Okay people, Have you ever wondered what the hell is a modern painting ? or a modern poetry? or story ? or lets say, anything ??? I’ll tell you what is it. For me anything modern is – anything that you can’t understand. Well, seriously. Lets consider a painting.
Can any one say what does this mean ? Well lemme tell you it neither has a start nor an ending. It is an abstract painting – a modern painting. It looks funky and good but I really cant understand its meaning. Please whoever the artist is, never mind what I said because I am just doing my job like you did i.e. writing my posts. (Am I being rude ?)
Viewers of certain paintings (like me) will kind of try to understand it in a perspective highly different from the painter. For example, I’ll say there’s this bird over there in white who sort of looks like a swan with red beak or a part of that blue paint looks like waves in water or simply water, but in reality the painter must not have painted thinking as such. He must have painted with a different thought and with a different view in mind which may or may not correspond with an actual ‘something’ in his life.
Life has just become the same, just like that modern painting above. Relations have become very flaccid. It is hard, in fact sometimes out of bounds to actually understand the meaning of a true relation, be it anything, from parents – children and husband – wife bonds to any bond in nature viable under human law. No one truly understands the meaning of any thing.
Love now has a different perspective. People hardly care about their relationships, about its longevity. They don’t really understand it at all.Yeah, it hurts them when it breaks, but they don’t even try their best to restore it. They hurt their parents over simple matters. They leave their husbands or wives for others and children are the main victims of such separations. Love has become a garbage man ! A use and throw pen. Once the ink is finished its of no use. So, once the basic feeling of love is finished, no relationship is of any use. Well, after all its a MODERN relationship ! And anything you DON’T (only in case of human bonds)/can’t understand, its modern.
You are absolutely right. Life has become so complex that we, with our own deliberate omissions and commissions make it still more complex. Sometimes we write in such a way that it is difficult for us even to decipher what was written. Simple things are not loOked by the people. May it be painting, or anything under the sun. Modernity has really taken its toll. But we have to flow with the current. We cannot oppose what is being liked by the masses. Lets flow as the wind flows or otherwise we will have to face several hurdles.
I like your post a lot. Calling this ‘modern’, however, is not quite as appropriate as calling it contemporary, and at some point in the future, that would not be apropos either. You could safely call it modernism-inspired. ‘Modernism’ (and post-modernism) refers to a specific set of creative (writing, industrial design, painting, photo arts, digital arts) movements in creativity that occurred over the course of the 20th century that generally rejected realism as subject, starting in about 1910-1930, and ending, arguably, in about 1960-1980. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism
Hmm… anything I can’t understand is modern? I can’t understand the script of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation. Neither can anyone else, yet. So it’s modern?
You’re right, though. A key issue is that we receive so much information so easily that it confuses us.
I’m thinking a lot about “modern” or “contemporary” as I just finished a bunch of books about the Pop Art revolution as response to abstract expressionism. Also thinking a lot about how language can function like paint — words dripping onto a page, not necessary in search of meaning, but working to elicit some mysterious something. We are pattern making beings, and ascribe meaning to those patterns. As for love being a throw-away commodity — we are in danger of using current high-speed ease to replace thoughtful relationship (and words) for reactive commentary. As artists, poets, viewers and readers, we can stop things and try to see what opening we can find. It’s a challenge… but not without meaning. There is the white that flowers, runs like a brook, rains out of a cloud, and bright fuchsia and colors, all of which can have associative value, linked to feeling.
What do you discover by giving your eyes a chance to focus on the colors — what patterns start to emerge — ? You might not call it “meaning” — but you will be different after such an exercise, tapping into something you wouldn’t have thought about before. Have fun with it! We learn through such play.