File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1994/avant-garde_14Apr.94, message 18


Date: Thu, 14 Apr 1994 18:47:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Judith Frederika Rodenbeck <jfr10-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: avant-garde?




On Thu, 14 Apr 1994, is0sls wrote:

> A comment rather than a reply to Malgosia's question as to whether the term 
> avant-garde can be used in connection with present phenomena or with a "specific
>  period of history now passed". For me this is doubly problematic as the list
> is described as including Surrealism, but surrealism's self-definition is that
> it is Non-avant-gardist, that it represents a definite break with the 
> avant-garde. On these grounds it should not be included in such a list at all.

Could you say more about "surrealism's self-definition?" 
Clearly Malgosia's question problematizes the term "avant-garde": are we 
talking about art, politics, psychoanalysis, fashion, zones, armies? When 
does an/the avant-garde begin to bubble into its iridescent scumminess on 
the top of the pot?
How do we read surrealism's revolutionary consciousness? (And Breton's 
prescient divorce from the PCF?) What is it to be self-defined as 
"non-avant-gardist"? Is this a retrograde motion or is it a beyond that 
can't be accounted for by the "garde," avant or not?
Just some questions. I was interested in the Bolshevik discussion, 
actually. If we historicize the avant-garde, we have to historicize the 
failure of the Soviet artistic avant-garde... or was/were that/they TAZs? 
(I wonder what life was like on those giant spectacle-boats.)
-fido

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