Let me try to explain 'Painting Modernism' for today, as both in the 21s century and as a movement for the last 3 centuries: It has always been an experiment under inquisitive eyes, and experimental, but you can distinguish the 19th, the 20th and the 21st centuries as both mutations and re-evaluations there has always been 'consolidation', new terrain as well as ground breaking material. It has never been solely about being the centre of the avant-garde! But here we go: This may demonstrate that firstly, that it is distinctly individualistic and therefore its longevity is based upon the principle of upgrade and not re-hash! Paint with the next page' beyond our control, even though bog-standard materials of brush, paint and canvas may imply slow progress met with instant unpredictability of a brushstroke that can lose or win an outcome! But if Painting were likened to the English language and was spoken all over the world, yet written entirely in local and regional phonetics, the world would be connected by speech in English but would be phonetically very different. You'd not just have multiple accents in English but you' d have multiple spellings of English too. Phonetics would be the only division in the written form of English. You'd have German English, Brazilian English, Chinese English, Indian English etc even if the English alphabet would be used!!
Now to some, how much richer would the English language be if there was a common English-speaking tongue and yet a unique individual written form!! To some purists this may be like sacrilege, and yet we would retain not just global language communication but retain our distinctive individuality from all parts of the world! Yet reaction may persist, and many original writers of English may become nationalistic or extend the 'hand of globalisation' too far! But hasn't the English language always been evolving from Chaucer to DH Lawrence? Or will traditionalists hold on to their piece of English territorially or would Joyce and T.S Elliot behead English written permanence, or empty all their potential on overcompensating atonal language that fractures and disintegrates the essence of the meaning of the written word? Now imagine Modernist Painting was both the written and spoken word in English, can we understand how contradictory or over complex would lead to overshooting all possibilities and making nonsense of the original intention! It would consume itself! In short, how would you know if there was too many brushstrokes' or not, without getting confused by such conflict? Wouldn't you try to manage the self-cannibalism and protect visual meaning by rejecting absolutists of orthodoxy and radical subversion by reverting to encouraging a different language (Art medium) that doesn't risk and doesn't self-deconstruct?
So Shock replaced Painting and Conceptual Art replaced the materials of canvas brush and paint that advanced tech and digital potential until international fears of high tech, social media, digitalisation with Al becoming mobilized for military purposes from regions of the world that present the world with an existential threat! Time for Paint, brush and canvas to rescue us from the hazards of a toxic Sovietism and nationalism with Capitalism!
BRICS present a problem and a solution that the West will have to accommodate, but can the West restore itself culturally as well and recognize that the end of one stage of the Cold War is over but the next stage hasn't begun to disarm Soviet Chinese ambition or Russian Federations isolationist 21st century's territorial expansionism! Is this a fair reflection of a shift of tectonic plates illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and the global superpower of Marxist China that only acquired a two systems economy to maximalize and fund its tiger economy and industrialise competition especially with the Al of the USA, clearly to outstrip it as the largest global economy, whilst still advocating Marxist Leninist Communist orthodoxy coordinated by an aggressive centralized state! So political expediency of the West's cultural subversion of Soviet Cold War socialist Realist absolutism has been met with 21st century use of political expediency of the Chinese adoption of Capitalism as a means to increase its 'real estate footage' as well as creating an international cultural market for a burgeoning Western influenced Contemporary Art scene that attracted great Western investment potential and didn't depend on ancient and modern Painting whilst extending its dogmatic demand of all Chinese citizens to transform themselves by a national dictat to entrepreneurialise, in order to never have to conform to a global liberal deregulated market economy in which China can't compete with its ideological and technical rivals! How long will Marxism take time-out this time? So the Soviets have a huge labour force are already mining Africa for it minerals a and is now the second biggest economy in the world capable of terrifying the West by its great leap forward in technology' that has already happened, and has diversified its home grown talents by international experience via incentivising Chinese students to learn all ways Western as well as reinforce the South-East Asian Dream of a fortified economy capable of withstanding its own vertiginous economic growth since the end of the Soviet Union!! Has the UK done the same to access new markets too? Are we keeping up? I'm convinced that we have not been ready for the quantum leap of peasant-based rural China of the Cultural Revolution to exciting but patriotic stars of the technological revolution under our non-competitive noses, who are maximizing their economic potential for the 'great glory of patriotic but Communist China!' Is this why Putin's Russia has invaded Ukraine? To keep up with and gravitate towards ' Time-out Marxist Jones'?
Meanwhile we are clinging to our post RBA's of the 1990s whilst the untapped potential of Painting remains bleeding out on the Top Table of Art elite's altar, when we should have engaged a cultural surgeon to remove the shrapnel from our wounds, and not getting all retrospective about reality TV, (Big Brother and Gladiators etc.) as well as popularist favourites such as the X Factor or Britain's Got Talent "Soon to be upgraded"!!! But do we want 'Cool Britannia' back let alone its New Labour lot?? Never was our Painting Community in the UK more needed to bump start the wagon of Painting .......just so we can fall off it in a couple of decades!?? But Painting is our trump card, our big player that even though was being rejected by the Art Top table as an intervention( too far in my opinion), the invisible hand of the Painter was so entrusted to break the cultural hold and deadlock of Socialist Realism and Western relativism by being rejected by most outlets in the West and extracted from the Eastern Bloc by taking the form of 'old hat', it remains new and true to our era, and is the epitome of anti-technology without being Luddite that, despite appearances, is our human common denominator that can absorb our era without demanding any status or concession - can that be said of all our Art media? Or not? You decide.
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