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AVANT-POP MANIFESTO:  THREAD BARING ITSELF
IN TEN QUICK POSTS

By Mark Amerika



1.  Now that Postmodernism is dead and we're in the process of
finally burying it, something else is starting to take hold in the
cultural imagination and I propose that we call this new
phenomenon Avant-Pop.

2.  Whereas it's true that certain strains of Postmodernism,
Modernism, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Surrealism,
Dadaism, Futurism, Capitalism and even Marxism pervade the new
sensibility, the major difference is that the artists who create
Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than
being the children of their parents who have much less influence
over them).  Most of the early practitioners of Postmodernism,
who came into active adult consciousness in the fifties, sixties and
early seventies, tried desperately to keep themselves away from
the forefront of the newly powerful Mediagenic Reality that was
rapidly becoming the place where most of our social exchange was
taking place.  Despite its early insistence on remaining caught up
in the academic and elitist art world's presuppositions of self-
institutionalization and incestuality, Postmodernism found itself
overtaken by the popular media engine that eventually killed it
and from its remains Avant-Pop is now born.

3.  Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde
sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media
culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our
imaginations to process experience.  At the same time, A-P artists
have had to work hard at not becoming so enamored of the false
consciousness of the Mass Media itself that they lose sight of their
creative directives.  The single most important creative directive
of the new wave of Avant-Pop artists is to enter the mainstream
culture as a parasite would sucking out all the bad blood that lies
between the mainstream and the margin.  By sucking on the
contaminated bosom of mainstream culture, Avant-Pop artists are
turning into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and
always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find
wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is.  The latter
strains of Postmodernism attempted to do this too but were
unable to find the secret key that led right into the mainstream
cell so as to facilitate and accelerate the rapid decomposition of
the host's body.  This is all changing as the emerging youth
culture, with its deep-rooted cynicism and nomadic movement
within the "dance of biz", now has the power to make or break the
economic future of decrepit late-capitalism.
        Avant-Pop artists themselves have acquired immunity from
the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry
and are now ready to offer their own weirdly concocted elixirs to
cure us from this dreadful disease ("information sickness") that
infects the core of our collective life.

4.  Now whereas Avant-Pop artists are fully aware of their need to
maintain a crucial Avant-sensibility as it drives the creative
processing of their work and attaches itself to the avant-garde
lineage they spring from, they are also quick to acknowledge the
need to develop more openminded strategies that will allow them
to attract attention within the popularized forms of representation
that fill up the contemporary Mediascape.  Our collective mission
is to radically alter the Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more
popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesturing
that grows out of the work of many 20th century artists like
Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Raymond Federman,
William Burroughs, William Gibson, Ronald Sukenick, Kathy Acker,
the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), art movements like
Fluxus, Situationism, Lettrism and Neo-Hoodooism, and scores of
rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater,
Tackhead, The Breeders, Pussy Galore, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth,
Ministry, Jane's Addiction, Tuxedo Moon and The Residents.
        The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the
scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform
our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more
sensual, trippy, exotic and networked Avant-Pop experience.  One
way to achieve this would be by creating and expanding niche
communities.  Niche communities, many of which already exist
through the zine scene, will become, by virtue of the convergent
electronic environments, virtual communities.  By actively
engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation
of collectively-generated electronic publications, individually-
designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi-
media interactive hypertexts, conferences, etc., Avant-Pop artists
and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the
conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist-
author creates their beautifully-crafted, original works of art to be
consumed primarily by the elitist art-world and their business-
cronies who pass judgement on what is appropriate and what is
not.
        Literary establishment?  Art establishment?  Forget it.
Avant-Pop artists wear each other's experiential data like waves
of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual-blood while
the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their
collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle
anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we
disseminate and interact with writing.

5.  Avant-Pop artists welcome the new Electronic Age with open
arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances
of finding an audience of like-minded individuals who we can
communicate and collaborate with.  The future of writing is
moving away from the lone writer sitting behind a keyboard
cranking out verse so that one day he or she may find an editor or
agent or publisher who will hype their work to those interested in
commercial literary culture.  Instead, the future of writing will
feature more multi-media collaborative authoring that will make
itself available to hundreds if not thousands of potential associates
around the world who will be actively internetworking in their
own niche communities.  Value will depend more on the ability of
the different groups of artist-associates to develop a reputation
for delivering easily accessible hits of the Special Information
Tonic to the informationally-sick correspondent wherever he or
she may be (one of the other great things about to make Avant-
Pop the most exciting movement-chemistry of the 20th century
and into the 21st Century is that our audience will be both
immediate and global, all in one breath).
        Writers who continue to support an outmoded concept of the
lone writer dissociated from the various niche communities at
their disposal will eventually lose touch with the nanosecond
speed at which the movement-chemistry wanders and will find
their own work and its individually-isolated movement
decelerating into turtle-like oblivion.
        Can you imagine what The Futurists would have done with
an Information Superhighway?


6.  Antonin Artaud, founder of The Theater of Cruelty, once said
that "I am the enemy of the theater.  I have always been.  As
much as I love the theater, I am, for this very reason, equally it's
enemy."  Avant-Pop artists are the enemy of pop culture and the
avant-garde, both domains seemingly so far-fetched in a world
that celebrates itself with live TV wars, rampant economic
disenfranchisement and nanosecond identity changes.  Our lineage,
the bloodbath of cultural history we swim in, includes Artaud,
Lautreamont, Jarry, Rimbaud, Futurism, Situationism, Fluxus,
Abstract Expressionism, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, William
Burroughs, Terry Southern, Surfiction, Metafiction, Postmodernism
in all its gruesome details, Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Beavis
and Butthead, SLACKER, Coltrane Miles Dizzy Don Cherry, feminist
deconstruction, the list goes on.  We will sample from anything we
need.  We will rip-off your mother if she has something we find
appropriate for our compost-heap creations.

7.  We don't give a shit about your phony social reality either.
"Once upon a timeI" doesn't interest us whether your setting is
the past (historical fiction), the present (contemporary classics) or
the future (cyberhype).  We prefer to lose ourselves in the
exquisite realms of spacy sex and timeless narrative disaster, the
thrill of breaking down syntax and deregulating the field of
composition so that you no longer have to feel chained to the bed
of commercial standardization.  The emerging youth culture's
ability to align itself with intuitive intelligence and non-linear
narrative surfing is just one sign of where the Avant-Pop artist's
audience is situated.  Soon the Data Superhighway will finally once
and for all do away with the high-priced middlemen, and artists
will reap the benefits of their own hard-earned labor.  The
distribution formula will radically change from

Author - Agent - Publisher - Printer - Distributor - Retailer - Consumer

to a more simplified and direct

Author (Sender) - Interactive Participant (Receiver)

Avant-Pop artists and their pirate signals promoting wild station
identifications are ready to expand into your home right now, just
log on, click around and find them.  It's all up to YOU, the
interactive Avant-Pop artist/participant.

8.  Postmodernism changed the way we read texts.  The main
tenet of Postmodernism was:  I, whoever that is, will put together
these bits of data and form a Text while you, whoever that is, will
produce your own meaning based off what you bring to the Text.
The future of Avant-Pop writing will take this even one step
further.  The main tenet that will evolve for the Avant-Pop
movement is:  I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data
created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting
with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning.
        In an Information Age where we all suffer from Information
Sickness and Overload, the only cure is a highly-potent,
creatively-filtered tonic of (yes) textual residue spilled from the
depths of our spiritual unconscious.  Creating a work of art will
depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select,
organize and present the bits of raw data we have at our disposal.
We all know originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual
realities are always already readymade and ready for
consumption!  In a nod to Duchamp's Armory Show scandal, the
questions we need to ask ourselves are 1) who are we sharing the
cultural-toilet with and 2) what are we filling it up with?

9.  Avant-Pop artists are already doing a lot of this stuff already.
It's impossible to name them all but a random sampling would
include Mark Leyner, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, William Gibson, William
Vollmann, Larry McCaffery, Ronald Sukenick, Kim Gordon, Doug
Rice, Derek Pell, Kim Deal, Darius James, Lauren Fairbanks, Jello
Biafra, Lisa Suckdog, Eurudice, Nile Southern, Takayuki Tatsumi,
John Bergin, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Richard Linklater, Don
Webb, The Brothers Quay, Lance Olsen, Curt White, Eugene
Chadbourne, King Missile, David Blair, and many, many others.

10.  Without even knowing it, the Avant-Pop movement has been
secretly generating interest and support for a few years now but
has recently become more exposed with the successful
breakthrough of the sub-pop alternative music scene, the
publication of alternative trade paperbacks like Black Ice Books,
and the release of low-budget alternative media projects like
*Wax, Or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees*.  The future
of fiction is *now* as we, its most active practitioners,
automatically unwrite it.

Boulder, Colorado

-- 
---------------------------Michael J. Current----------------------------
 mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net -or- -AT-ins.infonet.net -or- -AT-nyx.cs.du.edu
Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :)
 737 - 18th Street, #9 * Des Moines, IA * 50314-1031 *** (515) 283-2142
"AN IMAGE OF THOUGHT CALLED PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN FORMED HISTORICALLY
AND IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE
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