Pyramids at the Louvre - Glenn Watkins

A pyramid in front of the Louvre, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and "The Rite of Spring", Schoenberg and Shirley Temple - just as the odd juxtapositions of modernism produced a fresh way of seeing, so collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers another perspective on the art of this age. In creating a picture of 20th-century music and arts, Watkins's work show how much the current postmodern aesthetic owes to its modernist past.;Behind the many guises of modernism, is found an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins reveals these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin; in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Leger, Brancusi and Moguchi; in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Alain Locke; in the ballet companies of Diaghilev and de Mare; and in the performances of Josephine Baker. Throughout, the technique of collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and to promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts.;The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, Japanese Noh drama, and the "commedia dell'arte"; the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions of artists in time of war; all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of modernism. An exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism and technology, as they surface at either end of our century, this work exposes the millenial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture".