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 "Modernity"
or "modernism" are names historians give to the cultural and
intellectual changes that began around the turn of the
century and culminated in WWI. Modernity could mean simply
technological change--automobiles, movies, telephones,
electric light--but it could also mean social changes. Votes
for women, the country's changing ethnic make-up, civil
rights organizations for African Americans: all these
suggested major changes in American society. "Modernity"
could also refer to changes in culture--jazz and jazz
dancing (click here to explore jazz
culture in the twenties), amusement parks and in general
the growth of leisure time industries, as well as artistic
and literary movements that pushed the boundaries of how
Americans understood their world.
Consider,
for example, Marcel Duchamp's famous painting, Nude
Descending a Staircase
Duchamp's
painting reflects a world of movement, a dynamic world of
shifting forms. Traditional portrature shows us the subject
in a frozen moment, from one perspective. Modernist
movements like cubism strained against this artificiality.
The painter's subjects, they argued, were never really at
rest. They shifted, moved, changed perspective. And even
more, technologies like movies or the telephone allowed us
to see, simultaneously, two or more different place or
points of view. Cubist painters combined the full face with
its profile, or the guitar from three angles, or like
Duchamp, painted a portrait as a record of movement.
"Modernism"
either deliberately, in the cae of painters like Duchamp, or
more accidently, as in the motion picture, tampered with the
basis of perception itself.
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