Last week I entered into a debate on history and the interpretation of visual representation, a subject which intrigues me immensely and which deserves serious attention within academic circles. This debate was introduced into Maltese art history by Dr Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and profoundly studied in an essay presented at the Warburg Institute in London in a conference which tackled the concept of the Baroque as defined in the so-called Baroque era itself and beyond into modern history.

According to categorical constructions of history, it would be nonsensical to consider the idea of the Baroque as being alive in the present. The narrative of history tells us that this particular volume is closed shut and placed in chronological order on the shelves of the past. Yet is society able to extinguish all the principles which determined a particular moment in time, especially if these principles are designed for permanence? In the Maltese context, as Dr. Schembri Bonaci writes, we may experience a palpable multi-levelled example of Baroque continuity manifested in popular as well as in institutionalised thought and culture; Baroque principles which are explored in media such as film, the unending love for Baroque aesthetics, elements of theatricality and spectacle in art, performance and ceremony, carnival and festa celebrations. This situation unmasks an explicit defiance of the positivist historical approach, or, rather, exposes the idea of historical continuity as a 'deceptive illusion' (Schembri Bonaci, 'The Live Tradition of the Maltese Baroque', forthcoming 2016).

It is interesting to explore this idea in relation to the concept of Modernism which sought to extinguish the principles of Baroque theatricality, illusion and lavishness, to cleanse art of these properties and return to the fundamentals of the language of visual art. This self-reflexivity of Modernism, which Clement Greenberg highlights as a defining feature of such art, caused modern art to repudiate illusion, narrative and figuration in exchange for colour, line, volume and other representational elements which collectively form what is called Abstraction; the paintings of Mondrian, Klee, Kandinsky, Rothko, and several others. Abstraction was to communicate a universal language which resisted the hegemony and violations of freedom characteristic of totalitarian ideologies.

Greenberg's definition of Modernism was for a long time the dominant point of reference for understanding the concept, and all that did not fit neatly within the Greenbergian box was relegated as inferior and retrograde. Under Greenberg's shadow, the majority of Maltese modern art would be subject to this dismissive fate. Since the 1960s, the long-standing Modernist canon has been attacked by several late 20^th century and 21^st century art historians and theorists such as Rosalind Krauss, T.J Clark and Leo Steinberg, and must also be reconsidered within the local context as must the historical frameworks which formulate the understanding of our artistic development.

A seminal question put forward by Schembri Bonaci is the nature of the outcome of having Baroque principles 'transferred onto modern and modernist parameters', a question which guides him to elaborate upon four interconnected circumstances which arose from this conflict of historical positions. In the case of Malta, I am not sure as to whether the Baroque was transferred onto the modernist stage or whether the principles of Modernism were themselves transferred onto the state of Baroque normalcy which the Catholic Church fought for relentlessly. That is, did Modernism interfere with an unchanged social structure, or was the Baroque an imposed and mythologised absolute truth amplified to distract from the occurrence of real change?

I believe there is no straightforward, scientific answer which will point to one causational angle for the realities of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Rather, it would be more plausible to propose that modern history in general is constituted by a multitude of simultaneous continuities and discontinuities which are all embodied by aesthetics with varying degrees of intensity. As Schembri Bonaci writes, usurping the anthropological theory of Gregory Bateson, the Maltese context evinces a schismogenic state of being, meaning a state of perpetual ambiguity caused by the continuation of the old with the presence of the new. In other words, the uncertainty of never completing one stage of being whilst ushering in other, contradictory modes of thought and experience. In the arts we may observe this in the struggle between those who work in contemporary media and aesthetics and those who retain traditional values of art production and representation.

Okwui Enwezor identifies a similar idea which he theorises as an 'internal migration'; the development of the new within traditional, stable communities. The use of the word migration refers to the inevitable transference of ideas and practices within the globalised context.  This condition has an alienating effect, inciting difficult and even arbitrary polemics between the 'authentic' and the 'inauthentic'; what people sense as belonging or not belonging to a culture, which is of course a highly problematic situation.

These methodological perspectives which underline historical complexities open up thought and allow us to analyse Maltese modern art with untampered eyes; eyes filtered by the belief of what something should be according to 'correct' or even desired theoretical dogmas rather than looking directly at the material at our disposal. It is futile to constantly search for links between the Maltese brand of Modernism and institutionalised Modernism without also considering the particularities of our historical condition. History is not a homogenous system, even though the forces of neoliberal globalisation would like us to believe otherwise.

With this in mind, it is both logical and possible to identify the existence of the Baroque in the modern period, and even in contemporary times, coexisting with those ideas and behaviours which denominate the experience of the present.