: his fascination for the contrary impulses and the psychology of the modern thinker cannot accomodate those movements that appear to embrace modernity in all it's monolithic and crushing unity, they refuse the fragmentary mindset he set out to explore. Does this mean that he owes to deny those manifestations' fundamental modernity? I think not: if indeed self-reflexivity and dualism are characteristics essential to the radical critique (as Greenhalgh would have it) of modernity, the 'total identification' of modernists with modernity is at the very least worth more attention than he gave them. 

Anthony Gormley - Body and Light - 1990

All in all, this is one of those books, beyond all discussions of it's theoretical analysis, whose sheer culture and depth of thinking amply justifies the reading: the author sweeps across the fascinating multitude of modernisms, battles heroically with their contradictions and parting this blood-red sea leads us not to the inchoate Eden of post-modernity but in the Promised Land of a new modernity, a plural one that rely on self-reflexivity to accommodate it's inner contradictions while retaining those of it's ideals that he finds compatible with his humanistic worldview. 

The question as to whether humanism is to find it's place in modernity is probably what actually separate me from his stand point, and I would be more inclined to see in modernity, and especially in modernism, a striving for the supra-human that is bound to negate humanity as a de-facto community. 

Yet surprisingly Berman also echoes, better than most, my understanding of modernism as a religious point of view: he insists on translating Marx's use of "Geist" as spiritual rather than intellectual, and his grasp of the very self-reflexivity of modernism acknowledges the inherent mythical mechanisms involved in the process. 

My copy is scribbled all over and I can only wish there had been larger margins for me to take notes and I will no doubt both explore further many of the authors he has engaged with, and come back to the book in the future as a reference on a meaningful thinker. 

Nor the splendor of time - Antony Gormley, Model

"But what is it that I love in loving thee? Not physical beauty, nor the splendor of time, 

nor the radiance of the light -so pleasant to our eyes- nor the sweet melodies of the various 

kinds of songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and spices; not manna and honey, 

not the limbs embraced in physical love -it is not these I love when I love my God. 

Yet it is true that I love a certain kind of light and sound and fragrance 

and food and embrace in loving my God, who is the light and sound and fragrance 

and food and embracement of my inner man"

Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book X, Chapter 6

The Antony Gormley "Model" exhibition at the White Cube gallery runs from the 28th of November to the 10th of February. Most of the opinions ascribed to the artist where expressed at his discussion with Tim Marlow on the 12th of December 2012. 

Theo Van Doesburg - Study for rhythm of a russian dance - 1918

Antony Gormley's career echoes masterfully many of the concerns I have so far displayed on this blog: his work address what has been described as a return to modernity, but a re-constructed modernity, largely freed from it's inbuilt contradictions, from it's ruthless violence and it's teenage angst, leaving only the poetics of reason and the mystique of abstraction. 

Gormley is not alone in this pursuit, but whether him or the others are genuinely moved by the crushing ideals of high modernism, or whether they are content to re-enact those glory days as an heroic (if futile) last stand against the post-modern wasteland, I cannot tell. In either case they have my sympathy. 

Antony Gormley - Transfuser - 2002

Gormley's sculpture addresses many of the "traditional" themes of monolithic modernity: the multitude, harmony, abstraction, or proportions, but generally through the conceptual lens of the human body, which seems to provide him with a permanent referential around which to build his rational aesthetics. 

His new show continues in this vein, exploring the body as a space we inhabit. 

The entire exhibition is an aggregation of rectangular cuboids, in different materials (from corten to polystyrene  via wood, cast metal and plastic) and in a variety of scale, from the toy soldier to the pavillon. 

We can identify three parts to the exhibition, three main scales of work: the smaller works are all to be found in one room, which seem essentially to document the conceptual and technical process that brought us the larger works. The process in question is essentially one of abstraction, where the human body, it's shapes and it's proportions, is gradually simplified into a combination of angular boxes, much reminiscent, in it's later stages,  of Malevitch' Architekton. 

Antony Gormley - Mark - 2012

The medium scale is one more or less consistent with actual human proportions: what at first appear like an abstract accumulation of blocks reveal, at closer inspection, human bodies, playfully disposed in natural, and not so natural positions, around the gallery space, like so many dancers frozen into intimate performances, but boxed, reduced to the space they occupy. 

The third scale, and judging from the talk given by the artist, the central work, is a rather gigantic construction of metal sheets which the visitor is first invited to circle, to study as a gigantic sculpture, before being invited, like Job, to enter in a Hobbesian Leviathan. 

Perambulating inside the controlled space proves to be as compelling an experience as promised by the artist: the complex interplay of surfaces, planes and light make for many surprising vistas and interactions, prompting intense experiences mixing claustrophobia, disorientation and exploration; Like a concrete presentation of St Theresa's Interior Castle we visit a space so stripped of signification that we can project our elusive, innermost realities onto it. 

Antony Gormley - Model - 2012

Space and architecture as a metaphor for inner life is itself an important modern concept (as described by Frances Yates)  and Gormley is fond of colliding this subjective, intimate construction of psychological architecture with the harsh, brutal(ist) materiality of the world he constructs - his rhetoric allies the pervasive abstraction of mystique and Platonism with the materiality sculpture as an exploration of space. The modern meet the modernist. But ultimately his work seems to address the power of the metaphor, organic and spatial. 

The exhibition is compelling on more than one ground: for it's stretching of the boundaries of the gallery experience, as one has come to expect from international artists, but also for his very refined take on modernity, whose latent mystic and spirituality will hopefully take part in shaping the supposed revival of modernism. 

Antony Gormley - Model - 2012

Yet this very mystique can also leave one wanting: If Le Corbusier's houses were machines to live in, what is the purpose of Gormley's? The new modernist paradigm seems keen to conciliate art for art sake with pure contemplation, and when Gormley characterizes his work as a tool, as "machine" one is tempted to say, he remains elusive as to its purpose: oceanic feelings, self-exploration, or inverted allegories of the cave all sound very much contemplative in essence. 

Contemplation is an activity essentially solitary, inward and subjective, even leaving little room for the contradictory maelstrom of opinions and ideals the modern culture cater to. The very elusiveness of the absolute the artist seems to invite us to pursue leaves a gaping void in both his work and his theory, which one can only wonder at. If modernism is to be revived in all it's claims of purity and high-mindedness, not only as a style or a facade, but as a genuine, heartfelt ideal, surely tolerance, accessibility and marketability will have to make room for an absolute, transcendent telos that will suffer no contradiction.

Oskar Schlemmer - Illustration for "Man and Art Figure" - in Theater of the Bauhaus - 1925