Bob Cotton: The Modernist Stream

This article argues that William James description of the experience of our own awareness, our sense of Self -awareness  as a stream of consciousness (in James:The Principles of Psychology 1890)  played an important role in the development of Modernism, in literature, and in the importance of collage, photomontage and serial montage in the period 1890-1930. And that the evocation of stream of consciousness still underpins much of our 'streaming media' culture of the 21st century.

Modernism and the Stream of Consciousness

The impact of James' definition of consciousness, I will argue, triggered a period of radical re-appraisal - by philosophers, neuro-scientists and artists (including visual artists and writers) of creativity itself. How might this have happened? Well first of all, such an insight would have raised several - perhaps hundreds of - questions - especially those regarding the nature of creativity itself: how do we get ideas? Why are we creative? How do inventions come about? What is creativity - the act of bringing something new into the world? These kind of questions, faced anew in the light of James' definition of how we think, would have been of special interest to any creative person, and even more especially to the members of La Bande a Picasso; that group of artists, intellectuals, poets, playwrights and critical thinkers, that both Picasso and Gertrude Stein entertained at Le Bateau Lavoir, and at Stein's own Atelier, at the numerous

Le Bateau Lavoir Studios, Montmartre, in 1967 (photo by Jack Garofalo)

I love the mish-mash of studios, apartments, work-spaces, doss-houses and meeting places in the Bateau Lavoir - this too was an important ingredient and leitmotif of Modernism - the invention of new ways of living, new ways of working, new ways of meeting, conversing, socialising - new ways that encouraged happenstance, new ideas, new work...

Fernando Colomo: still from La Bande a Picasso 2012 

Vernissage or private views she held. The Bande included an inner circle - of Andre Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque and Maurice Princet, and a wider occasional, peripatetic group that included Jean Cocteau, Alfred Jarry, Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, the dealer Vollard, and the Steins - all of them busy speculating in the early 1900s, what would a new art for a new century look like, what would it say? 

Their conversations, their arguments, their boisterous repartee, the cut and thrust of debate included the hot (talking-point) sciences - stories of the fourth dimension, of space and time, and of relativity - the impossibility of a fixed perspective, the nature of perspective itself - a dogma (or idee fixe) for artists since the Renaissance. All these issues, and of course, the spectacular simulated 'rides' of the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the current exhibitions of their own Picasso - the Cezanne retrospective, the paintings of Derain and Matisse, fresh from their summer expedition to Collioure - and the revelations of the pre-cinema movie-shows and the centime Nickelodeons with their Mutoscopes, Kinetoscopes and flick-book entertainments so au courant in the capital city of their birth. The informed babble of their discourse - shouted loud the song of their quest for new solutions, new ways of appraising these new revelations - all created a stream of ideas - a combined stream of consciousness that became the bedrock of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and Abstraction - the new arts of the Modern. 

Fernando Colomo: La Bande a Picasso 2012

Imagine this as a generational phenomenon - a megastream of consciousness - a radical reappraisal of the zeitgeist - happening all over Paris, as the poets, painters, intellectuals - and mere flaneurs - debated the astonishing rapidity of centennial cultural upheaval as sudden insights and innovations became headlines, and magazine articles and topics of conversation - and otherwise dominated the realworld social media of the time. Imagine the bubbling swell of this combined consciousness especially amongst La Bande a Picasso, where it was amplified by the huge egos and combined world-class talents of Apollinaire, Jarry, Matisse, Derain and Braque, and given gravitas and clout by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, and fiscal credibility by Ambrose Vollard. 

Might this torrent of creative consciousness not have underpinned, catalysed and cascaded Cubism and Fauvism upon the expectant and thirsty for change culture of Paris and Montmartre? The evidence is circumstantial I confess - but what circumstances! When else had the cultures of science, art and technology collided together like this? And you would cite the Renaissance I know, where the adoption of Moorish perspective and German moveable typeface print technology had stolen God's own viewpoint and made it the possession of monocular stationery man, and Calvinist man too, and set in train all the chains of repercussions noted by Marshall McLuhan and Elizabeth Eisenstein as they examined the full impact of Print on the emergence of modern Europe..

(this is work-in-progress, to be continued...

Elizabeth Eisenstein: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 volumes 1980)

"Originally published in two volumes in 1980, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science."

(Googlereads.com)

I found this a perfect - and highly detailed - companion to McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy - Eisenstein covers the import and scope of Print - McLuhan the impact on our human sensorium...