The Position of Modernism in Between First and Second Modernity as Material, Social, and Discursive Process

Between documentary film and fictional cinema fall works that attempt to bridge both. How does subject-matter dealing with poverty, abjection, and marginalization get treatment that goes beyond the response always already wrapped into pieces of the narrative that the majority society has produced in the work of social differentiation?

Zygmunt Bauman says that in the governmental setup of modernity the two extremes of privilege and deprivation serves to bring the rest of society into the fold of self-regulated society that generates its dreams and nightmares on the model of those who are assigned the structural position of excess and lack in terms of social distribution of chances for leading lives that are on one hand desired and on the other hand abhorred.

Possibly, the question is born at the conjunction of theory with the after effect of watching the films that rarely get beyond the circuit of festivals, biennial screenings, and art house distribution, which makes them public at the same time as it puts them out of effective reach by the mainstream audience. The question of the archive as virtual construction with components that conjoin in equal measure social, discursive, and material may shed light of the question of the importance of such limited interventions as are the films that go back to the premise of the social realism and avant-garde that rather than entertain seeks to shake its audience out of complacency.

Rather than being merely different the impact of art on the larger society of necessity draws in its force on the very same components that curtail its effectiveness. The analyses of avant-garde propose that art that has reached that stage in its history has confronted thereby the limit conditions of its autonomy in the bourgeois society that permits freedom of expression within the institutionalized confines of museums, galleries, theaters, libraries and cinemas.

However, once the material side of the movement of modernity towards modernism is brought into account the dilemmas of autonomy and involvement that the very conditions of existence of art maintain in permanent relevance may begin looking different from the stalemate that the discourse on artistic autonomy seems to consign the efforts to bring art into concert with developments lying outside its exhibition spaces. In material terms the very spaces for the exhibition of art have to be built for that express purpose, should the mass audience be sought for the works that their creators want to make public.

While the historical discourse on museums stresses generic features of the practice of showing of things in public, the material conditions for gaining large scale exhibition venues for common use have only arisen with the decisive entrenchment of changes that in their sum have become constitutive of the first modernity as formation having social, economic, and political underpinnings. In this light the reclamation of the Louvre Museum as civic institution rather than the royal palace is more indicative of the revolution in the conditions of capital accumulation than it is of the gains for the fledgling French republic in public space since before the last decade of the eighteenth century the command of the material forces that went into erection and upkeep of architectural spaces on the scale of the Louvre were only available to the person occupying the pinnacle of the rigid social hierarchy that pre-revolutionary ancien regime enshrined.

Whether the intuition of the national museum that Louvre has become is also reflective of the ideological need for legitimization of the then newly ascendant republican regime or not, the work of ideology that monumental structures perform has little to do with the substantive nature of the political regime around these structures. For that reason, the material history of the museums can probably more felicitously mapped onto the preconditions for the creation of the wealth of nations than onto the rise of nationalism, as it has more commonly has been.

In the heyday of nationalist movements the whole constellation of sites, sights, and statements has been commanded into the production of the anamorphic illusion of the incontrovertible existence of the nation that only came into its naturalized own in the mirror of the bourgeois self. As the larger situation in which the bourgeois society has gone on to reproduce itself has changed over the course of movement from the first industrial revolution towards the host of revolutions in the growing number of fields the very nature of the connection between the self and the spaces where it was supposed to find its naturalized reflection has underwent changes that justify the introduction of second modernity as term of reference with which sense can be made of the spaces of the disorganized capitalism of the world operating as a single unit.

Thereby the assemblage of the social forces within which art becomes institutionalized in the spaces it does adds to the existing material dynamics that has conjured the productive forces for their construction in the first place. The spectacular growth in the number of museums worldwide, as well as in the countries of the First World specifically, has largely escaped theorization. That leaves room for venturing a hypothesis that the saturation of the urban space with places that are capable of lending themselves to ideological uses can bespeak of the uses for ideology that fall out of conventionally conceived critique of ideology.

In this point I concur with Scott Lash that a new kind of social critique has to be offered in order to adequately account for the changes that the transition from the first modernity to the second has as its precondition. Specifically, it may call for theorization at the speed at which certain significant events are occurring. Such real-time theoretical activity finds its paradigmatically contemporary to the moment of writing expression in blogging when journalistic reportage from around the world provokes the reaction that brings conceptual framework and the information on actual developments into confrontation.

From this perspective the third dimension of the discussion - that of the discourse - gains in relief as museums gain in unprecedented degree to which they are able to dictate the terms of their integration into the daily life. At the same time the scholarly attention to museums becomes ever more important both in terms of impartial understanding of the relations of ruling within which museums have to operate in the second modernity and in terms of cultural map making that different agents in the field of art would appropriate for their purposes in their turn.

In this situation I expect to bring my dealing with the contradictions of the presently occurring foundational change in the defining structures of modernity to bear upon the subject matter of the Guggenheim Museum on one hand and the international art biennials on the other. The notion of the future archive of contemporary art unites these two terms of comparison by virtue of its centrality to the issues of urban culture, minority art, and museum studies.