Avant Gardeness
Conceptions of a contemporary avant garde
University of Maastricht, 1997
Programming Note: I didn’t do much public speaking during my first year at The Jan van Eyck Akademie, it was only later in my second year when I started to speak about the game-based work I was doing much later on. I’d been invited by a couple of local art students to speaking at the University of Maastricht on the topic of the avant-garde, something I’d written and spoken about previous during my time at Kingston. This isn’t one of my stronger pieces, and even at the time I knew I was phoning it in - much preferring to spend my time in front of the computer designing the poster for the session, instead of participating in the academy’s philosophical and theoretical sessions, and forming a point of view to share. Either way, I was able to recently recover the transcript of the talk. I’d never written something in advance and then presented it by reading aloud, which felt very strange at the time, but now it’s something I frequently do.
My discussion really sets out with the premise of approaching the subject of the avant garde from the perspective of raising the pertinent question rather than giving any sense of a confirmed answer, and this is generally the direction that this lecture will take. My talk will try to discuss some form of collective description of the avant garde, primarily dealing with the four main areas of debate concerning this problematic area - namely the linguistic, the theoretical (of sorts), the historical, and perhaps more relevantly, the contemporary. So here goes.
Amongst other things, the term avant garde is derived from within a climate of intense ideological conflict, with the result of artists (however broad that term might be) attempting to locate themselves in terms of a wider social establishment, including political affiliations and society in general. Indeed, avant garde has come to refer more to a certain underlying spirit rather than any sense of visual manifestation.
Since virtually the beginning of time, artistic and literary creativity can be seen as steeped in some form of tradition which embraces resistance and regeneration. As any means of movement is formed, so members of a younger generation conspire (and that's probably too strong a term for what is after all, a really ambiguous process), to pursue fresh lines of inquiry and inspiration. Experimentation takes place, and supposedly (this I will return to later) new ground is broken time and time again. I would argue that now more than ever, the contemporary artist is reliant upon this perpetual invention in order to maintain a healthy environment in which to collectively work.
With the advent of new communications technologies, particularly the Internet, artists of all types are creating new paths towards more global means of collaboration, anticipating previously undreamed of heights in experimental exploration.
The definition of tradition, against which an avant garde reacts, seems to suggest that the traditional accounts for nothing more than a method which has been continually used and re-used, presumably over a long period of time. However, artists since about the 1950`s, or maybe even before, tend to deal with the traditional in terms of the fundamental. What are the basic fundamentals of artistic practice? Surely this would include such elements as authorship, line, colour, form, discourse, and of many, many more. Perhaps one aim (if I may prescribe) is to question the idea of the fundamental to such an extent that it creates a new fundamental, as in the case of Duchamp. Conversely, much contemporary practice openly obstructs any sense of artistically critical response. But what might the avant garde be defined as? Or is it by its very nature ambiguous and closed to generalised definition.
Here's one attempt from the Internet :
"The French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement, extended since the late 19th century to that body of artists and writers who are dedicated to the idea of art as experiment and revolt against tradition. Ezra Pound's view, that ‘artists are the antennae of the race’, is a distinctly modern one, implying a duty to stay ahead of one's time through constant innovation in forms and subjects."
Whether or not to say something like this exists today is problematic, not to say difficult or indeterminate, even if you get past the all too common response of total indifference.
Clement Greenberg, once described as the Pope of the art world, focuses upon somewhat more sociological issues in his 1939 text entitled Avant Garde and Kitsch. He begins by offering up a few questions as to the social implications of such a discussion, and what appears to be the most interesting point raised initially is the analysis of how different, as he calls them, strata of culture, appear to co-exist within the same social framework. Although whether or not this is something particular to the Modernist era forms the kernel of Green berg's discussion.
For Greenberg, the term avant garde is taken to denote a description of so-called real or living culture, whereas the Germanic term kitsch, set up in opposition to this, is portrayed as a means of dilution and pseudo-subversion of this real culture for purely economic gain.
In describing the genesis of the avant garde, Greenberg suggests that, in order to prevent a cultural stagnation, the Western bourgeoisie created (however consciously) a means of transcending this, as he calls it, Alexandrianism, and provided A platform whereupon this real culture could question and criticise social history, notably from outside. This cultural activity is said by Greenberg to coincide chronologically and geographically with the initial developments of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe, although the mid-nineteenth century in most respects could be described as a period of general sociological upheaval. Anyway, the avant garde (and now I`m generalising) due to this social questioning, tended to disassociate itself from society and preferred instead to define what it was not. Therefore, he goes on to say that, whereas previous art had been an art of imitation usually containing some form of narrative or documentary style, the burgeoning growth of abstraction itself became the imitation of imitating. Therefore, what kitsch does, according to Greenberg, is to dilute the supposedly fresh ideas of the avant garde, converting them into an easily recognisable formula, sparing the spectator the effort of actually engaging with the work, but providing a short cut to its pleasure.
The central thrust of what is essentially a very short piece of writing is that kitsch, inherent in galloping consumerism, is perhaps to the detriment of a society's cultural and possibly even moral standpoint. Whereas avant garde culture tends to imitate the processes of art itself (after the Modernist tradition), kitsch tends to imitate its effects, and is therefore easily identified as recognisable. We can see how kitsch has tended to borrow from the vocabulary of the avant garde by looking at the work of someone like Mondrian, and seeing how his work has been plundered for a wide range of design possibilities.
Everything here has been diluted and reduced down to the pure aesthetic effect, like Greenberg is saying, sparing the spectator the effort of having to actually engage with the original work itself. This celebration of superficial consumerism perhaps reaches its pinnacle in the work of someone like Jeff Koons, who would appear to typify the very mutated style of kitsch Greenberg is at odds with.
I’d propose that Greenberg's text here essentially attempts to pinpoint a means of cultural survival, as under threat from growing sociological and capitalist industrialisation. Yet of course, this industrialisation was subsequently embraced by artists in the 1950’s, so perhaps there's a progressive spiralling effect going on, whereby the kitsch imitates the real, and then subsequently the real imitates the kitsch (or vice versa, I’m not sure).
Is the kitsch really as destructive as Greenberg suggests or just another facet of industrialised culture? To what extent can art theory be transposed into sociological theory? Whether or not Greenberg would say that this embracing of kitsch was part of an avant garde is highly problematic. Perhaps its just a reflection of the deeper, underlying sense of cultural confusion inherent in twentieth century art practice. Although I still can't really say for certain.
The situation today is even more complex. For the last ten years, a row has been brewing over the current state of art criticism versus an alleged avant garde. A questioning of its very existence.
The kind of art recently coming under attack is perhaps best described by Carl Andre's Equivalent Eight. Made nearly thirty years ago, it questions traditional notions of what we mean by art. It's become one of the avant garde's most famous symbols. It did of course, spark off a considerable row when originally exhibited in the 1970’s, but if anything, this only reinforced its credibility with many critics. Of course, ever since Marcel Duchamp exhibited his ‘Fountain’ and proclaimed it art, it's been the avant garde in all its forms that's been at the centre of critical acclaim. By the 1960`s, pieces such as this, conceptual art, where the idea behind the work was as important as what you actually saw, were commanding high prices. And so it has, by and large, continued until now. But the critical response to a clutch of recent key exhibitions suggest that something may be changing. Since the early 1990’s, exhibitions showing this kind of work, both old and new, have been forcefully attacked.
The Hayward Gallery's Gravity and Grace, a survey of 60’s and 70’s conceptual sculpture had critics voicing serious misgivings about the repromotion of such work, suggesting that what once had been exciting and radical, was now familiar, over exposed and perhaps even over praised. A parallel survey of forty major conceptual artists at London's Lisson gallery received a similarly cool reception, the argument being that most of the work has simply failed to stand the test of time. But it's not just the immediate past that's under attack. Recent work in the conceptual style by young artists have also had a rough ride. The critics who lambasted Gravity and Grace were equally unimpressed by the Barclays Young Artist Award at the Serpentine, also in London, where the 25,000 Guilder prize went to this installation by Jane and Louise Wilson. It divided the critics. Impressive and ambitious for some, for others, the final straw. So what does it all add up to? A grousing disenchantment with art that's supposed to be difficult and experimental, or a genuine critical revisionism that signals the end of conceptual art's dominance?
I’d argue that this issue also parallels the more important question as to the mediation of primarily experimental work. With , as I mentioned before, the advent of being able to use new technologies, how easy is it to mediate their work to an audience largely confused as to the artist's means of production and therefore only vaguely engaged? For example, what about artists that make work in remote areas without documentation, projects in space, anti-exhibition art, underground music, or art which resembles an everyday activity in most respects? Due to this problematic notion of mediation, and the growing cloud of rhetoric surrounding such recent work, I`d propose that there is no such thing as an avant garde, as just like painting or sculpture, it is a fairly redundant term, as what had previously been known as this has mutated, been consumed and has learnt to work within a sociological arena in perpetual change. As the phrase goes - Art is dead, don't consume it's corpse.
So by way of conclusion, I`d like to raise a few questions. Would, or could anything like the previous avant garde ever return? Is today's experimental work different from the commercial applications involved in its production? (could it be art and little else, or is it barely art at all?), or is this situation just a case of contemporary critical spleen?
Thank you.
