The Avant-Garde: Histories and Theories (original) (raw)

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.

Avant-Garde: Its Genesis and Metamorphosis

2018

The narratives on avant-garde have been under deep scrutiny from as early as nineteenth century and keep resurfacing and metamorphosing with changing political, social, and economic factors. These narratives are specifically organised around moments of shock, rupture, youthful revolt and speak about how experimental art functions and about the nature of its gradual change.Over the years, avant-garde has undergone various phases and manifested itself through various movements of late nineteenth and twentieth century like Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism. Whatever phase or moment it must have been in, the aim of avant-garde art in pushing the boundaries and creating something new and innovative for making the world a better place has always been its hallmark.However, the utopian avant-garde, restyled into radical iconoclastic cultural movements of the first half of the twentieth century, eventually fell into the clasp of capitalism as the latter took over the entire West. The escalating ...

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.

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

Cultures of the Avant Garde Oxford 21st

This essay considers the early twentieth-century London avant-garde, concentrating specifically on the early poetics of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and their circle. In calling for experimentation with 'regular' forms and a new modern mode of composition, these avant-gardistes sought to capture the changing 'spirit' of their time, which, they felt, existing forms and techniques could no longer accommodate. What unites the different avant-garde practices of the time is the belief that poetry (art in general) ought to spearhead all means of communication. This conviction underlies the avant-garde distinction between 'prose' (or conventional language) and 'poetry' (direct, immediate, language), an opposition which, in turn, at least in the case of Hulme and Pound, carries severe ideological implications.

Retroactivating the Idea of the Avant Garde

Journal of Avant Garde Studies, 2020

In the late 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production was distinguished along class lines by three different modes of cultural habitus: bourgeois disinterestness, petty-bourgeois allodoxia and working-class necessity. Since that era, the petty-bourgeois habitus has become the dominant predisposition. Adding Bour-dieu's sociology of culture to Peter Bürger's historicized theory of the emergence of the avant garde as a critique of the "institution art," a new "avant garde hypothesis" becomes possible for today's age of post-Fordist biocapitalism. Based on Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses, the contemporary situation is shown to privilege specific forms of cultural production, in particular an activist Discourse of the Hysteric and a technocratic Discourse of the University. Psychoanalysis reveals the limits of these tendencies while also underscoring the archaic aspects of an aestheticist Discourse of the Master and the transferential logics of Analyst avant gardes.

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.