Is Modernity Our Antiquity?

"Bruno Latour wants to argue that this cult of the past - this need, at one and the same time , to conjure the past , revere it , excise it and destroy it - extends to the very heart of modernism and is in the end what undermines modernism from within...[therefor] The real problem, I suppose, is how to represent this passage (from modern to historical) without succumbing to a melancholic reverie; and moreover, how to give form to this when by its very name , modernism came to stand for those artistic forms where , metaphorically at least, the present waged a perpetual war on the past...[as such] iconoclasm was internalized as a metaphorical a priori of modernism. A sense of iconoclasm gave fuel to the latter's sense of invention and history, and in particular to how many of its leading practitioners conceived of their own work: 'Previously a picture was a sum of additions. With me a picture is a sum of destructions' (Picasso); and 'the destruction of old forms was a condition for the creation of new, higher forms' (Mondrian). Following Adorno, we perhaps need to think of the categories of decline (of old forms) less as categories of destruction, but rather as categories of transition."

Mark Lewis "Is Modernity Our Antiquity?" within "Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art" Edited by Brian Dillon p 87-88



Image: Brice Marden "Formal Marble" 2011