Grand Folly

Term has started again, and I went to my first class of the year on Monday. It was the core course, which I did last year. It was on the manifestos of the modernists - futurists, cubists, constructivists, the Bauhaus, surrealists, feminists, vorticists, eccentrics.

We all had to pick one we liked and talk a little about it. Now, I love the futurist one because it's so ridiculous - "O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge" - but as far as actual ideas go, the one that I remembered the most was the section from Guillaume Apollinaire's The Cubist Painters, the bit entitled "On Painting".

These are the lines:
"Poets and artists plot the characteristics of their epoch, and the future docilely falls in with their desires."
"Those you mock the new painters are actually laughing at their own features, for people in the future will portray the men of today to be as they are represented in the most alive, which is to say, the newest art of our time."

These lines set off a whole chain of thoughts:
- I like that historians look to an age's avant-garde art for the real "epitome" of an age.
- I wonder what art from today future historians will look at to get the epitome of our age.
- Can you have an epitome of an age?
- Can an age be epitomised?
- Hasn't that notion been completely eradicated by postcolonialism, and the showing up of essentialism?
- But aren't there still trends in art?
- What do they mean?
- Maybe we could talk about an era's "preoccupations"...
- But then what is an era?
- How do you aportion one?

And so on and so forth.......

And then I began thinking, wasn't modernism, all of the art, literature, events, movements, wasn't it all just a huge folly? Their whole idea was to get to the root of things, to wipe away all history, everything that came before and start again. Surely that's the grandest of grand follies?! Is art still fighting this legacy, unrooting itself from modernism, and unrooting itself from rooting?