Looking at Modernism in the broadest terms of design - anything that isn't art; film making, photography, graphic design. Modernism has a set of unifying characteristics across all practices responding to the effects of modernity and the modern world. Usually an attempt to embrace the modern but sometimes there are critical pieces about modern techniques and technologies, making images responding to the sensations and energies and atmosphere of the modern world. The way in which the modern world allows us to discover ourselves; a fractured sense of self, missing sense of self and ordering the chaos. Sensory overload in the modern world, re-instigating order and structure. Responding to the qualities of the modern onslaught.
Modernism doesn't re-appropriate historic qualities. Modernistic qualities want to make things better, pushing forward and inventing, creating the new. Looking at the ways of making, finding new ways of making, visually communicating, celebrating the things in their very materiality. Modernists embrace the brave new world and all of its trappings; concrete, steel, gadgets, cameras and so on. New paint technologies. What modernists do is celebrate the materials and let them look as they are. Modernist painters don't make pictorial pieces but let something sit on the canvas as it is.
Modernist film making explores the beauty of shutter speed and light effects with a truth to materials. Alfred Steiglitz - In The New York Central Yards (1905). This blew people's minds at the time and they thought the trains as going to come out of the screen! Strange to think of now... Etienne Jules-Marey - Running Man (c. 1880's) explores a sense of self. Form follows function. Modernist design places functionality before aesthetics. You solve a problem with your design and solve it efficiently. That will have a beauty in itself rather than having beauty imploded onto it. Reason and rationality before the romantic. The beauty comes from the elegance of it serving its purpose.
Aesthetics of minimalism. Little fuss going on. In many ways we are still in that now. Modernist practices aim to create a neutral but universal language of culture; utopian, brining the world together, where there is one style of making, one mode of visual communication common across the entirety of the planet. Social project. You get style of making that don't look like they belong to any country; belonging to any. No Roman font or Serif decorations. No baroque decoration. Great exhibitions, expos and culture wars to show off dated at the height of modernity. Not modernist. No truth to materials, not about functionality of items, not international, looking backward to classical culture.
There was a particular style of making in the Bauhaus, where LCA is modelled on the same design, which is modernist -stripping everything down to its basic bare essentials. The essence of their practice can be found in the spoon, knife and fork as we know it today. There is no decoration, it is a polished material but is allowed to look beautiful on its own terms in its own simplicity. What is created here is an aesthetic that doesn't belong to any particular place or time. One of the big criticism of the modernists was others creating work that was stylish, on trend, fashionable... The problem is that fashions come and go. If you design to capture a style in the future the work will look out of fashion and dated. Bauhaus artists and designers wanted to create a style of making that stripped everything down and was essentially timeless. Timelessness... We are buying new versions of this stuff almost 100 years later! "Ornament is a crime" Adolf Loos (1908).
Internationalism is another element of modernism, implementing a language of design that can be recognised and understood on an international basis; successful communication over the aesthetics and prettiness and the successful communication of an idea.
Illustration, in turn, should be about inventing and finding new ways of illustrating - not looking back to styles of drawing or painting or making that have been done before. New York is the main example of a modernist city. Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building (1958) was all about maximising space within a small rectangle of ground. Building upwards was the rational solution to have a small area of land. The square is the most efficient way, made completely of glass to let in light. Rational solutions with truth to materials, celebrating new ways of working and producing with reinforced steel and toughened glass, withstanding high winds. They revel in their glass beauty. Born out of logic, rationality and reason it has no historical ties or influences. IT is an international style where principles would spread around the world. All buildings would be the same size, quasi-communist before communism. Great harmonious fusion. The flip-side to the modernist dream was the Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds (1938 - 1978). Utopia hadn't materialised, it didn't bring about equality and things weren't always clean and shiny and new. It epitomises the failure of modernism and how it didn't work in its revolutionary ambitions.
The achievements of the modernist era are legion as seen through the Bauhaus. New type face to go with it - Future. Reinvented the way art and design was taught, in the spirit of collaboration, reinventing culture and art and design education. It was very interdisciplinary with artists teaching printmakers, photographers and film makers and sharing skills and knowledge.A fusion of diffusion in art, putting high art into everyday life. Not just principles for one-off items but integrated into everyday life; the glasses we drink from, the lights we use to see at night, the chairs and tables we sit at, interior design that decorates our living space. Life becomes a total work of art. Everything contributes to this modernist ideal and it is lived every day.
Tuber Linear steel and technologies were used to ensure function was first as seen with the Wassily Chair. It was consistent with factory line production and easy to make, available to all. Le Corbusier - Ikea are doing mass-priced cheap version of modernist design. Is that a good or bad thing? Ikea, in its essence, is definitely an embodiment of this international aesthetic. Ikea is in most countries, selling all of the same items which people think of as down to their bare essentials, affordable, functional and elegant in their ability to work well. An embodiment of design for the world. Harry Beck's London Underground Map (1933) is another great example of an international style. It is not an accurate map, but a visualisation to make it easy for commuters to understand how the lines work. It was designed for functionality to understand London travel at a glance; not to understand travel speeds or distances. All about communication and legibility. What was created was a universal language that tourists could understand and this was then taken as used in New York, Paris, becoming the standard.
Reinventing a new way of making and channeling this into a brave new world involves banding together, collaborating and making revolutions. There was a cultural expansion following the Russian revolution. Socialist revolution of the workers banding together to set up a socialist country of the USSR. Distribute the wealth, everyone would be happy and fed and that was the dream. There was no ruler to rule but to rule in the interests of the people. You can't have a style of communicating this ideal with an old style - a reinvented sense of communication needs to be created. Russia went from being a backward country to being the most culturally exciting country not he planned. They skipped a stage of development from being a backward country to putting the first man in space. That created a hyper-modernisation to their culture. People look to Western Europe usually but here Russia was, on the map.
Artists created a visual language looking to shapes, colours and structures of the modern industrial world. Looking at synthetic colours, man-made colours, distilling communication down to its simplest forms. The red wedge communicates revolutionary spirit; red symbolising the forgotten or martyred. The sharpe wedge driving through the old order, the vanguard, the progressive force, the energy driving society forwards. The Russians invented their own version of the Eiffel tower, an aesthetic of the modern. Iron girders are just iron girders and the wanted to celebrate that - art for the people. There would be three layers for libraries, lecture theatres, state offices for civil servants,, telecommunications at the top. All driven down by an axis, like the epicentre of the Earth's rotation, that would grind around and around at different speeds. Russia didn't have enough money to make it, however.
There's a fine line between having a culture with a shared vision to a grimly standardised society where no one is individual or unique. Mid to late-twentieth century soviet culture: state propaganda on shelves, the same crumbling houses. This is a sad end to a modernist dream and shows examples of how modernism failed in elements being pushed too far. When walking through modernist cities there is a lack of human and individual. It is an odd side-effect as modernist wanted to humanise people. Dehumanising and standardising. All elements of modernism. Abstract production in terms of painting or communication, pushing art and design as far s it goes, but it takes the human factor our of it. All of these are attempts to do something different.
Cultural imperialism. Times New Roman font, for the Times newspaper, directly from a Roman column. The greatness of Rome is brought to Britain - empire to empire. Nazi's used Fraktur font having connotations now of Germanic peoples, gothic aesthetics, connoting through design. A nationalistic supremacy. Nazi's shut down the Bauhaus; yet another modernist idea quashed by a regime. They were stopping a collaborative world. When looking at concrete shopping centres and cities today, it is easy to forget the equality and dream of people reaching for the impossible; utopia.
