modernism, in religion, a general movement in the late 19th and 20th cent. that tried to reconcile historical Christianity with the findings of modern science and philosophy. Modernism arose mainly from the application of modern critical methods to the study of the Bible and the history of dogma and resulted in less emphasis on historic dogma and creeds and in greater stress on the humanistic aspects of religion. Importance was placed upon the immanent rather than the transcendent nature of God. The movement as a whole was profoundly influenced by the pragmatism of William James, the intuitionism of Henri Bergson, and the philosophy of action of Maurice Blondel. Modernist ideas were accepted in all or in part by many of the Protestant denominations, but there was also a reaction against them in the movement called fundamentalism. In reformed Judaism, especially among Americans, there developed a modernist movement resembling Protestant modernism. Within the Roman Catholic Church there was a movement specifically referred to as Modernism; it was condemned as the "synthesis of all heresies" by Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi (1907). Among the leaders of Catholic Modernism were A. F. Loisy in France and George Tyrrell in England. Vital to the Catholic movement were the adoption of the critical approach to the Bible, which was by that time accepted by most Protestant churches, and the rejection of the intellectualism of scholastic theology, with the corresponding subordination of doctrine to practice. Many modernists applied the pragmatic method to the sacraments, to dogma, and to prayer. They considered the sacraments to have no reality as a divinely ordained means of grace, but valuable only for their psychological effect. These tendencies led them naturally to deny the authority of the church and the traditional Christian conception of God; a decree declared the beliefs heretical, ending Roman Catholic Modernism.

See M. Rancheti, The Catholic Modernists (tr. 1969); B. M. Reardon, comp., Roman Catholic Modernism (1970); A. R. Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (1970); W. R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1976); G. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (1980).

Modernism describes an array of cultural movements rooted in the changes in Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The term covers a series of reforming movements in art, architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged during this period. At its most basic level, Modernism could be described as the experimentation and fragmentation of the human experience, characterized by deviations from the norms of society.

It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology or practical experimentation. Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions, believing the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated; they directly confronted the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. Some divide the 20th Century into movements designated Modernism and Postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.

The first half of the nineteenth century for Europe was marked by a number of wars and revolutions, which reveal the rise of the ideas and doctrines now identified as Romanticism: emphasis on individual subjective experience, the sublime, the supremacy of "Nature" as a subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty. By mid-century, however, a synthesis of these ideas with stable governing forms had emerged, partly in reaction to the failed Romantic and democratic Revolutions of 1848. It was exemplified by Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik and by "practical" philosophical ideas such as positivism. Called by various names—in Great Britain it is designated the "Victorian era"—this stabilizing synthesis was rooted in the idea that reality dominates over impressions that are subjective.

Central to this synthesis were common assumptions and institutional frames of reference, including the religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical physics, especially electromagnetism, and doctrines that asserted that the depiction of external reality from an objective standpoint was not only possible but desirable. Cultural critics and historians label this set of doctrines Realism, though this term is not universal. In philosophy, the rationalist, materialist and positivist movements established a primacy of reason and system.

Against the current ran a series of ideas, some of them direct continuations of Romantic schools of thought. Notable were the agrarian and revivalist movements in plastic arts and poetry (e.g. the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the philosopher John Ruskin). Rationalism also drew responses from the anti-rationalists in philosophy. In particular, Hegel's dialectic view of civilization and history drew responses from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, who were major influences on Existentialism. All of these separate reactions together began to be seen as offering a challenge to any comfortable ideas of certainty derived by civilization, history, or pure reason.

From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that progress was always good came under increasing attack. Writers Wagner and Ibsen had been reviled for their own critiques of contemporary civilization and for their warnings that accelerating "progress" would lead to the creation of individuals detached from social norms and isolated from their fellow men. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, and could not move forward in its present form. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism. The work of Schopenhauer was labelled "pessimistic" for its idea of the "negation of the will", an idea that would be both rejected and incorporated by later thinkers such as Nietzsche.

Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin, and in political science, Karl Marx. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia. The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Karl Marx seemed to present a political version of the same proposition: that problems with the economic order were not transient, the result of specific wrong doers or temporary conditions, but were fundamentally contradictions within the "capitalist" system. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in establishing modernism.

The second school was Symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature and a portrayal of patriotism, and that poetry and writing should follow connections that the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé would be of particular importance to what would occur afterwards.

At the same time social, political, and economic forces were at work that would become the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. Chief among these was steam-powered industrialization, which produced buildings that combined art and engineering in new industrial materials such as cast iron to produce railroad bridges and glass-and-iron train sheds—or the Eiffel Tower, which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be—and at the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life.

The miseries of industrial urbanism, and the possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects brought changes that would shake a European civilization which had, until then, regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance. With the telegraph's harnessing of a new power, offering instant communication at a distance, the experience of time itself was altered.

The breadth of the changes can be sensed in how many modern disciplines are described, in their pre-twentieth century form, as being "classical", including physics, economics, and arts such as ballet or architecture.

Beginning, 1890–1910

William Everdell has argued that Modernism began with Richard Dedekind's division of the real number line in 1872 and Boltzmann's statistical thermodynamics in 1874; but Clement Greenberg wrote, "What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Flaubert, too, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture). The "avant-garde" was what Modernism was called at first, and the term remained to describe movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo.

In the 1890s a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of current techniques. The growing movement in art paralleled such developments as the Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of the internal combustion engine and industrialization; and the increased role of the social sciences in public policy. It was argued that, if the nature of reality itself was in question, and if restrictions which had been in place around human activity were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change. Thus, in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century a series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music.

Powerfully influential in this wave of modernity were the theories of Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach, who argued, beginning in the 1880s, that the mind had a basic and fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of the parts of the mind. All subjective reality was based, according to Freud's ideas, on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Ernst Mach developed a well-known philosophy of science, often called "positivism", according to which the relations of objects in nature were not guaranteed but only known through a sort of mental shorthand. This represented a break with the past, in that previously it was believed that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as it was, on an individual, as, for example, in John Locke's empiricism, with the mind beginning as a tabula rasa.

This wave of the modern movement broke with the past in the first decade of the twentieth century, and tried to redefine various artforms in a radical manner. Leading lights within the literary wing of this movement (or, rather, these movements) include:

Composers such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and George Antheil represent modernism in music. Artists such as Gustav Klimt, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and the movements Les Fauves, Cubism and the Surrealists represent various strains of Modernism in the visual arts, while architects and designers such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe brought modernist ideas into everyday urban life. Several figures outside of artistic modernism were influenced by artistic ideas; for example, John Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and other writers of the Bloomsbury group.

Explosion, 1910–1930

On the eve of the First World War a growing tension and unease with the social order, seen in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the agitation of "radical" parties, also manifested itself in artistic works in every medium which radically simplified or rejected previous practice. In 1913, the year of Einstein's first paper on the General Theory of Relativity, Niels Bohr's quantized atom, Edmund Husserl's Ideas, Ezra Pound's founding of Imagism, and the New York Armory Show, famed Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, working for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed Rite of Spring for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky that depicted human sacrifice, and young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings—a step that none of the Impressionists, not even Cézanne, had taken.

These developments began to give a new meaning to what was termed 'Modernism': It embraced disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple Realism in literature and art, and rejecting or dramatically altering tonality in music. This set modernists apart from 19th century artists, who had tended to believe in 'progress'. Writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and musicians like Brahms were not 'radicals' or 'Bohemians', but were instead valued members of society who produced art that added to society, even if it were, at times, critiquing less desirable aspects of it. Modernism, while it was still "progressive" increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore the artist was recast as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening.

Modernist philosophy and art were still viewed as being part, and only a part, of the larger social movement. Artists such as Klimt and Cézanne, and composers such as Mahler and Richard Strauss were "the terrible moderns"—those farther to the avant-garde were more heard of than heard. Polemics in favour of geometric or purely abstract painting were largely confined to 'little magazines' (like The New Age in the UK) with tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, but were not seen as representative of the Edwardian mainstream, which was more inclined towards a Victorian faith in progress and liberal optimism.

Thus in the 1920s, modernism, which had been such a minority taste before the war, came to define the age. Modernism was seen in Europe in such critical movements as Dada, and then in constructive movements such as Surrealism, as well as in smaller movements such as the Bloomsbury Group. Each of these "modernisms", as some observers labelled them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new results. Again, Impressionism was a precursor: breaking with the idea of national schools, artists and writers adopted ideas of international movements. Surrealism, Cubism, Bauhaus, and Leninism are all examples of movements that rapidly found adopters far beyond their original geographic base.

By 1930, modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 modernism, which emphasized its continuity with a past while rebelling against it, and against the aspects of that period which seemed excessively mannered, irrational, and emotionalistic. The post-World War period, at first, veered either to systematization or nihilism and had, as perhaps its most paradigmatic movement, Dada.

While some writers attacked the madness of the new modernism, others described it as soulless and mechanistic. Among modernists there were disputes about the importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in society. Modernism comprised a series of sometimes contradictory responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it. In the end science and scientific rationality, often taking models from the 18th Century Enlightenment, came to be seen as the source of logic and stability, while the basic primitive sexual and unconscious drives, along with the seemingly counter-intuitive workings of the new machine age, were taken as the basic emotional substance. From these two poles, no matter how seemingly incompatible, modernists began to fashion a complete weltanschauung that could encompass every aspect of life.

Second generation, 1930–1945

By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture. With the increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the day. As modernism gained traction in academia, it was developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. Popular culture, which was not derived from high culture but instead from its own realities (particularly mass production) fueled much modernist innovation. By 1930 The New Yorker magazine began publishing new and modern ideas by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, and James Thurber, amongst others. Modern ideas in art appeared in commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo, designed by Edward Johnston in 1919, being an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.

Another strong influence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-World War One Modernism, which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions, and the neoclassicism of the 1920s, as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky—which rejected popular solutions to modern problems—the rise of Fascism, the Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalise a generation. The Russian Revolution was the catalyst to fuse political radicalism and utopianism, with more expressly political stances. Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, André Breton, Louis Aragon and the philosophers Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this Modernist Marxism. This move to the radical left, however, was neither universal, nor definitional, and there is no particular reason to associate Modernism, fundamentally, with 'the left'. Modernists explicitly of 'the right' include Wyndham Lewis, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Dutch author Menno ter Braak and many others.

One of the most visible changes of this period is the adoption of objects of modern production into daily life. Electricity, the telephone, the automobile—and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created the need for new forms of manners, and social life. The kind of disruptive moment which only a few knew in the 1880s, became a common occurrence. The speed of communication reserved for the stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life.

After World War II

The Post war period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris (the former center of European culture and the former capital of the art world) the climate for art was a disaster. Important collectors, dealers, and modernist artists, writers, and poets had fled Europe for New York and America. The Surrealists, and modern artists from every cultural center of Europe had fled the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those that didn't flee perished. A few artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, remained in France and survived.

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American Abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early Modernism via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, Max Ernst and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors.

Pollock and Abstract influences

During the late 1940s Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all Contemporary art that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via Cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials; linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown; drawing, staining, brushing; imagery and non-imagery—essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art.

The other Abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. Rereadings into abstract art, done by art historians such as Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Catherine de Zegher critically shows, however, that pioneer women artists who have produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by the official accounts of its history.

In the 1960s after abstract expressionism

In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like Hard-edge painting and other forms of Geometric abstraction, as a reaction against the subjectivism of Abstract expressionism began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde circles. Clement Greenberg became the voice of Post-painterly abstraction; by curating an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. Color field painting, Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction emerged as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, Postminimalism, Process Art and Arte Povera also emerged as revolutionary concepts and movements that encompassed both painting and sculpture, via Lyrical Abstraction and the Postminimalist movement, and in early Conceptual Art. Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves, Ronald Davis, Howard Hodgkin, Larry Poons, Jannis Kounellis, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Sam Gilliam, Mario Merz, Peter Reginato were some of the younger artists who emerged during the era of late modernism that spawned the heyday of the art of the late 1960s.

Pop Art

In 1962 the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted The New Realists the first major Pop Art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Sidney Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in England in 1958 the term "Pop Art" was used by Lawrence Alloway to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected Abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted, and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi were considered seminal examples in the movement. While in the downtown scene in New York's East Village 10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of Pop Art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Later Leo Castelli exhibited other American artists, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for most of their careers. There is a connection between the radical works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists with a sense of humor, and Pop Artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings reproduce the look of Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction.

By the early 1960s Minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction via Malevich, the Bauhaus and Mondrian) which rejected the idea of relational, and subjective painting, the complexity of Abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of Action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement. Depending on the context, minimalism might be construed as a precursor to the postmodern movement. Seen from the perspective of writers who sometimes classify it as a postmodern movement, early minimalism began and succeeded as a modernist movement to yield advanced works, but which partially abandoned this project when a few artists changed direction in favor of the anti-form movement. In the late 1960s the term Postminimalism was coined by Robert Pincus-Witten to describe minimalist derived art which had content and contextual overtones which minimalism rejected, and was applied to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Sol Lewitt, and Barry Le Va, and others. Minimalists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others continued to produce their late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainder of their careers.

In the 1960s the work of the avant-garde Minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley also became prominent in the New York art world.

Since this time, many artists have embraced minimal or Postminimal styles and the label postmodern, has been attached to them.

Collage, Assemblage, Installations

Related to Abstract expressionism was the emergence of combined manufactured items, with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, whose "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz among others were important pioneers of both abstraction and Pop Art; creating new conventions of art-making; they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion of unlikely materials as parts of their works of art. Another pioneer of Collage was Joseph Cornell whose more intimate scaled works were seen as radical; partially because of his personal iconography and partially because of his use of found objects.

In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His professed point was to have people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "Readymades." Fountain, was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art, other famous examples being John Cage's 4' 33", which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing. Many conceptual works take the position that art is created by the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not from the intrinsic qualites of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain was exhibited, it was a sculpture.

Marcel Duchamp famously gave up "art" in favor of chess.[1] Avant-garde composer David Tudor created a piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross that features a chess game, where each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. At the premiere, the game was played between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.[2]

Performance and happenings

During the same period—the late 1950s through the mid 1960s—various avant-garde artists created Happenings. Happenings were mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in varied specified locations, often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physicality, costuming, spontaneous nudity, and various random or seemingly disconnected acts. Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman among others were notable creators of Happenings.

Late period

Artists from many disciplines continue to work in modernist styles into the 21st century. The continuation of Abstract expressionism, Color Field painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Abstract Illusionism, Process Art, Pop Art, Postminimalism, and other late 20th century modernist movements in both painting and sculpture continue through the first decade of the 21st century.

However by the early 1980s the Postmodern movement in art and architecture began to establish its position through various Conceptual and Intermedia formats. Postmodernism in music and literature began to take hold even earlier, some say by the 1950s. While postmodernism implies an end to modernism many theorists and scholars realize that late modernism continues into the 21st century.

Goals of the movement

Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Arnold Schoenberg believed that by rejecting traditional tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music which had guided music making for at least a century and a half, and perhaps longer, he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows (See Twelve-tone technique). Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne and Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that color and shape formed the essential characteristics of art, not the depiction of the natural world. Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development.

Other modernists, especially those involved in design, had more pragmatic views. Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced the horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or from the Middle Ages. Following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically reject decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958), became the archetypal modernist building. Modernist design of houses and furniture also typically emphasized simplicity and clarity of form, open-plan interiors, and the absence of clutter. Modernism reversed the 19th century relationship of public and private: in the 19th century, public buildings were horizontally expansive for a variety of technical reasons, and private buildings emphasized verticality—to fit more private space on more and more limited land. Conversely, in the 20th century, public buildings became vertically oriented, and private buildings became organized horizontally. Many aspects of modernist design still persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture today, though its previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama.

In other arts such pragmatic considerations were less important. In literature and visual art some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists rejected such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Greenberg labelled the products of consumer culture "kitsch", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music, Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism.

Some modernists did see themselves as part of a revolutionary culture—one that included political revolution. Others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. Many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a conservative position. Indeed, one could argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.

Reception and controversy

The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition. Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects: the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism, or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterisation in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.

The Soviet Communist government rejected modernism after the rise of Stalin on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed Futurism and Constructivism; and the Nazi government in Germany deemed it narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" and "Negro" (see Anti-semitism). The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate art (Louis A. Sass (Bauer 2004) compares madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence). Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened.

This merging of consumer and high versions of modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism". Firstly, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Secondly, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers declared that modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as Postmodernism. For others, such as, for example, art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.

"Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as being remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see Modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to the failure to see systemic and emergent effects. Many Modernists came to this viewpoint, for example Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, in The Cultural Creatives (2000), Fredrick Turner in A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself — that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make everyday life more emotionally acceptable.

See also

References & Notes

  • Armstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine (eds.), Women Artists as the Millennium, Cambridge Massachusetts: October Books, MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-262-01226-3.
  • Aspray, William & Philip Kitcher, eds., History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol XI, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988
  • Baker, Houston A., Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
  • Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Second ed. London: Penguin, 1988. ISBN 0140109625.
  • Bradbury, Malcolm, & James McFarlane (eds.), ''Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (Penguin "Penguin Literary Criticism" series, 1978, ISBN 0-14-013832-3).
  • Brush, Stephen G., The History of Modern Science: A Guide to the Second Scientific Revolution, 1800-1950, Ames, IO: Iowa State U.P., 1988
  • Centre George Pompidou, Face a l'Histoire, 1933-1996. Flammarion, 1996. ISBN 2-85850-898-4.
  • Crouch, Christopher, Modernism in art design and architecture, New York: St. Martins Press, 2000
  • Eysteinsson, Astradur, The Concept of Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992
  • Gates, Henry Louis. "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004.
  • Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (Gardners Books, 1991, ISBN 0-500-27582-3).
  • Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (1971), Berkeley, CA: U. of California Press, 1973
  • Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1983
  • Kolocotroni, Vassiliki et al, ed.,Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).
  • Levenson, Michael (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, "Cambridge Companions to Literature" series, 1999, ISBN 0-521-49866-X).
  • Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
  • Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1995).
  • Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-300-10571-1).
  • —, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (Thames & Hudson, "World of Art" series, 1985, ISBN 0-500-20072-6).
  • Pollock, Griselda, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts. (Routledge, London, 1996. ISBN 0-415-14128-1)
  • Pollock, Griselda, and Florence, Penny, Looking Back to the Future: Essays by Griselda Pollock from the 1990s. (New York: G&B New Arts Press, 2001. ISBN 90-5701-132-8)
  • Schwartz, Sanford, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985
  • Van Loo, Sofie (ed.), Gorge(l). Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp, 2006. ISBN
  • Weston, Richard, Modernism (Phaidon Press, 2001, ISBN 0-7148-4099-8).
  • de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. (MIT Press, 1996).

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Carbon cycle models underestimate indirect role of animals

Researchers boost Artificial Intelligence (AI) with evolution

Animals focus smell as well as vision

Does rock music bring out the animal in you?

Study: GMO food causes organ disruption in animals

Lions more likely to attack after a full moon

If you didn't already make it a priority to avoid lions and other maneating creatures like wolves, scientists warn you should particularly avoid them right after a full moon when they are the most likely to eat you.

Mark Zuckerberg kills goats

Watch out, Winkelvosses - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that from now on he's going to kill what he eats.

Brain researchers investigate nervous system repair with worms and fish

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Paleontologists used to believe Tyrannosaurus Rex was a monstrous and slow scavenger. But now a Canadian researcher has hypothesized that the dinosaur was actually a very fast and efficient killing machine.

Bee brains calculate better than expensive computers


Division Chief Paul Lepore "How to become a firefighter"
Smoke Your Fire Fighter Interview$24.95

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Product Description

Smoke Your Fire Fighter Interview

This new 5th edition of Smoke Your Firefighter Interview has additional questions, expanded answers and reasoning as well as New Paramedic Situational questions.

Chief Lepore’s most popular book is called Smoke Your Firefighter Interview (360 pages). It provides readers with a view of the interview from the perspective of the panel raters. The objective is for candidates to see themselves through the eyes of the raters. By the end of the book, readers will understand exactly how they are being scored. More importantly, they will understand how to completely answer the types of questions that they will encounter on the fire department interview. Since it is often weighted 100% of the candidate’s final score, earning a high score on the interview is essential to getting hired.

In this book, Chief Lepore uses his 30 years of fire service experience to review over 90 commonly-asked fire department interview questions. The author shares not only the questions that you can expect in your fire department interview, but also how the panel expects the entry-level candidate to answer them. Most importantly, Chief Lepore explains the reasons for the correct answer. The “Reasoning” section that follows each question is often longer than the answer itself. It covers the exact key points that the interviewers are looking for in the previous question. This section includes the following: expectations of a probationary firefighter; understanding the candidate’s knowledge of their position within the organization; the rank structure of the fire service; and how to expertly navigate the tricky waters of stepping up as the new firefighter when he or she identifies something that is not right.  The reasoning section is designed to provide an in-depth insight into the unique culture present in every fire station in every department throughout the country. It is expected that entry-level firefighters understand the culture prior to getting hired. For those who understand it, the interview questions make more sense. For those who are new to the fire service culture, passing the interview can be a daunting task.

The interview panel will quickly identify candidates who simply memorize the answers to both routine and complex questions, but have no understanding as to why they would act or perform in a certain way. The panel’s follow-up questions are designed to identify how committed candidates are to their answers.

Smoke Your Firefighter Interview  allows readers to do more than simply memorize the right answer. By explaining the rationale, which often includes the culture of the fire service, readers are able to understand and internalize the “right” answer. Since readers now completely understand the concepts, they are able to clearly express their thoughts to the oral board. The oral interview is the most important part of the hiring process.

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News and blog posts from our students and faculty

A Reductionist Approach to Determing Design Roles

Wednesday, September 4th, 2013 | Posted by scott.gerlach

What is a designer’s role and how can it be determined?

In our first two weeks in our Design, Society, and the Public Sector section at ac4d, we’ve been reading and discussing articles that speak broadly to implications of design on society and attempt to derive meaningful roles for the designer.

As an exercise to help us process our thoughts and reactions we were asked to extract a central idea from each of the five articles we’ve read and then plot those five ideas on line to represent their importance.  Laced into this process was that each of us were to decide what exactly that scale of importance was.  Specifically we had to give the rankings context beyond their positioning on the line.

The process of reduction was difficult.  These articles were largely academic and consequently full of meaningful ideas.  My first few attempts at this spiraled into internal debate and on some level the process just felt wrong.  But one of the major themes that I internalized through this unit was the uniqueness of design because of it’s intertwined relationship with the specific.  So I tried a different approach.

I thought about my experience in other areas of my life.  I thought about specific representations of the individual and then expressed those as an insight:

Increasingly, people are the curators of their representational identity in the world.  In this role they struggle to expose their own vulnerability, and therefor their humanity, to others.

This insight may of course be completely wrong, but it was immensely helpful for me to reference in the process of reducing and ranking the ideas in the articles.

By defining a specific problem, a narrative started to form and then it was only a matter of understanding how each of the different articles responded to that narrative and to what extent I thought that response was insightful.

The result of this process is and related discussion follow:

“Design is Powerful” was the reduction of Manipulating Public Opinion by Edward Bernays.  The article defines the process by which the public forms and responds to ideas and then outlines techniques which can be used to manipulate this process.

While there’s no questioning the potency of  Bernays’s ideas, they also weren’t particularly insightful in thinking about how to help the curator.  Empowerment seems much more crucial than manipulation in addressing the issues at play: pushing the raw power of Bernays to the bottom of my scale.

“Consequences are Amplified” was distilled from my reading and discussion of Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World.  Papanek expresses a lot of ideas about the wider context of a designer’s decisions and the necessity for better approaches to design education.  Embedded in this discussion is the notion that the industrial designer’s education and view of the world is crucial because his/her ideas will be greatly amplified.

I think Papanek is absolutely right about the need for a broad understanding of the challenges that face society in order to design.  However, in the context of trying to provoke individuals to convey more of their humanity, the consequences of amplification only serve to highlight the problem: people are guarded and controlling with their identity precisely because of the increase in amplification in the mediums were are communicating through.  While central to the topic, it’s also obvious.

High Stakes
“The Stakes are High” is a reduction from Maurizio Vitto’s The Meaning of Design.  Vitto connects the dots between the mass production of objects, the individuals consumption of those products as a means of a communication, and the erosion of substance that results from the repetition of this process.

I think Vitto’s ideas are important to the specific problem I considered in that they offer a pinpoint explanation on exactly why our own control over our representative identity can erode our connection to our actual identity.  By engaging in so many empty forms of personal representation we actually create a more substantively vacant version of ourselves.

“Context is Essential” was directly lifted from Allan Chochinov’s 1000 Words: A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design.  Chochinov’s manifesto is full of helpful, simply articulated themes that are relevant to design.  Particularly compelling are his statements about sustainability, impermanence, and systems design.  But it’s not a stretch to see everything he writes as an extension of a deep understanding of the modern context of design.

The reason why Context is ranked so high on my scale is that it implies not just a process for understanding our specific problem but also suggests a technique for ranking difference design frames that are available (just as this activity has pushed me to do).  While most of the other ideas represented thus far feel helpful in articulating the problem, Context seems to be the first opportunity for tangible steps toward problem solving.

“Design Technology must be Agile and Specific” was a helpful reduction of Richard Buchanan’s Wicked Problems in Design Thinking although certainly others were possible.  Via John Dewey, Buchanan articulates a thought provoking narrative of the history of design as well as clues to how it can be regularly re-instantiated going forward through the use of technology.  And the technology Buchanan is referring to are the mental methods and practices of design thinking.

Buchanan’s articulation of design technology was by far the most helpful in thinking of the specific problem at hand.  It suggested a process by which a designer can locate his/her role in the world by rooting them in the specific problem and then calling upon them to employ the technology of design.  The specific method that come out of this process are the result of the wide context that the problem exists but also result from an understanding of the fine details of the problem.  In our case, we might think of how our context with the curator could be addressed by different current design areas (like signs and communication) and then try different very specific methods (like affinity diagrams and insight combinations) to provoke the design toward meaningful outcomes.

This process was at once helpful and difficult.  In trying to make abstract sense of ideas about design I found the abstractions to be vacant and difficult to compare.  However, by rooting my thoughts in something practical, the ideas in these articles started to come to life.  I can’t escape the feeling that I made an intuitive narrative and then just pulled from the articles as it suited me and perhaps that is the most meaningful takeaway: that ideas reduced in isolation are arbitrary but in reducing with a purpose already in mind, the reductions take on meaning and multiple reductions are possible.

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How we made it

The process of making the show began with a residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in New York State. The new state-of-the-art art and technology facility had recently been completed.

The view from our office - dusk

We had a beautiful studio to ourselves, where the EMPAC team helped us explore the ways we could take images of flashing lights and create landscapes with them, and record layers of similarly landscaped sound, due to the studio’s excellent acoustic properties (the studio floats on giant acoustic springs and is paneled with special metal acoustic tiles despite its very large size).

We worked almost exclusively in the dark, using still images to inspire the sound and video choices.

Singing was recorded using the rhythms, structures and poetic resonances of the lights as inspiration.

We used these materials to compose the final performance, and wove narratives of sound and image together to create the immersive space of the show; the lighting, the blocking and the other materials.

We experimented with screen, speaker placement and lighting until we settled on what felt right to balance the acoustic against the electronic sound, the live lights against the just perceptible physical body doing the singing.


Syria rejects partial reports on chemical weapons

Damascus, Aug 30: Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem Friday rejected any partial reports by the UN secretariat before investigators complete the probe into the alleged use of chemical weapons in the country, state-run SANA news agency reported.

The minister said this during a phone call with UN chief Ban Ki-moon after the UN said the chemical investigators would leave Syria Saturday, Xinhua reported.

“Syria rejects any partial reports before the completion of the mission and the completion of the laboratorial tests of the samples assembled by the team,” al-Moallem said.

According to SANA, the minister asked Ban about the reasons behind the abruption of the UN team’s mission, urging him to stick to evenhandedness. He also stressed that any aggression against Syria would “blow up all of the exerted efforts to politically solve the Syrian crisis”.

He requested that the UN team should also investigate the sites where the government accused the rebels of using nerve agents against troops and civilians.

The UN team did not investigate all reported instances of chemical weapons’ use, but its officials promised to return to Syria after submitting the result of their primary investigation.

The UN probe team, led by Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom, has been carrying out its work without incidents after a pause Tuesday when its convoy was attacked by snipers while heading to Damascus’ eastern suburb of Ghouta, where chemical weapons were allegedly used Aug 21.


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The Beatles accession to the Toppermost of the Poppermost began in 1960 when they headed over to Hamburg Germany to work regularly in nightclubs. Working 8 hour shifts, with another band…sometimes Ringo’s band “Rory Storm and the Hurricane” helped them to focus their stage act and dramatically increase their repertoire. This included the writing of their own songs, initially to make sure they would have material to play when they traveled with other bands. As most Rock bands were in England at this time in history, the Beatles were a cover band, offering their versions of Carl Perkins, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and many other artists songs. After moderate success on the British Melody Maker Chart during 1962 with a Lennon/McCartney original composition, “Love Me Do” (it reached # 21), the Beatles had their first NUMBER 1 hit with "Please, Please Me" in March of 1963. Beatles History Beatles History
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The Planted Tank Forum

The Planted Tank Forum (
-   General Planted Tank Discussion (
-   -   Help with new planted tank please (

GreenTank1 01-20-2013 07:35 AM

Help with new planted tank please
I started researching planted tanks about 6 months ago and decided I was ready to jump in. Well, I am not so sure now. It seems I cannot do anything to make my tank flourish. I planted the plants 3 weeks ago and while most of the plants that remain show new growth, the original parts of the plants are all still decaying and I am replanting plants 2-3 times per week that have detached from the rooted parts of the plants. I managed to keep at least one of every plant that I purchased, but some look to be on their last leg.

Tank Setup (fully cycled 3 months before putting current plants in, but no fish yet):
- 55 Gal Standard Tank
- 6x T-2 6400k lights (I've been told it is roughly equivalent to 3 T-5 54W lights)
-- 8 hours of light per day
- Eco Complete substrate (3" in front to 6" in back)
- EI dosing with CSM+B and GH booster, also have API root tabs for now and clay balls with CSM+B in substrate. Have osmicote plus that will go in after the current root tabs are done. I will soon start adding Iron to the regular water column dosing as well.
- 50% water change every week
- Pressurized CO2 with Cerges reactor where drop checker reads green by the time lights turn on...I had it reading yellow for a while, but am trying to dial back to allow fish eventually
-- CO2 starts 2 hours before lights turn on and stops 1 hour before lights out
- Rena XP3 filter and Hydor 750 for water flow

Water Parameters for what I can test:
- Ammonia/Nitrites = 0
- Nitrates = ~80 (day before 50% water change)
- PH drops about 1 degree during day due to CO2, but reads around 7.4 before CO2 added
- GH = 6
- KH = 4

Plants in tank (almost all arrived in great shape):
- Rotala roundifolia
- Myriophyllum sp. 'mini'
- Ludwidgia sp. 'red'
- Echinodorus tenelus (Sag?)
- Rotala Magenta
- Blyxa Japonica
- Ludwidgia repens x arcuata
- Water Sprite
- Proserpinaca palustris
- Limnophila macrandra

Video of my tank:

Still pictures if you do not prefer the video (sorry some of them are a little blurry as this was taken with my phone and the plants may be moving too much inside the tank to get a good still shot):

So questions I have:
1. Should I cut the new growth and replant for those plants that have a large amount of decaying in the old growth?
2. Are the plants telling me I don't have enough or too much light?
3. Do I need to adjust my EI dosing? I am sure I am going overboard, but that is kind of what it is about anyways right?
4. Do I have too much water flow? Is there enough/too much surface ripple? I am seeing some film on the surface.

Thank you for your help.

samjpikey 01-20-2013 09:42 AM

What's the temperature of the tank ???

dprais1 01-20-2013 10:12 AM

ei dosing macros as well? looks like a lot of the issues are with stem plants which I believe are mostly water column feeders so all those root tabs won't help. And I believe most root tabs are mostly micros not macros so they won't help anyhow.

GreenTank1 01-20-2013 07:25 PM

Temp is 80F.

I dose both micros and macros. Most of those stem plants were red when I got them so I assume they need extra iron as well. But I don't think lack of extra iron from something other than micros. Does that jive with common belief?

Kathyy 01-20-2013 09:27 PM

I think you have the information on lighting backwards. T2s are more efficient than T5s according to this site.

Try cutting back to half the bulbs you are running now to see it that helps. You may only need one bulb if they are really that good!

Do remove dead and decaying material. I find that new plants tend to sit there and look horrible until all the growth is from after arrival then they decide to stick around and look pretty.

GreenTank1 01-21-2013 12:11 AM

GreenTank1 01-21-2013 08:24 AM

I re-read that article about the T-2 lights and it appears I have the equivalent of about 2w per gal if I was using T-5 lights. I can back off to make it about 1.33 by shutting off one bank if that will help. Or down to about .67w by turning off two banks. Is the problem that I have too much then?

GreenTank1 01-22-2013 07:53 AM

I started the iron dosing today so we will see what happens as I know the plants are showing iron deficiency. I have also started trimming the dead off the plants.

Should I drop the lighting down right now or only change one thing at a time? I know it makes sense to only change one thing at a time, but will my plants survive if it is too much light? I know others out there have higher light than what I am using as it seems I am using more of a med-high light set-up. The website that recommended 6-8 13w T-2 lights for my sized tank said that it is equivalent to 2-3 54w T-5 lights. My understanding was that 2-3 54w T-5 lights was Medium-high light. Correct?

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TED Community » Dylan Tilley

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United States, Dania, FL
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    A comment on Conversation: Is it possible that gravity, is a persistent illusion, created by the constant expansion of mass in the universe?

    Jan 28 2012: It is possible to explain in simple isolation the effect of gravity relatively as expansion however there are many simple reasons why this theory is false; 1st the force of Gravity is not constant throughout space so objects would have to be accelerating at different rates to achieve the observable gravity fields, which would distort the stable geometry of the universe such as the relative distance between stars and planets second in order for the other forces in the universe to maintain their proportional balance as they have in nature for all of the history of the known universe the fundamental laws governing those laws would have to be in constant change to accommodate for the proposed continuous expansion. It is fundamental geometry that if you increase a linear dimension (lets say doubled) then the associated area goes up by that same scale squared (X4) and the volume by the same scale cubed (X 8) so phenomena that are proportional to the ratio of these quantities are limited to a particular scale. This is why cells only grow so large to maintain volume to surface area ratio for sufficient nutrient transport, or why dimensional analysis with Nondimensional numbers like Reynolds is so important in scaled models for testing like in windtunnel and tow tank tests. Therefore the uniform or even irregular expansion of space cannot explain gravity or other comoonly observed phenomena. I hope this answers your question. The simplest explanation is often the best one.

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This 15" x 72" Advance Tabco DT-6R-72 wall mounted drainage shelf is perfect for storing and draining dish racks in any busy dish room! It's made of 1 5/8" diameter stainless steel tubing with stainless steel side brackets. Please consult the Specification Sheet for additional details and measurements.

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