Child on the Cusp of Post-Modernism

My childhood was immersed,
Drowning in Modernism.

My parent’s formative art practice
Absolutely at the cutting edge
The industrial heart
The break through Bauhaus Basic Programme
1950’s Leeds College of Art
Received a tornado of European teaching.

Finally the Dessau school, Staatliches Bauhaus idealism
Made its way to the industrial
Heart of the North.

Harry Thubron brought his Knowledge – To Leeds
on the back of beer mats and cigarette boxes in the Cobourg Tavern.
His vision and skills communicated
To the ready ears of the
Students and teaching staff
At the College.

My mother agog with the new System,
the Basic Programme.

Ann was taught by Miss Noble of the
Old school as was thought.
Taught in the Art Deco style.

My mother was ready to move
Design in a new direction
Modernism arrived in
with the Bauhaus philosophy and its
inspiration brought new thoughts.

As for me myself and I
I was born
On the cusp of a decade
On the cusp of 2 houses
On the cusp of an hour

Crazy balancing act
A foot in both camps always
But never on the fence
Seeing both sides of every story
And every history.

But this is my herstory
This is the legend of me
This is the narrative of my life
This is the tapestry woven
Row by row
Slowly – so slowly but surely
The pattern is everything
It is not completed
It is not time to cut my life
From the loom.

The pattern is emerging in bloom
And my life expands and contracts
In shades and hues of ever
Changing fortune and Plot devices
showing a maze
In which the centre is not always achieved
Only to S-bend into the
Next complexity.

Back circling upwards
Passing the same point
But with a slightly different angle
To make
Modernism
This Behemoth begun in the 1890s
As with my life
I was born on the cusp of
Modernism changing to Post-Modernism.

Brought up in a household
Enthralled to the ethos of Modernism
Surrounded by paintings, engravings and jewellery
Of Modernism
The geometries, the flat planes of flatter colour
In neutral prismatic greys and earth tone
Cubism has done its work
And in the minds of young Northern
Students the palette and forms of
The continental milieu,

The expressionist paradigm
The Futurists, Dadaist, industrialist
Manifestos of Europe
Rang the same bells in the
Opened minds of art students
Surrounded by mills and mines.

It makes sense
Back turned firmly against WWII
Rejection of the values of the past
Idealist Marxist cant
Takes hold in art college leftism
In Bohemian minds.

Wanting freedom from the past
The Orphist blaze of the electric lantern
The Surrealists slide into blissful unconscious
Pulling out taboo subjects of
Sexuality, emotion, dream state trance.

How this tidal wave of Modernism
Ever reached the far flung shore
Of our front door
And seeped into colour schemes
Collections and design work.

My spirit was awakened amidst Modernism
My first objects to touch
Were modernist sculptures
I was consumed in my womb house
With Modernism so it became my touch-stone
So no other art movements mattered
As much as Modernism
So alternative feelings for new ways
Were rejected for a long time.

Post-Modernism is the thing of
My formative college days
Without taking too much notice of it
As if glancing obliquely at it
It was going on while I watched
From the bushes to see if it was safe.

Post-Modernism isn’t safe
It is unstable
It asks questions
It is always changing
It rejects
It is against
It poses danger to body and soul
If misunderstood
If taken too literally
It is chaos and must be handled wisely,

But strangely it too has had its day, 
given way to
Speculative Realism, 
the cusp is reset
and just at the tipping point between one and the other
I sit again, ready for the ride.
 Image - Cobourg Tavern 1965, Leeds 
(Leodis Archive Leeds City Council)








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