Date: Mon, 05 Jun 1995 16:09:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: vance <vance-AT-CWU.EDU>
Subject: RE: MTV




On Mon, 5 Jun 1995, ALASTAIR DICKSON wrote:

> 
> >On Sun, 4 Jun 1995, ALASTAIR DICKSON wrote:
> >
> >> The constitution of a prior canon and assertion of its own
> >>importance are major functions in an avant-garde's
> >>self-constitution, for example in the 1st Surrealist Manifesto.

vance:
> >Yet major avant-garde artists such as Cezanne had neither of
> >these; did they?

Alastair:
> That's true.  He was rather unclubbable vis-a-vis movements, wasn't he? 
> For example, he didn't participate in Paris exhibitions between the mid
> 1870 and mid 1890s.
> 
> It takes us back to what constitutes an avant-garde.  My feeling is that
> it involves the use of publicity to present a group, usually
> differentiating it from the norm (i.e. scandal).  Such adroitness in
> (self-)advertising is quite a 20th century trait, which is why it's
> interesting to look at it in the wider context.  But I recognise that
> emphasis on this characteristic runs the danger of taking the particulars
> of futurism/surrealism to be the general traits of avant-gardes.
> 
I would argue that the above is an attempt to define it from the wrong 
end. That attempts to define the avant-garde by cataloging its methods; 
I'd be more comfortable in defining the a-g from examining its 
results--no advanced change in concept, no followers, no a-g.

> So would Beethoven be avant-garde?  Or would Liszt be avant-garde in his
> concert tours, when he presented Beethoven, Mendelsohn, etc as a "core
> curriculum" of modern music?  Or Wagner in his striving for the total
> artwork?  I suspect the inclusion of these an an "avant-garde" category
> makes it too wide to be useful.

Don't get me to talking points about music: I'm, as the French say, "dumb 
as a painter" about music. But I would certainly regard artists such as 
Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo as an avant-garde. Certainly a new term such 
as avant-garde is almost always invented to describe a practice that had 
previously been practiced. The term follows the practice, not vice versa. 
Leonardo was definitely a formalist long before the term was coined.

I would argue that anyone who advances an idea that is advanced ahead of 
the other work of the time, an idea important enough to guide the 
direction of the discipline, is avant-garde. I would think that anyone 
who fits Foucault's description of the "transdiscursive" would be a-g.

Foucault speaks of a similar concept when he examines how we construct 
the idea of an author.  He notes that an author (and, I would add, a 
painter) can create much more than a series of books or paintings; he can 
father a "theory, tradition, or discipline" which will spawn other books, 
authors, paintings, and painters.

Foucault's label for such authors (or painters) is "transdiscursive".  A 
transdiscursive body of work, he says, "contains characteristic signs, 
figures, relationships, and structures which could be reused by others".  
Thus, both Giotto's and Masaccio's paintings began a transdiscursive 
tradition of interest in illusion that dominated, in one construct or 
another, painterly discussion until the last half of the 20th century.

But Foucault insists there is a second category of even more uncommon, 
subtle, and far reaching influence than the "transdiscursive."  Foucault 
refers to those who qualify for this second category, which first appears 
during the 19th century, as "founders of discursivity".  They found a 
paradigm, a system of rules, a set of possibilities for the formation of 
other texts.  "Freud is not just the author of "The Interpretation of 
Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious"; Marx is not just 
the author of the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital:  they both have 
established an endless possibility of discourse".  Among 19th-century 
painters, such a category would seem to describe only Cezanne.  His 
paradigm of the plane, rather than line and shade, as a schema for the 
representation of the world outside the painting was influential in the 
formation of images as diverse as those of Picasso, Hofmann, and de Kooning.

All these people, I would argue, must be considered under the banner of 
the avant-garde.

vance


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