Cours n° 3

Differences and connections between the two generations:
Both were really transformed in their approach to life by the experience of WW1. The discovery of the unconscious was imposed on them through history. History could not be rationally analyzed. Progress would have to live with the reality of human’s savagery. WW1 is also a source of differences between the generations. They couldn’t even understand each other, there was no possible dialog. The oldest could keep some distance and analyze the war. The youngest, couldn’t; they discovered the world as entirely spoiled by the war (difficult to find a husband, mutilates encounters, no philosophical power to analyze it, their childhood world has completely disappeared, they couldn’t accept the words with their social meaning). They couldn’t share their experience of WW1.
But for the two, the esthetic of fragmentation was central.

Picture of Samuel Beckett’s play performance. A post modern work of art. A desert context. No visible fragmentation, no possible fragmentation.

WW2 was a new collective experience that forced artists to take into account a new human reality through profound essential questions. During and after the war, artists have come to terms with aspects of reality generally forgotten in the historical field. They have been the guardians, the keepers of all the problems that were raised by the ware and were forgotten.
The reality of extermination camps was a new version of something that had appeared in WW1 with the use of scientific technology to produce destruction. Extermination concerned gypsies, leftists, communists, Jewish and opponents to the Nazi party in general. It was a project of erasing a part of humanity. People had to live knowing that, to digest, to understand and analyze the events (that couldn’t be studied as a simple history fact). They had to face the project of exterminating extermination, the negation of it with the distorted use of words in social and politic speeches.

The reality of the atom bomb. This time, the reality and the negation of it are more subtle. It was represented through shapes (mushroom) and colors as an abstract reality. Only artists considered the reality of the experience as it was, hence Samuel Beckett’s choice to meditate on who we are and what the world is with the poverty of elements as a consequence of the collective experience. The reality was dealt with by a few scientists first, a few politicians, but by artists, playwrights, authors and painters as a regular basis on their production.
This unawareness had reasons.

Historical reasons: to obscure and avoid the debate about it, because it still exists. Unlike extermination camps, it was used by a democracy. It is more delicate to face the fact especially when we consider that the war was over and because Japan did not surrender for cultural reasons.
This reality was negated by a subtle form of negationism represented by artists only.

A woman with a supermarket troll full of food.
A new conception of the work of art. Its status had changed. In a society in which collective experience is not worded, artists were forced to impose the subject in a way that cannot be repressed nor stopped. They were to impose an image, to shock. But the question the artist asks is; is our life a real life? It was a new function of art in a new era in our society. The chances of art to survive, to maintain ideals of beauty were also questioned. Is there still room for it? Does a beautiful work of art mean something? No.

Post modern is a new form, a new use of art with a different role for the artist. It appeared in 1970s when it was obvious that pop art (1960s) had nothing in common with fragmentation and modernism.
Post modern indicates that this period has no proper name, it is just coming after modernism. There is an ambiguity with “post”= after or decadent/weaker? Because all the content came from modernism.
Photograph in London after the Blitz represents a collective experience that had transformed sensitivities. A library was bombed and people have the same attitude as before the war.