FUNNYSORRY

At the webpage of Baktruppen the following, among other things, was written:

"CLARIFICATION ON MODERNISM

At first I claimed that nobody understands modernism, and that this misunderstanding almost kill people like us because - I have to begin from the beginning.

Most people talking about modernism in art, mean Italian futurism. They talk about the kind of art always trying to get away from tradition to seem young, new, contemporary, fresh and in tune with the future.

They talk about art denying the past.

They talk about artists who cut their legs of - with the purpose of running faster and longer.

The modernists mostly did the opposite of what it is said and written that they did.

The modernists chose traditions with a larger geographical range stretching longer back in time than the artists coming before and after them, and they searched for new artistic laws to be valid for all these traditions. They probably had a bit too high ambitions in trying to find these aesthetic laws through approximately scientific methods. Thus they experimented, and found new art forms, but they did this to understand the past, not to break away from it.

Why do I fuss about this?

Because artists who always seek the new run away from their art on shorter and shorter legs in a room shrinking because society around it keeps building alliances needing an increasing amount of space. And art is put in a corner the artists defend with their own lives because they understood modernism as a kind of puerile and senile romanticism from which they could learn to forget.

Do you know that in the major encyclopaedias like the German Brockhaus, the French Larousse, the English Encyclopaedia Britannica, the American and so on not one word is mentioned about the art direction/epoch called 'modernism'? It is hard to create art corresponding to one's age when it always has to build on forgetfulness and memory loss, but it becomes easier if we refer to it as post-modernist, because it is easy to renew oneself if nobody remembers what you did the last time around.

That was about as far as I got before I got stuck, as in a TV debate, and I had to run and said 'F, were going, Eh!'."

Sources:

Baktruppen, baktruppen.org, 05.09.2010, www.baktruppen.org

The archive of Baktruppen, donated by Baktruppen. 04.03.2011