METAMODERNISM

Historical development of the term

The term metamodernist appeared as early as 1975, where Zavarzadeh used it to
describe a cluster of aesthetics or attitudes which had been emerging in American
literature since the mid-1950s.[1]
By 1999, metamodernism was being described as an "extension of and challenge
to modernism and postmodernism" with the aim to "transcend, fracture, subvert,
circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and
postmodernity".[2] In 2002, metamodernism in literature was described as an aesthetic
that is "after yet by means of modernism. a departure as well as a perpetuation."[3][4]
The metamodernists' relationship with modernism was seen as going "far beyond
homage, toward a reengagement with modernist method in order to address subject
matter well outside the range or interest of the modernists themselves."[3]
In 2007 metamodernism was described as partly a concurrence with, partly an
emergence from, and partly a reaction to, postmodernism, "champion[ing] the idea that
only in their interconnection and continuous revision lie the possibility of grasping the
nature of contemporary cultural and literary phenomena."[5]

Vermeulen and van den Akker

In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker
proposed metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate.[6][7] In
their essay Notes on Metamodernism, they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by
the return of typically modern positions that did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets of
the 1980s and 1990s. According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived
of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism", characteristic of cultural
responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political
instability, and the digital revolution.[6] They asserted that the postmodern culture of
relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological
condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.[8]
The prefix "meta-" here referred not to a reflective stance or repeated rumination,
but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between opposite poles as well as
beyond them.[6] Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure
of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum
swinging betweeninnumerable poles".[9] According to Kim Levin, writing in

ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy,
sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and
techne."[8] For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives
are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love
not necessarily something to be ridiculed."[10]
Vermeulen asserts that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophywhich
implies a closed ontologyas it is an attempt at a vernacular, ora sort of open source
document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political
economy as much as in the arts."[10] The return of a Romantic sensibility has been
posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den
Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan
Ader, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Kaye Donachie, Charles Avery, and Ragnar
Kjartansson.[6]

Cultural acceptance
In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York acknowledged
the influence of Vermeulen and van den Akker when it staged an exhibition entitled No
More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism, featuring the work of Pilvi Takala, Guido van
der Werve, Benjamin Martin, and Mariechen Danz.[11]
In March 2012, Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin curated Discussing
Metamodernism in collaboration with Vermeulen and van den Akker, billed as the first
exhibition in Europe to be staged around the concept of metamodernism.[12][13][14] The
show featured the work of Ulf Aminde, Yael Bartana, Monica Bonvicini, Mariechen
Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Andy Holden,
Sejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J.
Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Rnkk.[14]
In his formulation of the "quirky" cinematic sensibility, film scholar James
MacDowell described the works of Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Miranda
July, and Charlie Kaufman as building upon the "New Sincerity", and embodying the
metamodern structure of feeling in their balancing of "ironic detachment with sincere
engagement".[9]
The 2013 issue of the American Book Review was dedicated to metamodernism
and included a series of essay identifying authors such as Roberto Bolao, Dave Eggers,
Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace as
metamodernists.[15][16] In a 2014 article in PMLA, literary scholars David James and
Urmila Seshagiri argued that "metamodernist writing incorporates and adapts, reactivates

and complicates the aesthetic prerogatives of an earlier cultural moment", in discussing

twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.[17]
Professor Stephen Knudsen, writing in ArtPulse, noted that metamodernism
"allows the possibility of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of
subjectivity and the selfLyotards teasing of everything into intertextual fragments
and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of
modernisms virtues."
In May 2014, country music artist Sturgill Simpson told CMT that his album
Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had been inspired in part by an essay by Seth
Abramson, who writes about metamodernism on his Huffington Post blog.[19][20]
Simpson stated that "Abramson homes in on the way everybody is obsessed with
nostalgia, even though technology is moving faster than ever."[19] According to J.T.
Welsch, "Abramson sees the 'meta-' prefix as a means to transcend the burden of
modernism and postmodernism's allegedly polarised intellectual heritage."[21]
In November 2014, Garazh Museum of Contemporary art introduced an
exhibition "Russian performance: a Cartography of its History" including Summer Radek
art group that were formed and influenced by the ideas of metamodernism.

The Metamodernist Manifesto

In 2011, Luke Turner published a Metamodernist Manifesto.[21] The manifesto
recognised "oscillation to be the natural order of the world" and called for an end to "the
inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical
insincerity of its antonymous bastard child."[21][22] Instead, it proposed metamodernism
as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and
knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of
disparate and elusive horizons."[23] The text cited the work of Vermeulen and van den
Akker, and concluded we must go forth and oscillate![24][10] Turner later credited his
manifesto to the actor Shia LaBeouf as part of the pair's wider artistic collaboration.
In early 2014, Shia LaBeouf embarked on a collaboration with Turner and Nastja Sde
Rnkk, described by Dazed as a multi-platform meditation on celebrity and
vulnerability, and referred to by the collaborators as metamodernist performance art.[27]
This included a performance in a Los Angeles gallery entitled #IAMSORRY, in which
LaBeouf sat for six days silently crying in front of visitors, wearing a tuxedo and a brown
paper bag over his head emblazoned with the words "I am not famous anymore"