ART & LIFE 366
In the 1920s Gertrude Stein argued that America was the oldest society on earth. She contended that as the progenitor of the 20th century it had been modern first and longer than other places. ‘The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilisation.’1 The vexatiousness of her assertion and the general unease it engendered probably had less to do with its disorientating grammar than with the challenge it must have presented to European assumptions about the originating authority and power of their own culture at that time. Specifically in respect to that of their ensemble of former colonies, condescendingly characterised by Europe hitherto as the New World.
To turn things upside down, to subvert, reorientate or to look at the familiar from an altered perspective can result in fresh insights and overcome long established obstacles. So there is a lot to be said for the assertion that if we do not want to keep getting the same answers we need to begin by asking different questions. Comparisons are generally useless and frequently result in needless hierarchies. Analogies also are fraught with the limitations of the criteria from which they are extrapolated and habitually end up foregrounding subjectivity and difference rather than commonality and convergence. Nevertheless, it is both possible and meaningful to compare the experience of a traveller arriving by ship in the harbour of New York in the 1920s with that of someone taking the Maglev Train into downtown Shanghai from the airport, today. By applying Stein’s Law of what is age in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline