Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics

Art historian and critic Steven Henry Madoff offers a contemporary reframing of modernist art and the way it presages installation and performance art

For more than a century, European modernist art has been written about as a profound expression of fragmentation-of an alienated world in pieces. In Unseparate, Steven Henry Madoff proposes that there was always another artistic intention present among the modernists, offering visions of wholeness in the face of the instability and alienation brought on by war and new technologies.

Blending history, philosophy, and media theory, Madoff argues that from the mid-nineteenth century-when Richard Wagner championed his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art)-to the rise of the Bauhaus, the urge to connect different art forms into single, unified works anticipates our contemporary networked culture.

Madoff revisits the artworks and projects of such leading figures of European modernism as Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, and Walter Gropius, proposing that their various ambitions for totality were both aesthetically beneficent and politically dangerous. This striking contemporary rethinking gives readers a way to understand modernism’s complex history more fully. Modernism, seen through the lens of network aesthetics and its emphasis on interconnectivity, presages many different forms of contemporary art, including installation and performance art. Further, as Madoff reveals, the modernist drive for wholeness and unity can give us a way to look at our own increasingly divisive society.

Steven Henry Madoff is the founding chair of the Masters in Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and a former senior critic at Yale University’s School of Art. His art criticism and journalism have been translated into many languages and he lectures internationally on contemporary art, curating, and education.