August 17, 2024

leaving the postmodern

Sometimes I write things that surprise me and, at my ripe old age, I now assume I must be wrong.

A younger person, a dumber person, takes shock as evidence that a discovery has been made. 

It’s easy to mistake an error for a breakthrough; both go against the grain of what is true, which in turn is simply that which has been made true by our society.

Likewise, it’s possible to be surprised by what is only “hyperlocal” knowledge; when you discover something that, unbeknownst to you, other people already have. (It’s called multiple discovery.)

Finally, how do you know if the new is true given that it is, in fact, new and thus, in some way, breaks from the structure of the old; floating off in space like a bubble. 

When does it pop? if it’s but a thin envelope of spittle. 

Or does it defy the norm and somehow last long enough to become a new navigational star?

Last weekend I wrote an earlier version of this letter that ended with such a bubble of a thought.

So I set it aside and waited for it to pop.

It did not. In fact, it has hardened and become shinier.

A Star is Born

I went to see this 1954 movie last weekend, not because I wanted to but because I had to: it was the only movie playing at the venue where I was testing a 360° sound recording technique for work. 

Here I’ll quote myself from last week: 

About 30 seconds in, I began to realize this was not what I had expected. Two minutes later, I was enthralled.

By the time the first montage of still images came on, I was ecstatic.

“Wow, this movie is so advanced!” I thought to myself.

Now, I’m not a fan of musicals. But you might be. So you might already know what I only learned hours later.

The photomontages were added in the 1980s, when the movie was restored to its original length.

Upon its release in 1954, theater owners had complained that the movie was so long they weren’t moving enough people through the box office. So the studio cut entire scenes out, which were added back as publicity stills over sound recordings in the early 1980s.

The montages of stills that had felt fresh and recent were in fact the product of a postmodern labor.

But I had believed them to be part of the 1954 release because the rest of the movie is filled with similar moments of formal and narrative panache—one of its best known sequences is a movie of a musical within a movie musical.

I went on to reason that this sublime 50 year-old movie, starring the amazing Judy Garland (fka Frances Ethel Gumm), directed by the genius Hungarian-American Jewish director George Cukor, is in fact a post modern movie, and that we are just now finally leaving its era.

I was writing this recollection while lying on my back, typing into thin air, on the Apple Vision Pro.

Surely it was this material reality that inspired my moment of “revelation”, which I then deleted but am now resurrecting thanks to the wonders of reversion:

Just as “the future is already here it’s just unevenly distributed”, it’s possible that the postmodern era may have come and gone in one discipline, before it does another.

As evidence, I submit that the words you are now reading first appeared in front of me as a play of mirrors, which is what Apple‘s new mixed reality computer excels at.

One of the most remarkable things about this 1954 movie is how visually inventive it is; its use of mirrors and screens is dazzling throughout.

If anything, my use of virtual reality in 2024 feels like a delayed event. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that popular stories from the 1960s through the start of the 21st-century often include the very technology that is only now barely beginning to become commonplace.

We are leaving the postmodern era, not because of the resurgence of cults of ignorance (surely, these are a constant in human affairs but primaries with a special love of reflections) but because we are now beginning to reap what we have sown.

We are just now beginning to have at hand the tools that we dreamed of 100 years ago. It will take us some time to actually make things with them.

You may be asking: “Well, Jose, what’s your proof? Where’s your evidence?”

And you have every right to demand it!

How do I know now that I was right then? (and wrong to have deleted my own conclusion)

Or, if you want to be especially cute about it, when did I know?

The Third Floor of LACMA

On Thursday, after a business meeting that I can accurately, legally describe as about rematerializing, I was invited to tour the current exhibits at LACMA. (The Simone Leigh pieces are incredible; and I am once again humbled and grateful to have been born in Cuba, a culture brought closer to the eternally perfect by the African diaspora).

I quickly walked through the Ed Ruscha paintings and realized my 12 year-old child is more than ready to enjoy their humor.

So on Friday morning, I brought both our children back to LACMA for a speedrun (the only way to dose 11 and 12 yo’s, in my opinion.) On the third floor we walked from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s and, thanks to some truly excellent curation, we witnessed the birth of the postmodern.

As I explained to our 11 yo, who is especially fond of computers and their art, these European paintings and sculptures were wireframes and low polygon models, sometimes inspired by African and Polynesian art, a full half-century before computers would produce similar if not identical work.

They had been there first. We were catching up to them.

It was then that a friend showed us Central Meridian (The Garage), a literally wonderful installation from 1981 about the mid 1950s—the same chronotope as A Star is Born.

In conversation with our 12 yo, I remarked: it’s a memory of what the future felt like, just as America was leaving its agrarian political economy.¹ The boy answered: “That’s what it said on the podium holding up the car.”)

Of course, he’d remembered it better than I did:

This is a whole lot of words to say: I believe that for the next ~50 years we’ll be building out the ideas inscribed in the art of the early postmodern era.

Where will the new ideas come from?

As always, from the mistakes that emerge in the processes of production.

Postscript

Throughout this letter I am absolutely moving the goalposts – or the milestones, or whatever metaphor you prefer – when it comes to epochs.

I’m referring to artists from the 1950s as postmodern, and basically ignoring the literature / scholarship that claims it’s 1960s on. I’ll just say one thing about that now.

The late and great Sarah Paige Baty once shared with me her personal memory of watching Fredric Jameson writing parts of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in his living room, high on stimulants (cocaine, iirc) while his little kids ran around. So it’s possible that, uh, the scholarship can be revised anon.

Footnote