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Ring out the NOISE, ring out the FUNK
The arts go in search of a 21st-century ism
By Ed Siegel
It is no accident that two of the movies nominated for Academy Awards at the end of the millennium look back to Elizabethan times. As we hurtle toward 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer) with the anxiety of Stanley Kubrick's about-to-be-reborn astronaut, artists in almost every genre are finding it necessary to look back in order to look ahead.
There is a sense throughout the art world that the progress of the 20th century has been too noisy and chaotic, even too academic in the sense that art has become severed from the everyday lives of people. The question in many cases seems to be not where do we go from here, but where did we go wrong?
Thus in classical music we have the repudiation of serialist or atonal music as classical composers and conductors strive for the tonality that ruled from Bach to early Stravinsky. Similarly, Wynton Marsalis has led a whole movement of jazz artists who reject both free jazz avant-gardism and jazz-rock fusion in order to bring back to the fore jazz's roots in blues and swing, from Louis Armstrong to early John Coltrane. Even in the nouveau world of hip-hop, the ascension of the talented Lauryn Hill doesn't represent a radical extension of rap, but a fusion of hip-hop rhythms with more melodic forms like reggae and R&B. Meanwhile, Elvis Costello goes knocking on Burt Bacharach's and Tony Bennett's doors and swing is king among rock stars like Brian Setzer. ''Ragtime'' and Julie Taymor's ''Lion King'' reject the artiness of Stephen Sondheim and the faux artiness of ''Les Miserables'' to reconnect to a more tuneful, as well as tonal, form of musical theater.
All this looking back in music and in other artistic idioms conjures up the second-dirtiest word in the English language you can call an artist - conservative. (The worst? Reactionary.) The aim, though, isn't to live in the past, but to tap back into it in order to march ahead with a new spring in one's artistic step.
We even find the same thing going on these days in the worlds of popular culture and politics. Take the feminist furor with programs like ''Ally McBeal'' and novels like ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' which in themselves can be seen as a post-feminist, Camille Paglian rebellion against '60s dogma. The movie ''Pleasantville'' is widely seen as a rebuke of 1950s conformity, but the movie also shows the '90s as having lost touch with the glue that held families and communities together. ''Everybody Loves Raymond'' yearns for the family ties of the '50s, while acknowledging that family life is, and was, more dysfunctional than idyllic.
France, at the moment, is in culture shock over Michel Houellebecq's slashing look at the excesses of the 1960s in his new book, ''Les Particules Elementaires'' (''Elementary Particles''). What is significant is that these criticisms aren't coming from George Will, but from nonideologues like Houellebecq or liberals like Robert Hughes, art critic for Time magazine
Looking back in skepticism is nothing new in the world of art - or the world at large - at the end of a century. Romanticism rejected the over-intellectual excesses of classicism early in the 19th century just as modernism in the 20th rejected the over-emotional excesses of romanticism. Now, it seems, modernism has gone too far into the seemingly opposite poles of academicism and triviality. To walk up the slope of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, for example, which has early-20th-century work at the bottom and contemporary at the top, is to make a pilgrimage from genius to junk.
What Hughes says in his conclusion to ''American Visions,'' the book that accompanied the PBS program about American art, could apply to all art at the end of the century: ''The sphere of the visual arts is fatigued, and its model of progress - the vanguard myth - seems played out, hardly even a shell or a parody of its former self. This, however, only seems unnatural or disappointing to those whose expectations have been formed by vanguardism. Cultures do decay; and the visual culture of American modernism, once so strong, buoyant, and inventive, and now so harassed by its own sense of defeated expectations, may be no exception to that fact.''
The late Stephen Albert, a classical composer, used to say that the modernist giants had stretched things to the breaking point - James Joyce with stream of consciousness writing, Pablo Picasso with his various schools of nonrepresentational art, Igor Stravinsky's and Bela Bartok's dissonant music, along with Friedrich Nietzsche's and Sigmund Freud's attempts to go beyond good and evil.
Those who tried to go further went so far into abstraction that they cut off the narrative thread that art had traditionally given to people's lives. The one constant that seems to prevail among all the arts today is an attempt to return to a more narrative structure. Stream of consciousness writing is practiced by very few writers today; the same goes for serialism among composers. How many of today's critically-acclaimed filmmakers practice the surrealism of Federico Fellini or the symbolism of Michelangelo Antonioni?
Which isn't to say that the influence of modernism doesn't remain. There are remnants of Joyce or Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness in Toni Morrison's ''Beloved,'' to name one example. Plays like Don DeLillo's ''Valparaiso'' at the American Repertory Theatre show there's still life left in a rigorously modernist aesthetic, particularly when - as if to put bookends on the 20th century - it's paired with a fierce contemporization of Henrik Ibsen's ''Master Builder.'' Ingmar Bergman's bleak Swedish landscapes are reconfigured in the two films made from Russell Banks's novels, ''Affliction'' and ''The Sweet Hereafter,'' (even if Bergman at his bleakest makes those films look like ''Beach Blanket Bingo'').
Still, the divorce that the severest forms of modernism engineered between the concerns of average men and women and those of artists left a void that pop culture has been only too happy to fill. If Arnold Schoenberg, the father of serialist music, and his disciples are to be blamed for driving people in search of contemporary music from classical music halls, artists in rock, jazz, and world music were welcoming them into their camps.
Which leaves the question: Should serious 21st-century artists shun the world of popular culture or make an accommodation with it? To follow the first path risks the elitism engendered by modernism; to follow the second risks the triviality that DeLillo skewers in ''White Noise,'' where Elvis studies have the same, or higher academic cachet as courses on Melville.
Nevertheless, the influence of popular culture on the contemporary arts scene is incontrovertible. The playwright Tom Stoppard seems like the prototypical 21st-century artist. His play, ''Arcadia,'' looks backward to Lord Byron and ahead to the end of the world, combines the best of all isms - a classical narrative structure, a romantic attitude, and 21st-century concerns. While ''Arcadia'' delights the intellegentsia, ''Shakespeare in Love'' connects both Stoppard and Shakespeare to as wide an audience as one could hope for - even if the movie itself is not much more than a charming diversion. The avant-garde Taymor working for Disney before going off to film Shakespeare's ''Titus Andronicus'' is another case in point.
The only ism that seems to hold sway these days is eclecticism. As Stoppard has one foot in the Royal National Theatre and another in Hollywood, a classical composer like Christopher Rouse can tip his hat to Led Zeppelin in one piece and Stephen Albert in another. There are only six degrees of separation from world music's Caetano Veloso to rock's David Byrne to minimalist Philip Glass to classical violinist Gidon Kremer to tango composer Astor Piazzolla to cellist Yo-Yo Ma to classical composer Richard Danielpour. Do these categories makes sense anymore? Less and less.
The Public Theater in New York, under George C. Wolfe, has adopted an all-inclusive aesthetic that has room for virtually any intelligent playwright or director, be they of the modernist ART stripe or more classical Huntington Theatre camp. (And that aesthetic is mirrored in the age and color of its audiences, which are neither as white nor as old as most theater audiences.)
The culture wars raging today are the inevitable result of new patterns of immigration in the country as well as a shrinking of the planet in general. We may debate whether standards are being lowered to make room at the Eurocentric table for Asian playwrights or Inuit visual artists, but the international melting pot has resulted in fascinating hybrids, from Salman Rushdie's novels to Lou Harrison's music, both an almost seamless incorporation of Eastern and Western values - not to mention classical as well as contemporary values.
Another strain that is apparent as the year 2000 approaches is religion. Are there ''Angels in America'' as Tony Kushner posits in Part 1 of that play, ''The Millennium Approaches'' only to answer, no, in the conclusion, ''Perestroika.'' Still, if the century began with artists frustrated at the silence of God, if not the absence of God, it seems to be ending with a striving toward a form of spirituality that is also basically eclectic in nature. Mysticism is particularly strong among Eastern European composers like Arvo Part; new-age composers look to nature; and rock stars like Madonna and Alanis Morissette head toward Buddhism. And everyone is ''Touched by an Angel,'' from CBS Entertainment to Wim Wenders, the severe German film director who made two films, ''Wings of Desire'' and ''Faraway, So Close,'' about angelic intervention.
Whether this spirituality results in anything significant artistically, or if it is merely symptomatic of end-of-the-millennium anxiety remains to be seen, as does everything else about the 21st century. We may not be around to see what ism or isms define the times, but there won't be any shortage of vantage points from which to watch what looks like a fascinating competition.
Ed Siegel is the Globe's critic-at-large.
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