The Discourses of the Avant-Garde
A variety of authors have attempted to conceptualize the avant-garde both as a momentum in art history and as a dialectical
movement. From Jose Ortega y Gassett’s
The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art
(1925) to contemporary
perspectives on the avant-garde by the scholars of the present, the underlying feature of this phenomenon has been seen in its
potential to ridicule art as itself. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, Ortega identifies iconoclastic nature of the
avant-garde when “it turns against and engages in a critique of art itself and as such [14, P. 16].” In an attempt to set a definitional
framework for “the new art of the 20th century [as] a nascent reality [14, P. 17],” Ortega addresses the areas of the avant-garde’s
production, distribution and consumption in its features of iconoclasm and unpopularity. Later on, Renato Poggioli’s
The Theory
of the Avant-Garde
(1962) and Peter Burger’s
Theory of the Avant-Garde
(1974) have attempted to reflect on the movement as
a historical moment. The significant parallel underlying these works lies in the avant-garde’s historical nature hence allowing to
posit its essential characteristics as ‘moments,’ for Poggioli and as an ‘explanatory factor’ for an institution of already
autonomous art, for Burger.
Poggioli’s approach distinguishes the avant-garde as a dialectical movement in its moments of activism, antagonism,
nihilism, and agonism. Because Poggioli posits “the concept of movements […] internally and externally, [the avant-garde’s]
ideological and psychological motivations as well as its practical, sociological consequences” become aligned with “a concrete
end [10, P. 25].” The latter as related to the avant-garde is seen in “agitat[ing] for no other end than its own self, out of the sheer
joy of dynamism, a taste for action, a sportive enthusiasm, and the emotional fascination of adventure [10, P. 25].” This may, to
some extent, reflect Adorno’s suggestion that the avant-garde “is free from socially determined communication [14, P. 33]” and
is “closed and self-sufficient [14, P. 33].” On the other hand, it foregrounds the discourse of purposeful rationality as a foundation
for avant-gardist discourse. The limited significance of this feature is certainly admitted by Poggioli in “the movement formed
in part or in whole to agitate
against
something or someone [10, P. 25].” Hence, activism and antagonism are further accompanied
by the drive “beyond the point of control by any convention or reservation, […] in the act of beating down barriers, razing
obstacles, destroying whatever stands in its way [until reaching the point when the movement] accepts [its own] self-ruin [10, P.
26].” These two moments represent nihilism and agonism, which presuppose the radical nature of the avant-garde and the
similarity of such nature to ‘suicidal’ feature of capitalism posited by Nick Land in his
Making It with Death
essay published in
2011 in
Fanged Noumena, Collected Writings 1987-2007
. Land’s claim that “[i]f capital is a social suicide machine, it is because
it is compelled to advantage its assassins [8, P. 266]” allows to place the notion of the avant-garde as defined by Poggioli on a
par with ‘capitalist machine’, which in itself is a starting point for the present investigation.
Peter Burger’s take on the avant-garde expands this starting point even further in terms of viewing the avant-garde as a
method of “eliminat[ing] art as an institution [4, P. 50]” on the levels of production and reception. Burger suggests replacing the
term of ‘the avant-gardiste work’ with ‘avant-gardiste manifestation’ to “counter [the social functionlessness of Aestheticism]
not by an art that would have consequences within the existing society, but rather by the principle of the sublation of art in the
praxis of life [4, P. 51].” Moreover, Burger’s positing the avant-garde as a purposeless endeavor in its application and as a
mockery to individual creativity in terms of its production suggests market-driven dynamics of avant-gardiste manifestation
rather than its provocative nature. “If an artist today signs a stove pipe and exhibits it, that artist certainly does not denounce the
art market but adapts to it. Such adaptation does not eradicate the idea of individual creativity, it affirms it, and the reason is the
failure of the avant-gardiste intent to sublate art [4, P. 51].” In view of Land’s claim that “radical prioritization of the interrogative
impulse [demonstrates that] critique belongs to capital [6, P.262],” even historical avant-garde as a failed project becomes in
essence the space of the affirmation of capitalist dynamics.
Contemporary conceptualizations of the avant-garde link it to the poetics of the contemporaneity and technicity. Suggestion
that “[…] with avant-garde practice in general, the emergence of discourses of the contemporary […] was the result of a
complicated processes of socio-economic appropriation and synthesis, the fetishising and rejection of antecedent forms, and
technological strategies beyond any straightforward chronology [2, P. 8]” by default places the movement into chronologized
and de-chronologized spaces. The latter is not the space beyond humanist frame of the temporal per se but rather a subsystem, a
sub-space of ‘beyond-hood’ whereby the chronology itself remains both visceral and visible in those very processes of ‘socio-
economic appropriation’. It is from this perspective of the contemporary that the temporal acquires a theoretical significance in
relation to the avant-garde. That can be further justified by the very proposition of the existence of culture ‘after the avant-garde’
when the new becomes defined as a technicity. The concept of technique “no longer regarded as either inorganic or subordinate
to an illusionistic mimeticism [2, P. 12]” allows technicity to assume “an ontological status it did not previously possess [2, P.
12].“ This perspective, to some extent, mirrors Burger’s view on the avant-garde as an explanatory factor since “the avant-garde
has always served as a means by which, periodically, the commodity purifies itself [2, P. 9].” Furthermore, juxtaposition of this
contemporary framework against Land’s proposition that “[t]he commodity 'form' is a transmutational matrix [6, P. 230]” allows
to justify the present investigation of the avant-garde as a method rather than a movement. With its potential to serve as self-
critique, such method may further be characterized as a rupture foregrounding “the commoditisation of the avant-garde [2, P.10]”
itself. In other words, “[t]o be concerned with a poetics of the contemporary is to be concerned with this two-fold dynamic: the
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fascination of the avant-garde for the commodity myth which in turn reflects a fatal narcissism [2, P. 10]” the dynamics of which
becomes visible on spatial and temporal planes.
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