Real life writing in the field 00 - April 30th - Remedy for the modernist hangover?

My friend Niek came to visit me the 25th of April. The first couple of days we stayed at the Morningside Heights right next to the Columbia Campus. We stayed with Rahul and Susham Bedi. Susham appeared to be a well-known Indian writer and former movie actress. The house was filled with colonial paraphernalia like panther and tiger skins pinned to the wall, and at the first floor there was a private primary school. We were not staying in a BnB but in the decor of a novel.

April 30th, Niek told me there was a symposium about the modern Avant-Garde right next door in "Das Deutsches Haus". Together with the crowning of a new Dutch King and the tiger skins at the wall of our hospice it all made sense to me. So within a few seconds we were listening to a series of lectures on the "Modernist Hangover" of the Avant Garde in literature and art.

Now, it could have been the acoustics, or maybe the limitations of our understanding of academic English, but we had a hard time understanding what was said. The second speaker spoke about an artist group called "Tiqqun" and their "Theory of Bloom" but unfortunately I could not properly hear her elucidation. Nevertheless musing on these few fragments of information I had a stroke of insight.I was thinking something like:

What could be the modernist hangover? I guess the acknowledgment of the limits of human ability to fully understand the world and control its destiny. For post modernists this would mean a liberation of the totalitarian rationalization of every aspect of human existence. But for the hardcore modernists this surrender would be a defeat, a failure of the modernist project.

What could "Tiqqun" mean in this context? It is the name of a contemporary art magazine that seems to refer to the Jewish word "Tikkun Olam", meaning "repairing the world". In the context of the modernist hangover it might suggest that we should not focus on changing the world but on fixing it. We might not be able to mold the world completely according to our will, but we might be able to put ourselves to the task of adjusting, rectifying and modifying it the best we can, everyday over and over again until eternity.

And what about the "Theory of Bloom"? I figure it suggests we should think of development of the world in lifecycles instead of linear trajectories from imperfect to perfect. The world will never reach a final stage of perfection. But it will bloom every now and then. And if we treat it well and dedicate our selves to the work of "Tikkun" it might bloom more luscious, and more often.

I am pretty sure this interpretation is my own and does not match the version of the speaker or the artists she was talking about. Nevertheless I find this line of thought very inspiring as a perspective to move on past modernism. Maybe these "Tiqqun" artists could be a new case in my research. I will definitely sort them out the next couple of days.