Contents of spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/papers/simford.txt
On the Destruction of the Institution of Avant-Gardism
by Simon Ford
The concept of the avant-garde is as much an area of contention
today as it has been since its initial cultural formulation by
Saint-Simon in 1825 (1). Attempting to define it is also a
traditional folly. That it is repeatedly attempted has much to
do with its various meanings in the diverse contexts and subject
positions available in the art world. The artist rarely uses it
as a term of self-description; there exists a certain etiquette,
involving modesty, that makes it a slightly embarrassing label.
For the critic to describe something as avant-garde usually
indicates a certain mystification in the face of the object, and
as such the term legitimates incomprehension. For the
gallery-owner, the avant-garde indicates a relatively
under-colonised domain that is ripe for commercial exploitatation
at the same time as improving the gallery's reputation for
supporting daring and innovative work. For the curator, the
avant-garde represents an opportunity to construct new trends and
to codify what might otherwise appear as disordered and
polymorphous. Definitions are thus strategic, a situating in
relation to potential allies, enemies, patrons, and critics. The
avant-garde is always a strategy of positioning in relationship
to the contemporaneous field of cultural activity.
The discursive field surrounding the concept of the avant-garde
today is massive and manifold. But it can, at the cost of
over-simplification, be divided between an "avant-gardism" that
supports that which superficially contravenes conventional
forms of art, and the "avant-garde" that works towards the total
eradication of the institution of art (2) and by extension the
whole prevailing social order. With the wide range of artistics
practice that these two views encompass it soon becomes apparent
that one person's avant-garde is almost certainly another
person's cultural mainstream. Drawing on the evidence of recent
interest in the avant-garde (3) we are currently in a period
characterised by attempts to promote the first formulation
(avant-gardism) at the expense of the second (the avant-garde),
resulting in the promotion of "avant-gardism for avant-gardism's
sake".
Because there is no consensus on definition each commentator is
required to search out their own true avant-garde and
differentiate it from a "false" avant-garde. Ownership of the
label is so valuable because of the enviable position of the
avant-garde in culture. To be avant-garde is to be way ahead
of the rest, at the front of a massive and profitable cultural
mainstream. The avant-garde banks in the present on its future
profitability.
For Donald Kuspit the "true" avant-garde artist's aim was "to
undertake a sincere, risky search, carried out in social
obscurity, for the touchstone primordiality that could
reoriginate the self." In distinction, today's "false"
avant-garde accepts "cynically, guilelessly, a facile,
impersonal formula for making art and being an artist, rather
than to be a missionary converting the fallen to the faith of
the true self by way of an original art" (4) The
"neo-avant-garde", in the form of appropriation artists, is the
epitome of the conservative and reactionary because of the damage
they do to the original avant-garde project. The appropriation
artists strips the avant-garde of its life and purpose through
his/her morbid nostalgia, decadence and narcissism. By
repackaging the art of the past, the appropriation artist reifies
the whole avant-garde project by turning revolution into a
spectacle, an image, just another art object. Plagiarists,
through the appropriation of past revolutionary art, in fact only
"plagiarize the reified idea of the revolution" and this only
makes sure of the death or impossibility of revolutionary art in
the present because "it stylises and systematizes the very idea of
artistic revolution" (5) For Kuspit then, the avant-garde artist
is not far removed from the conventional view of the
Modernist/Romantic artist as a heroic figure struggling to
communicate transcendental truths. It is, however, just this
figure and his/her construction through representations that is
the target of much appropriation work. As such, Kuspit's project
to revise this figure puts him firmly in the avant-gardism camp, a
characteristic of which is the inability to distinguish between
modernism and the avant-garde.
For Neil Nehring, in his book on postwar British subcultures (6),
the avant-garde exists to assimilate exemplary acts of
contestation which exist outside of an art work that will
eventually replace it. The avant-garde exists to co-ordinate
and stimulate the international revolutionary consciousness and
the signs of refusal and creativity that abound in popular life.
As an integrator of art and everyday life, and an intermediary
between deviant subcultures and the bourgeois art world, the
avant-garde attempts to break own the barriers between the elite
practices of artists and the experiece of lived daily reality for
the masses (the destruction of difference between artist and
audience). Punk is perceived by Nehring as a model example of
avant-garde discourse being integrated with popular culture.
Popular culture, however, remains distinct through being
incoherent, regressive and commercially compromised whereas
avant-gardism remains elitist, politically pessimistic and
isolated from mass ideological movements. The oft-repeated aim,
to destroy the distinction between art and everyday life through
the realisation and suppression of art, co-joins art, politics
and everyday life with no one realm claiming sovereignty over
the others. For the moment each realm operates in the belief in
its own forthcoming self-destruction and is happy "to experience
its own death as an aesthetic pleasure" (7) as Andrew Hewitt
has expressed it, a characteristics shared with fascism. Despite
this notion the paradox of the avant-garde remains its status as a
specialist enterprise that wants to do away with separation and
specialisation. (8)
This paradox brings us to the most repeatedly suppressed aspect
of avant-garde activity, namely its self-consciously "collective"
identity. The historical avant-garde recognised the need to
theorise and construct forms of organisation and the possibility
of eventual strategic alignment with larger social forces. The
political was incorporated into the artistic not just as a subject
but also as a form of organisation, modelled usually on the
vanguardist integration of theory, practice and agitation.
Nehring points out how the avant-garde shares most common ground
with anarchism in that it rejects traditional values, centralised
authority, hierarchical systems, and dogmatic parliamentary
politics. Its energy derives from the dialectic of the individual
and group, and emancipation is conceived through the "free
self-realisation of others, in a dialectic between individual and
collective" (9). The avant-garde exists to light the fuse -
control would then be given over to more extensive social forces.
Another currently overlooked indicator of avant-garde activity is
the number of artists' manifestos being produced. The health of
the genre usually marks periods of intense interaction between the
cultural and the political and at the same time announces a
commitment to collective artistic practice. In the past a
manifesto was obligatory - they were the public proclamation of a
movement's programme, beliefs and demands. Manifestos were
composed as strategic incursions into a realm of written and
verbal discourse usually denied the artist. They communicated in
the printed word what was not possible through the purely visual.
Today, with avant-gardism, the manifesto has become a dying art
form. Much of the energy that once went into it now gets used up
in supplying the new genre of the press release, a form of arts
marketing that at its most creative publicises subversion as it
attempts to subvert publicity. The decline of the manifesto can
also be put down to the rise of theory and the supplanting by the
essay of its more simplistic, populist and often militaristic and
phallocentric excesses. The manifesto, in its mixture of art
discourse with political rhetoric, questioned the autonomy
of both. For between the aestheticisation of politics and the
politicisation of aesthetics - a position that inclines
disconcertingly towards the shared ideological roots of fascism
and avant-gardism.
The manifesto thrived on its ability to be interpreted, on its
ability to produce more "copy". The avant-garde keeps abreast of
theoretical and critical developments because art is heavily
dependent on the legitimisation and publicity provided by
reviewers and art critics. In addition to this recognition,
reaction is also sought after in the pages of the popular press,
which stands in place of the reaction of society at large, as
representative of the "public". To annoy the popular press is a
sign that one's message is hitting home (the more outraged the
reaction the better). Avant-garde art, like media scams and
pranks, is looking to incorporate this reaction into the work
itself. Here Kuspit makes a distinction between the avant-garde
artist who is "found" by fame and the neo-avant-garde artist who
"seeks" fame. The pseudo-avant-garde "assumes that avant-garde
art is a means to the end of fame and fortune, not a thing with
intrinsic value" (10) That the historical avant-garde were also
deeply involved in the process of self-promotion is not
acknowleged by Kuspit.
The late 80s and early 90s have seen a series of exhibitions
rejuvenating, re-inventing and promoting 60s and 70s
avant-gardism, represented by such movements as the Situationist
International, Fluxus and Viennese Actionism. What is new about
these attempts at codification and containment through
reprsentation is that they took place so soon after the
movement's active period. The speed with which cultural
dissidents become the darlings of the establishment art world is
worthy of note - today this process is becoming almost
simultaneous. The art world, regulated and administered by the
few galleries, magazines and museums interested in contemporary
art, controls the meaning and value of art through its
institutional context; a framework that also orientates debate
about the functions and types of works of art that are
acceptable. The dominant culture maintains its dominance by
institutionalising or recuperating the radical rather than
totally eliminating it. The trouble, however, with the concept
of "recuperation" is that it invokes some lost "paradise" of
unrecuperated space and practice. It totalises the utter
vulnerability of all actions to appropriation.
The concept of recuperation does reveal how avant-gardism
becomes merely one mediated role amongst others that can be
adopted: where rebellion becomes image of rebellion. Seduced by
this image, avant-gardism advocates only compliance through the
production of more images and objects. However, the "true"
avant-garde also cannot claim it is not exploitable in the
present conditions. All it can attempt is to make this
exploitation dangerous for the exploiters through such tactics
as making the process visible The avant-garde thus stimulates
just what it ostensibly hopes to destroy. It has become more
obviously market oriented, with the market, institution, and
commodification becoming the subject as well as the context.
The three books mentioned here indicate the perpetual state of
crisis that thediscouse of avant-gardism inhabits. Now, as
ever, is a time of deep questioning of the need for a
contemporary avant-garde. With postmodernist, the idea of
progress in art, as a continuing process of formal and aesthetic
innovation, has come to be exhausted: "the essece of modernity
as we have traditionally thought it is its incompletion, the
impossibility of ruling out yet more radical negation, yet more
startling innovation. A modernism that is somehow 'completed'
will be decidedly anti- or post- modern; it will be an
avant-garde. (11) There is no longer any connection between
artistic innovation and the logic ofthe precedent and the
antecedent. Culture now operates in an environment of
simultaneity, raiding the archive with impunity. In the absence
of this metanarrative or progress, the traditional avant-garde's
function - to be a advance guard that leads the following army
into new territory for colonisation - becomes redundant.
Radicalism in the art world is now inextricably linked to the
careerism of the artist. In this sense it becomes necessary to
question the over-determination vested in the "new" in the
discourse of avant-gardism. The idea of the new for its own
sake is totally integrated with the discourse of commercial and
corporate sponsorship of the arts, such as this example from
Philip Morris Europe: "Just as the artist endeavours to improve
his interpretation and conceptions through innovation, the
commercial entity strives to improve its end product or service
through experimentation with new methods and materials. Our
constant search for a new and better way in which to perform and
produce is akin to the questioning of the artists" (12) To speak
of the avant-garde only in terms of aesthetic innovation is
therefore to normalise them as key players in a self-regenerating
and dynamic art market. A market that can handle and indeed
requires an infinite variety of new styles and new forms of art
making.
Does then the present situation enable us to work towards or
recognise an avant-garde today that can be validly compared to that
of the past? The present conditions can only lead us to the view
that the avant-garde cannot exist in the way that it once did
and that it is necessary to rethink just what can constitute
avant-garde practice today. That this is necessary can be put
down to three important actors. The first is its unprecedented
institutionalisation, the fact that past avant-garde art now
functions as official art within galleries, museums and education
systems. The second factor has to do with the accommodation of
pluralism: the avant-garde is accepted as just one more approach
amongst others and there becomes no one identifiable culture to
contest. Further erosion of the "difference" of the avant-garde
comes about through the appropriation by both mass and high
culture of many of the avant-garde's own tacttics and techniques.
The third factor is the changing concept of the political in art,
with the waning of the productivist model, the attention given to
the politics of representation, and the lack of belief in the
strength of the proletariat leaving the cadre elite with no mass
to follow its example.
Although it is necessarily subject to imprecise usage,
avant-gardism remains identifiable, but the avant-garde continues
to escape categorisation. The ideology of avant-gardism is the
dominant model of artistic production today. The avant-garde,
caught up in its own discourse, is suffering from a lack of
original moves to make in an over-analysed end-game. This
situation of stasis and equilibrium, with no one side having any
winning positions, clearly suits one side more that the other. It
is now up to production to lead theory out of its aporias, a
production so different it may be necessary to call it something
other than "avant-garde". But because of its cultural dominance
it seems to me that the proper target for the avant-garde today
entails a kind of infanticide, a destruction of the institution of
avant-gardism. The aim, as always will be to attempt to
construct a concept of the avant-garde pertinent to our
contemporary situation.
(1) See Donald D. Egbert "The Idea of Avant-Garde in Art and
Politics", American Historical Review. Vol 73 no.2, Dec. 67,
pp339-66
(2) See Peter Burger "Theory of the Avant-Garde", University of
Minnesota Press, 1984
(3) See the series presented by the "avant" Guardian
"Who's Afraid of the Avant-Garde?" which to date has featured
articles by amongst others Terry Eagleton, James Hall and Deyan
Sudjic, each Friday during September and October 1993.
(4) Donald Kuspit "The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist" Cambridge
University Press, 1993
(5) Ibid p111
(6) Neil Nehring "Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture Anarchy and
Postwar England", University of Michigan Press, 1993
(7) Andrew Hewitt "Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and
the Avant-Garde", Stanford University Press, 1993, p173
(8) For a discussion of the many productive aporias of the
avant-garde, see Paul Mann "The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde",
Indiana Universty Press, 1991
(9) Nehring op cit p165
(10) Kuspit op cit p108
(11) Hewitt op cit p45
(12) John A Murphy, Sponsor's statement for "When Attitudes
Become Form" (1969) in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds) "Art
in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas", Blackwell
192, p886
_____
Originally published in Variant no.16 (winter/spring 1994)
Simon Ford can be contacted at National Art Library, Victoria &
Albert Museum, Cromwell Rd, London,SW7 2RL.
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