The Interminable Monopoly of the Avant-Garde (original) (raw)

The theory of the avant-garde: an historical critique

Canadian Review Of Sociology/revue Canadienne De Sociologie, 1992

L'auteur critique l'incapacite de penser le processus de reconnaissance sociale de l'art dans les thbories de l'avant-garde proposees par Burger et Poggioli. Sans cette dimension, leurs theories reposent sur une tautologie. Tout en reconnaissant l'apport que constitue la sociologie du goOt daboree par Bourdieu, l'auteur signale la prkoccupation preponderante qu'accorde cette analyse a la stabilitb des structures du champ artistique, preoccupation qui la conduit a renoncer aux pretentions de comprendre les conditions historiques de la naissance et de l'bvolution des avant-gardes au sein dcs socibtes occidentales. The author criticizes the theories of the avant-garde advanced by Burger and Poggioli for their incapacity to theorize the process of social recognition of art. Without this dimension, their theories are based on a tautology. While recognising the positive contribution of Bourdieu's sociology of taste, the author notes that this approach has emphasized the stability of the structural determinations of the art world and seems to have sacrificed the ambition of previous theories of the avant-garde to understand the historical conditions of its appearance and evolution in Western societies. * Questions discussed here are part of a larger research project on a social history of the Academy of Fine A r t s in France during the 19th Century which has received support from the SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) and the DGEC (Direction Generale des ktudes Collhgialee) of the Quebec Department of Higher Education. This manuscript was

The Rearguard of the Avant-garde (Editor’s Note)

2020

A quarter of a century ago, I started my first paper on the avant-garde with the following sentence: "The notion of the avant-garde is inextricably linked to the artistic attitudes of the 20 th century." I couldn't imagine that avant-garde could still be alive in the 21 st century-I thought at the time that it has definitely "left the stage." The approach seemed to be confirmed by Dubravka Oraić Tolić (1990), who placed the end of avant-garde culture in 1968. The Croatian expert distinguished three phases of the avant-garde culture: artistic, political and philosophical. In her opinion, the artistic phase came in the years 1910-1935, when art was in the centre of culture, with painting having a significant impact on literature at the forefront, and with poetry playing the major role in the field. The years 1935-1955 marked the political phase of avant-garde culture. Its central model based on contestation was shifted from the aesthetics of destruction to destructive politics. At that time, in the opinion of the researcher, avant-garde literary work almost died out, and novels became the dominant genre. The third and last phase of avant-garde culture, the philosophical stage, lasted from the early 1950s to 1968, when the avant-garde artistic style ended. At that time, Oraić Tolić writes, there no longer exists a "stylistic formation" (Flaker), replaced by "isolated avant-garde tendencies that mix with the demands of contemporary mass media culture, knowledge of nature and technology." In the distinguished phases, the following phenomena took place successively: aestheticisation, politicisation and philosophicisation of culture. At the time of my first scientific encounter with the avant-garde, Zygmunt Bauman published his essay Ponowoczesność, czyli o niemożliwości awangardy (Postmodernity, on the Impossibility of the Avant-garde) (1994), in which the philosopher argues that in the spatially and temporally disordered postmodern world, there is no point in talking about the CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

Introduction: The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today

This book is dedicated to Amiri Baraka, Chris Marker and Lebbeus Woods iv • "Innovation enters art by revolution. Reality reveals itself in art in much the same way as gravity reveals itself when a ceiling collapses on its owner's head. New art searches for the new word, the new expression. The poet suffers in attempts to break down the barrier between the word and reality. We can already feel the new word on his lips, but tradition puts forward the old concept." -Viktor Shklovsky • "This means that in the psychology and ideology of avant-garde art, historically considered (from the viewpoint of what Hegelians and Marxists would call the historic dialectic), the futurist manifestation represents, so to speak, a prophetic and utopian phase, the arena of agitation and preparation for the announced revolution, if not the revolution itself." -Renato Poggioli • "Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the constituencies that might support them, constituencies that are always limited by the entirety of social conditions. People from these tendencies who have been noticed are generally admitted on an individual basis, at the price of a vital repudiation; the fundamental point of debate is always the renunciation of comprehensive demands and the acceptance of a fragmented work, open to multiple readings. This is what makes the very term avant-garde, which when all is said and done is wielded by the bourgeoisie, somewhat suspicious and ridiculous." -Guy Debord • "In so far as the historical avant-garde movements respond to the developmental stage of autonomous art epitomized by aestheticism, they are part of modernism; in so far as they call the institution of art into question, they constitute a break with modernism.

The Twilight of the Avant-Garde

2009

C hapter appeared in Hispanic Review (1999) under the title "The Avant-Garde and its Discontents: Aesthetic Conservatism in Recent Spanish Poetry." I am grateful to Ignacio-Javier López for this accepting this article, and to Guillermo Carnero for circulating it among writers in Spain. Chapter 2 was published in Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World, edited by Cecile West-Settle and Sylvia Sherno. Chapter 3 appeared in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Elena Delgado, Jo Labanyi, and an anonymous reviewer were helpful in improving this piece. Chapter 5 appeared in a special issue Diacritics edited by José María Rodríguez-García. Without the help and encouragement of José María and an anonymous reviewer for Diacritics, this chapter would have been much weaker. Claudio Rodríguez-Fer was also helpful to me in giving me background on Valente's acquaintance with Celan and Heidegger. Chapter 7 first appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. I would like to acknowledge Michael Mudrovic and Randolph Pope for accepting this article, and Akiko Tsuchiya for permission to reprint it here. Randolph also accepted other articles of mine on related topics that did not make it into this book. His generous support of my work over the years is greatly appreciated.

The Invention of the Avant-Garde

This paper questions the role of the avant-garde in the sphere of modern visual art, positing that the avant-garde operated in reaction against the prevailing attitudes of social and cultural institutions, thereby reinforcing rather than transcending them.

Of Tradition and Experiment VIII: What’s Avant-Garde in the 21st Century?

Tears in the Fence (Dorset, UK), 2013

This column for Tears in the Fence magazine reflects on the notion and definition of the contemporary Avant-Garde. Bouncing off ideas and articles by Marjorie Perloff, David Lehman and Alain Badiou, this short article discusses the role and possibility of naming and classifying material as part of defining or categorizing avant-gardism. The presence or absence of pop culture, normative speech, disjunctive speech or punctuation, and other formal techniques at the heart of aesthetic debates on poetic practice are also discussed, in particular as presented in works published by presses such as Wave books or Ugly Duckling Presse. The column ends responding to Perloff's claim that the new avant garde is lyric conceptualism, claiming instead that the new has not yet arrived, though perhaps "Authors interested in the potential for the unknown are almost waiting for an art to emerge that has the potential to surprise, scandalize, and radicalize their view." This article does not attempt to answer as much as to meander around and mull over some of the core debates about definition and position of avant gardism today.