Metamodernism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Metamodernism is a term employed to situate and explain recent developments across current affairs, critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, cinema, music, and literature which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism.
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Definitions
The term metamodernism was introduced as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate by the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in 2010. In their article 'Notes on metamodernism' they assert that the 2000s are characterized by the return of typically modern positions without altogether forfeiting the postmodern mindsets of the 1990s and 1980s. The prefix 'meta' here refers not to some reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond.
Van den Akker and Vermeulen define metamodernism as a continuous oscillation, a constant repositioning between positions and mindsets that are evocative of the modern and of the postmodern but are ultimately suggestive of another sensibility that is neither of them: one that negotiates between a yearning for universal truths on the one hand and an (a)political relativism on the other, between hope and doubt, sincerity and irony, knowingness and naivety, construction and deconstruction. They suggest that the metamodern attitude longs for another future, another metanarrative, whilst acknowledging that future or narrative might not exist, or materialize, or, if it does materialize, is inherently problematic.
As examples in current affairs Vermeulen and van den Akker cite the multiple responses (such as an 'informed naivety', 'pragmatic idealism' and 'moderate fanaticism') to climate change, the financial crisis and geopolitical instability. In the arts, they cite the return of transcendentalism, Romanticism, hope, sincerity, affect, narrativity, and the sublime. Artists and cultural practices they consider metamodern include the architecture of BIG and Herzog and de Meuron, the cinema of Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Gus van Sant and Wes Anderson, musicians such as CocoRosie, Antony and the Johnsons, Georges Lentz and Devendra Banhart, the artworks of Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Ragnar Kjartansson, Šejla Kamerić and Paula Doepfner, and the writings of Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolano and Jonathan Franzen.
Popularity
In January 2011, the German newspapers Die Zeit and Der Tagesspiegel proclaimed metamodernism as the new dominant paradigm in the arts.
In September 2010, Galerie Tanja Wagner curated the first exhibition explicitly linked to metamodernism, including the artists Mariechen Danz, Routes Award winner Sejla Kameric, Issa Sant, Angelika Trojnarski and Paula Doepfner.
In June 2010, van den Akker and Vermeulen initiated the webzine Notes on metamodernism. The webzine brings together a new generation of scholars and critics from a variety of nationalities and disciplines working on tendencies in philosophy, politics and the arts that can no longer be described in terms of postmodernism but need to be conceived of by way of another vernacular. Since the webzine's inception, it has featured the work of amongst others Niels van Poecke (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Reina Marie Loader (Exeter University), Leonhard Herrman (University of Leipzig), Nadine Feßler (University of Munich), James MacDowell (University of Warwick), Hanka van der Voet (Modelectoraat ArtEZ), Luke Butcher (Manchester School of Architecture), as well as the New York based critic David Lau.
In 2011, the artist Luke Turner published a metamodernist manifesto, calling for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child", and instead proposing "a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage."
Previous uses of the term
The term metamodernism was previously adopted by the literary theorist Alexandra Dumitrescu to describe the contemporary paradigm, the poetry of William Blake, the fiction of Arundhati Roy, Michel Tournier, and also by Andre Furlani to describe the work of Guy Davenport.
Related topics
- Altermodernism
- The Death of postmodernism and beyond
- Digimodernism
- Neomodern
- New Sincerity
- New weird generation
- Performatism
- Post-postmodernism
- Remodernism
- Remodernist film
