View from Notre Dame. Scattered thoughts.

While reading the TJ Clark selection, I couldn’t help but wonder what a 22nd century intellectual might have to say about 20th century subway tag graffiti or indie underground stencil art’s awkward declarations of tenderness or furtive love. What does it all mean? What does it all mean.
He summarizes his point succinctly when he says that “capitalism was coming to determine the main motions of social life.” (61) The images he chose support his arguments on the whole insofar as they reflect the changing face of the city. But when he digs in deeper and extracts the painters’ thoughts and intentions from the paintings, its hard for me to think he isn’t just using the works as convenient footholds on his ascent (descent?) to deeper meaning.

Clark hints late in chapter one of The Painting of Modern Life that the “old” Paris and Haussmann’s modern Paris were both illusions; “Those who looked back to the life of the quartier were fond of calling it the real Paris…Of course their descriptions were formulaic…[and] became in time as tiresome as the baron’s hacks’ exulting at modernity.” (52) But surely neither Paris existed as clearly or neatly delineated as he would have us believe.
The good old days. These modern times. We objectify, reduce, classify. Clark talks of classes; bourgeoisie, lower classes. Workers in industry. Entire groups of people corralled, reduced to a historical nomenclature. He talks about these people and their times in overly defined terms. As if they really existed in the kind of one-dimensional cartoonish shape he would like to give them.

I also thought of the Mission in San Francisco. In the heyday of the dotcom boom wealthy whites moved in to the blue collar Hispanic neighborhood en masse, driving up rents and driving out much of the local residents and businesses. Although there was no particular architect such as Haussmann, it was still driven by commerce. There were protests, mostly by other white people, of the gentrification of the neighborhood. Scarcely a week went by without a story in either of the local weekly papers. There were loud shouts about “old,” “genuine,” “real.” What was new was somehow less worthy, had less flavor or less inherent value. It’s an old argument, often repeated. And there was the art. There were murals showing a proud heritage on the one hand, and on the other the more “modern” art found in the many tiny galleries that popped up in the area, on the streets themselves and hung on the white walls of live/work lofts. Both “sides” making and reinforcing their own myths. Classic, hip, cultured, value, new, old, good, bad. Was Van Gogh a cultural commentator with “The Outskirts of Paris,” or did he simply feel a certain affinity for the place….did it have a more personal meaning to him? I wonder….