Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 01:26:44 -0400
From: ostrow-AT-is2.nyu.edu (Ostrow/Kaneda)
Subject: Re: make yourself at home


>Ah, the eternal golden braid of generalities that we spin on this list!
>I would think that we have perhaps collectively come to understand that
>"avant-garde" may mean many different things and that it is fruitless to
>make broad general statements about it without specifying how one uses
>the term. _Which_ avant-garde disappeared, and why, when the museums
>decided to become educational institutions and all that?  _Which_
>avant-garde was killed, or not killed, by post-modernism (and _which_
>post-modernism)?  And so on.
>
>
>
>-malgosia
>
As usual I have not proof read this, so if there are typo's or grammatical
or spelling  errors, I apologize in advance though I am sure that my point
is clear enough.

Ah, the eternal  complaint, I would think that we have perhaps collectively
come to understand  that that thing  designated  the Avant Garde is not a
program but a practice that has established itself over the last  hundred
plus years and that the use of the term is not to  dismiss the conscious
use of a term because the common usage of the term for various and
sundryconventions (which can be  enumerated) has  currupted it.  I will
stand by the term as it has been traditionally  eg.-- Vanguardism is/was
represented a changed  attitude toward tradition and the conscious making
of culture  and progress.  Being avant Garde is not synonomous with being
Modernist, Modernis circumscribes the van garde, not the other way around.
As a practice it plays a role first in the  transition from  court to
bourgeois culture and then in defining the means by which bourgeois culture
will define its forms and practices,  By the Forties  it comes to dominate
the feild of High cultural in part by establishing  modernisms relationship
to Mass Culture ( the culture industry)

  Its legacy is the mythologies accrued by acentury long rebellion against
the cannon of Academic Art that would impose a static system of
metaphysical values on increasingly dynamic and materialistic society. With
time this , rebellionin a reified  and relexive manner became  a  condition
of the cannon because as  a practice it almost guaranteed  scandal and
success.  It was this tradition of revolt  and reaction which sought to
make art contemporary by overthrowing the paradigms that had arose from the
humanism of the  rennaissance. This tradition that once could produce
works that could be condemned as subversive  or be hailed as a release from
past tyrannies.  Such battles are cold issues, though those who would dream
the dream of being avant garde posture and boat that they are the solution
to a problem long addressed.  The AV was the   agent by which the last
remenants of the heirarchy of  western art was laid flat. It came to an end
when its opposition and re-action became ready-mades. alternatives or
expected novelties that breed self-satisfaction on the part of the maker
and created a business as usual fascade to a culture sphere that was
increasingly being institutionalzied and standardized even in its
opposition.

 If  were still an avant garde it would have to be self-critical as well as
socilly and culturally critical , it would have to surrender its now
tarnished  holier than thou attitiude in which all who succeed are
currupted all those who are marginalized are martyrs.  Romanticism is
lovely but its self serving.  Post-modernism represents  the triumph and
institutionalization of what had been thought of as vangauard practices,
that is the acceptance of  a form of culture that is in keeping with the
corposrate values. The avant garde is not the agent of cultural resistence
but of its maintainence.

If there is another avant gard that htis brief but general discription does
not cover , iwould be more than happy   to know the nature of its practice,
what values it represents  or proposes and how its practices resist against
co-optation or marginalization, while simultaneously  struggling within
and in the name of dominant culture, even if only to decentralize it.




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