Difference between revisions of "Avant-garde"

Revision as of 00:30, February 8, 2008

A French art term used to describe art that is experimental or art that goes against the norm or what is culturally acceptable.

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-[[Image:The Love of Zero, 35mm film Robert Florey1928.jpg|thumb|right|''The Love of Zero'' (1927) film by [[Robert Florey]]]]
+{{stub}}
-'''Avant-garde''' (pronounced {{IPA|/ɑvɑ̃ gɑʁd/}}) in [[French language|French]] means "front guard", "advance guard", or "vanguard".<ref name="dictref">{{Cite web|url=http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=avant-garde|title=Avant-garde definitions|accessdate=2007-03-14|publisher=Lexico Publishing Group, LLC|work=Dictionary.com}}</ref> The term is commonly used in French, English, and German to refer to people or works that are [[experiment]]al or innovative, particularly with respect to [[art]], [[culture]], and [[politics]].
-Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the [[Norm (sociology)|norm]] or the [[status quo]], primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of [[modernism]], as distinct from [[postmodernism]]. Postmodernism posits that the age of the constant pushing of boundaries is no longer with us and that avant-garde has little to no applicability in the age of [[Postmodern art]].
+A [[French]] art term used to describe art that is experimental or art that goes against the norm or what is culturally acceptable.
-==Working definition==
-The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled [[soldier]]s, explores the [[terrain]] ahead of a large advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow. This concept is applied to the work done by small collectives of [[intellectuals]] and [[artist]]s as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for society to follow.
-The origin of the application of this [[French language|French]] term to art is still debated. Some fix it on [[May 17]], [[1863]], the opening of the [[Salon des Refusés]] in Paris, organized by painters whose work was rejected for the annual [[Paris Salon]] of officially sanctioned academic art. Salons des Refusés were held in 1863, 1874, 1875, and 1886.
-The term also refers to the promotion of radical social reforms, the aims of its various movements presented in public declarations called [[manifestos]]. It was this meaning evoked by the [[Saint Simonian]] [[Olinde Rodrigues]] in his essay "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”,  1825) which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now-customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde," insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political, and economic reform.<ref>{{cite book|author=Calinescu, Matei|title=The Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism|publisher=Duke University Press|year=1987}}</ref> Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with ''[[art for art's sake]]'', focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of [[aesthetic]] experience, rather than with wider social reform.
-[[Avant-garde jazz]] is a more recent application of the term, dating back to the late 1950s.
-[[Image:Duchamp Fountaine.jpg|thumb|''[[Fountain (Duchamp)|Fountain]]'' by [[Marcel Duchamp]], 1917, photograph by [[Alfred Stieglitz]]]]
-For instance, whereas [[Marcel Duchamp]]'s ''[[Fountain (Duchamp)|fountain]]'' (a urinal), which he declared a piece of art, may have been avant-garde at the time but is no longer given the title today as the body of work has already been created; it is no longer innovative. Avant-garde is therefore [[temporal]] and relates to the process of art's unfolding in time. Duchamp's work retains its distinction as avant-garde even today, because it marks a historical point in the advancement of the conception of art, relative to the period in which it surfaced.  Similarly, "avant-garde" can be applied to the forerunners of any new movements.
-==Theorizing the avant-garde==
-Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity with limited success. One of the most useful and respected analysis of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon remains the Italian essayist [[Renato Poggioli|Renato Poggioli's]] 1962 book ''Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia'' (''The Theory of the Avant-Garde'').  Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry and music to show that vanguardists may be seen as sharing certain ideals or values which are manifested in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopted, vanguard culture being shown to be a variety or subcategory of [[Bohemianism]].<ref>{{cite book|author=Poggioli, Renato|title=The Theory of the Avant-Garde|publisher=Harvard University Press|year=1968|id=ISBN 0-674-88216-4}}</ref>
-Reflecting on [[Charles Baudelaire|Charles Baudelaire's]] complaint that 'the man of letters is the enemy of the world' and [[Stéphane Mallarmé|Stéphane Mallarmé's]] distress over the isolation of the creator in "this society that will not let him live", Poggioli identifies that beyond their non-conformist postures. Avant-gardes have historically existed in a state of mutual antagonism towards both the public and tradition. As pioneers, avant-gardes have shunned popularity, seeing those who are popular as producing complacent or compromised work.  This is also why avant-gardists have abhorred fashion, judging it to deal in stereotypes, falsehoods and insincere sentiments. Their iconoclasm has witnessed avant-gardes take positions against current trends; but as pioneers they will also adopt a strong ‘down-with-the-past’ attitude.  Vanguardists are committed new ideals, seeing traditions, institutions and orthodoxies as outmoded prisons of convention.
-Taken together, these traits mean that avant-gardes are often estranged from society. This has taken several forms, as some creators were [[social alienation|socially alienated]]. It has been common for avant-gardes to declare their opposition to the [[bourgeoisie]] class in particular. Their antagonism towards accepted values and approaches has also meant that historically their audience has tended to be the [[Intelligentsia|intelligentsia]]. Poggioli further tries to classify avant-gardes according to four conceptual dispositions: [[Nihilism]], [[Agonism]], [[Futurism (art)|Futurism]], and [[Decadence]].
-Other authors have attempted to both clarify and rxtend Poggioli's study. The German literary critic [[Peter Bürger]]'s ''Theory of the Avant-Garde'' (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the polotical content of the individual work."<ref>{{cite book|author=Bürger, Peter|title=Theorie der Avantgarde|publisher=Suhrkamp Verlag|year=1974}} English translation (University of Minnesota Press) 1984: 90. </ref>  While the title of Bürger's essay is an explicit reference to Poggioli's, he makes several useful additions to the latter's groundbreaking study, such as the distinction between "historical" ([[Futurism]], [[Dada]], [[Surrealism]]) and "neo" avant-garde ([[Abstract Expressionism]], [[Pop Art]], [[Nouveau Réalisme]], [[Fluxus]], etc.).
-Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art historians such as [[Benjamin H. D. Buchloh]], while older critics like Bürger continue to view the postwar neo-avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century, others like [[Clement Greenberg]] view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the collection of essays ''Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry'' (2001)<!--or 2000?--> critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.<ref>{{cite book|author=Buchloh, Benjamin|title=Neoavantgarde and Culture Industry|publisher=MIT Press|year=2001}}</ref> In the postmodern period, [[Jean-Francois Lyotard]] and [[Griselda Pollock]]<ref>Fred Orton & Griselda Pollock, ''Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed'', Manchester University, 1996. ISBN 0-7190-4399-9</ref> have re-articulated the Avant-Garde in art.
-== Avant-garde and mainstream society ==
-The concept of avant-garde refers exclusively to marginalised artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is not only opposed to mainstream commercial values, but often has an abrasive social or political edge. Many writers, critics and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay ''[[Avant-Garde and Kitsch]]'' <ref>[http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html ''Avant-Garde and Kitsch''] written by the New York art critic [[Clement Greenberg]] and published in the journal ''[[Partisan Review]]'' in 1939.</ref>  As the essay’s title suggests, [[Clement Greenberg]] conclusively showed not only that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to ‘high’ or ‘mainstream culture’, but that it also has rejected the artificially synthesized [[mass culture]] that has been produced by industrialization – the pervasive commercial culture of [[popular music]], [[Soap Opera]] dramas, [[Pulp fiction (genre)|pulp fiction]], [[magazine]]-illustration, and [[B movie]]s.  Each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism – they are all now substantial industries – and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art.  For Greenberg, these forms were therefore ''[[kitsch]]'': they were phony, faked or mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from advanced or vanguard culture.  For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from [[surrealism]], but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal.  It was a matter of style without substance.  In this sense Greenberg was at pains to distance true avant-garde creativity from the market-driven fashion change and superficial stylistic innovation that are sometimes used to claim privileged status for these manufactured forms of the new [[consumer culture]].
-[[Image:Adornohorkhab1.png|frame|[[Max Horkheimer]] (front left), [[Theodor Adorno]] (front right), and [[Jürgen Habermas]] in the background, right, in 1965 at [[Heidelberg]], [[Germany]]]]
-A similar view was likewise argued by assorted members of the [[Frankfurt School]], including [[Theodor Adorno]] and [[Max Horkheimer]] in their essay ''[[Dialectic of Enlightenment|The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception]]'' (1944), and also [[Walter Benjamin]] in his highly influential ''[[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction|The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction]]'' (1936) <ref>[http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction''] by Walter Benjamin</ref>. Where Greenberg used the [[German language|German]] word [[Kitsch|''kitsch'']] to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture, members of the Frankfurt School coined the term [[mass culture]] to indicate that this bogus culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged [[Culture industry]] (comprising commercial publishing houses, the movie industry, the record industry, the electronic media).  They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it was a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled.
-Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, the term ‘avant-garde’ has been appropriated and misapplied by various sectors of the culture industry since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema.  It is now common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, the very word having been stripped of its proper meaning.  Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as [[Matei Calinescu]] in ''Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism'' (1987), and [[Hans Bertens]] in ''The Idea of the Postmodern: A History'' (1995), have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new [[post-modern]] age, when the former [[modernist]] ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.
-Nevertheless the most incisive critique of the vanguardism against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic [[Harold Rosenberg]] in the late 1960s.<ref>{{cite book|author=Rosenberg, Harold|title='D.M.Z. Vanguardism' in The De-Definition of Art|publisher=Chicago University Press|year=1972|id=ISBN 0-226-72673-8}}</ref> Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role.  Since then it has been flanked by what he called 'avant-garde ghosts' to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees.  This has seen culture become, in his words, ‘a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it.’
-==Examples==
-Avant-garde in music refers to an extreme form of [[musical improvisation]] in which little or no regard is given by [[solo (music)|solo]]ists to any underlying [[chord structure]] or [[rhythm]], such as [[free jazz]] and some forms of [[noise music]]. It can often refer to any form of [[experimental music]], even those working within the traditional structures.  An extreme example here is [[4'33"]] by [[John Cage]], in which no instrument is ''played'' in the traditional sense, yet the audience still leaves with the tangible experience that something ''happened'' within a performance.  Since the experience of this particular work is unique to every audience, it might be argued that this piece is perennially avant-garde.
-By some assessments, avant-garde art includes [[street art]], for example [[graffiti]] and any other movement which pushes forward the accepted boundaries. It has even moved into building construction projects, one example of which is the proposed [[Louisville Museum Plaza|Museum Plaza]] project in [[Louisville, Kentucky]]. Featuring a radical design overlooking the [[Ohio River]], this three-tower project will include a diagonal elevator and a 22nd floor public park.
-[[Musique Concrète]] (meaning ''concrete music'' in French), is a style of avant-garde music that relies on natural environmental sounds and other non-inherently-musical noises to create music. Pieces that have used ''Musique concrète'' include ''Étude aux chemins de fer'' (1948) by [[Pierre Schaeffer]], [[Revolution 9]] by [[The Beatles]] (1968), [[1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)]] by [[Jimi Hendrix]] and [[Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict]] by [[Pink Floyd]] (1969) and was most popular in the late Sixties and early Seventies, but has been used since.
-==Avant-garde art movements==
-{{col-begin}}
-{{col-2}}
-*[[Abstract expressionism]]
-*[[Angry Penguins|Angry Penguins (Australian modernists)]]
-*[[Asemic writing]]
-*[[Avant Garde Metal]]
-*[[Bauhaus]]
-*[[Cinema pur]]
-*[[COBRA (avant-garde movement)|COBRA]]
-*[[Conceptual art]]
-*[[Constructivism (art)|Constructivism]]
-*[[Cubism]]
-*[[Dada]]
-*[[De Stijl]]
-*[[Dogme 95]]
-*[[Electronic art music]]
-*[[Epic theater|Epic Theatre]]
-*[[Expressionism]]
-*[[Fauvism]]
-*[[Fluxus]]
-*[[Free Jazz]]
-*[[Futurism (art)|Futurism]]
-*[[Impressionism]]
-{{col-2}}
-*[[Incoherents]]
-*[[Lettrisme]]
-*[[Lyrical Abstraction]]
-*[[Mail art]]
-*[[Minimal art|Minimal Art (Minimalism)]]
-*[[Musique Concrète]]
-*[[Neo-Dada]]
-*[[Neoism]]
-*[[Neoteric|Neoteroi]]
-*[[Neue Slowenische Kunst]]
-*[[Noise Music]]
-*[[No Wave]]
-*[[Pop art]]
-*[[Postminimalism]]
-*[[Primitivism]]
-*[[Progressive Rock]]
-*[[Situationist International]]
-*[[Social realism]]
-*[[Space music]]
-*[[Suprematism]]
-*[[Surrealism]]
-*[[Symbolism (arts)|Symbolism]]
-*[[Theatre of Cruelty]]
-{{col-end}}

Difference between revisions of "Avant-garde"

Revision as of 00:30, February 8, 2008

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