Cover image by Julie Doucet: http://juliedoucet.net
Begun in 2011, this edited anthology, co-published by Left Curve, is due out in September from Manchester University Press: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719096914
The Idea of the Avant Garde is premised on the view that the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. A different kind of culture is possible.
This collection of writings, essays, interviews and artworks by many of today’s most radical cultural practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde mediates the different strategies and temporalities of avant-garde art and politics. Tracing diverse genealogies and trajectories, the book offers an inter-generational forum of ideas that covers different arts fields, from visual art, art activism, photography, film and architecture, to literature, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.
http://www.leftcurve.org and http://www.leftcurve.org/LC38WebPages/LC38ToC.html
THE LAST ISSUE OF LEFT CURVE
While I was working on the book, which was to be an offprint of the journal Left Curve, editor Csaba Polony invited me to write something for the next issue of the journal. In the last issue, no.38, I underscored my choice to distinguish the spelling of the noun avant garde, meaning either 'an' or 'the' avant garde, without a dash, and the use of avant-garde, with a dash, as a qualifier. The adjective avant-garde can be used to characterize the real thing just as it can be used to qualify something that has the characteristics of avant-garde praxis, something that perhaps is not avant-garde at all, but that could be qualified as new, experimental or innovative. I myself take it as axiomatic that an or the avant garde is opposed to capitalist social relations and contributes to social emancipation, that avant-garde art production is undertaken as a form of disalienated labour if not an overcoming of the alienation of art itself. In this sense any work that could be characterized as avant-garde partakes in the event of the avant garde that was inaugurated in the nineteenth century and that has gone through several changes, as Nicos Hadjinicolaou noted, in terms of art itself as an avant-garde formation with respect to the rest society, and then, dialectically, as an avant-garde formation within the sphere of cultural production as such. From this, we pass very easily to Peter Bürger’s historicization of bohemian, historical and neo-avant gardes and his idea of the avant garde as a critique of the institution art, with all that this implies for us today in terms of the problematic of culture and creative industries. From here we move to different contestatory strategies: hibernation, radical democracy, genealogy, refusal, suspension, derealization, fantasy.
LETTER OF INVITATION
Marc Leger <leger.mj@gmail.com> To:
13 November 2011 12:12
Dear X,
I've had the idea for some time now to organize a festival of avant-garde art which for the time being has transmuted into a more likely undertaking for me, which is to put together a collection of writings and artworks by people who are in some way associated with or who identify with, or not, as the case may be, the idea and the practice of avant-garde art.
I would like to invite you to contribute to a book project titled The Idea of the Avant Garde. For this I would like to invite you to send me something you like, from a short text to a long text, to some images or whatever you think conveys your thoughts on what avant-garde work is and what it means today. I've just begun this undertaking and I don't yet know what shape it will take. Anything else I could say is that I'm an artist and write about visual art. I've recently put together a collection of essays titled Culture and Contestation in the New Century (Intellect, 2011) and am the author of the forthcoming Brave New Avant Garde (Zero Books, 2012). I don't yet have a deadline nor do I have a publisher and so we are at the very beginning of what I hope becomes something people will find compelling, useful and maybe even something that they associate with the struggle for freedom.
Thanks for considering this invitation and I look forward to hearing from you. Please let me know if you would like more information - though there isn't a lot more to say yet as I am open to this process of bringing together your ideas with those of other interesting people.
sincerely,
Marc James Léger
Cover image of the Chto Detal newspaper: http://chtodelat.org
FUNNY AUNTS AND QUEER UNCLES
“One commentator, not known for his sympathy to the Revolution, has recently written: ‘With the tolerant and sophisticated Anatole Lunacharsky in charge of cultural affairs and with a high proportion of Bolshevik leaders (Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin) being intellectuals [...] it was taken for granted that the creative process was not amenable to crude administrative control.’” – Tariq Ali citing Max Hayward
“Socrates said that the baby was born knowing everything. It is the uncovering of this knowledge that is the learning process. The avant garde is the re-discovery of the classics, which man is born knowing. The classics always last through time.” – Robert Wilson
“The race of gladiators is not dead; every artist is one. He amuses the public with his agonies.” – Gustave Flaubert
“Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.” – Oscar Wilde
“Innovation enters art by revolution. Reality reveals itself in art in much the same way as gravity reveals itself when a ceiling collapses on its owner’s head. New art searches for the new word, the new expression. The poet suffers in attempts to break down the barrier between the word and reality. We can already feel the new word on his lips, but tradition puts forward the old concept.” – Viktor Shklovsky
“Perhaps there is no such thing as an avant-garde, only a few uncorrupted sensibilities who cling together in times of rampant militarism or commercialism to challenge their elders.” – Cyril Connolly
“This means that in the psychology and ideology of avant-garde art, historically considered (from the viewpoint of what Hegelians and Marxists would call the historic dialectic), the futurist manifestation represents, so to speak, a prophetic and utopian phase, the arena of agitation and preparation for the announced revolution, if not the revolution itself.” – Renato Poggioli
“Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the constituencies that might support them, constituencies that are always limited by the entirety of social conditions. People from these tendencies who have been noticed are generally admitted on an individual basis, at the price of a vital repudiation; the fundamental point of debate is always the renunciation of comprehensive demands and the acceptance of a fragmented work, open to multiple readings. This is what makes the very term avant-garde, which when all is said and done is wielded by the bourgeoisie, somewhat suspicious and ridiculous. The very notion of a collective avant-garde, with the militant aspect that it entails, is a recent product of historical conditions that are leading simultaneously to the need for a consistent revolutionary cultural program, and to the need to struggle against the forces that are preventing the development of this program. Such groups are led to transpose a few of the organizational methods created by revolutionary politics into their sphere of activity, and in the future their actions will no longer be able to be conceived without a link to political critique.” – Guy Debord
“In 1957 Max Mathews began composing computer music at Bell Laboratories. Edgar Varèse inaugurated tape music with Deserts (1954) and premiered his Poème Électronique (1958) in a special pavilion designed by the architect Le Corbusier, where the music was reacting with the environment. In 1958 the Columbia-Princeton studio for avant-garde composers opened in New York, and was featuring an RCA Mark II, the ‘synthesizer,’ and the following year Raymond Scott invented the sequencer, the ‘Wall of Sound.’ In 1959 John Cage performed ‘live electronic music.’ Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros and others founded the Tape Music Center near San Francisco in 1959. 1961 Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma organized Ann Arbor’s ONCE festival, entirely devoted to avant-garde music. Together, these events marked the end of avant-garde music as an exclusive of seasoned (and mostly European) composers and the beginning of avant-garde music as a relatively grassroots (and mostly American) phenomenon. Sure, the composers were still educated at the most prestigious schools of music, but their stance towards composition/ performance was moving away from the concert hall and towards the praxis of jazz music. The musicians of this generation tried many (and wildly different) avenues of experimentation, from musique concrète to electro-acoustic synthesis, but they all shared a fundamental aesthetic belief in the power of ‘sound,’ as opposed to the traditional emphasis on harmony and melody. – Piero Scaruffi
“The avant-garde groups of today conduct their antilinguistic action from a base that is no longer literary but linguistic: they don’t use the subversive instruments of literature in order to throw language into confusion and demystify it, but they set themselves at a linguistic zero point in order to reduce language – and thus values – to zero.” – Pier Paolo Pasolini
“I met John Cage towards the end of the 1950s, through Stephan Wolpe. What Cage gave me was confidence that the direction I was going in was not crazy. It was accepted in the world called ‘the avant-garde.’ What I was doing was an acceptable form. That was an eye-opener for me. Pre-Cage composers such as Henry Cowell, Stephan Wolpe, and Edgar Varèse should be remembered for their brilliance and courage, too. They were in pain already because it seemed that they were rapidly forgotten once Cage came out.” – Yoko Ono
“Avant-garde art has become the official art of our time. It occupies this place because, like any official art, it is ideologically useful. But to be so used, its meaning must be constantly and carefully mediated.” – Carol Duncan
“While the [avant-garde] movements I am writing about situated themselves in opposition to consumer capitalism, they also emerged out of societies based on such a mode of organisation and thus do not entirely escape the logic of the marketplace. This is particularly obvious in relation to the obsession many of them display over the concept of innovation, which reflects perfectly the waste inherent in a society based on planned obsolescence.” – Stuart Home
“A major consequence of changes in the social situation of the artist as well as in the political and social importance of the arts generally, as seen in the increased resources which were allocated to them during this period [1940-1985], was that the artistic role ceased to be that of an avant-garde with its concomitant overtones of alienation from popular culture and middle-class values.” – Diana Crane
“Avant-gardism involves a series of gambits for intervening in the interrelated spaces of representation, publicity, professional competition and critical recognition.” – Griselda Pollock
“The idea of what is avant-garde is always changing.” – Kenneth Goldsmith
“Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for ‘improved’ products; nevertheless, we have to find a new way to contribute by generating a ‘surprise’ (a term that almost conforms to the cybernetic definition of ‘information’).” – Christian Bök
“I’m very sorry, but I don’t think I ever wrote something about the avant garde, be it in general or particular!” – Harun Farocki
“Over the past century, avant-garde artistic practice has remained remarkably consistent in its understanding of the aesthetic as a zone of punishment and remediation.” – Grant Kester
“Littoral artists acknowledge their debt to history and respond positively to successful models presented by the historical avant gardes and neo-avant gardes of the more recent past.” – Bruce Barber
“Frank’s good, but Beefheart’s the real thing. If you wanna get avan-garde man, you’ve not gonna find anybody that’s gonna get more avan-garde than Captain Beefheart.” – Jimmy Carl Black
“The Clash have taken Beefheart’s aesthetic of scorched vocals, guitar discords, melody reversals, and rhythmic conflict and made the whole seem anything but avant-garde: in their hands that aesthetic speaks with clarity and immediacy, a demand you have to accept or refuse.” – Greil Marcus
“The ‘time’ of the cultural avant-garde is not the same as that of the vanguard party. These artists’ practices interrupted the continuity of perceptions and estranged the familiar, severing historical tradition through the force of their fantasy.” – Susan Buck-Morss
“The dream of reconciling political vanguardism and avant-gardism in matters of art and the art of living in a sort of summation of all revolutions – social, sexual, artistic – is undoubtedly a constant of literary and artistic avant-gardes.” – Pierre Bourdieu
“To write a history of the avant-garde is already to contain it: obviously within a narrative structure and thus inevitably within a certain ideological regime, a certain formation of (pre)judgments. Every history is to some extent an attempt to determine (to comprehend and to control) the avant-garde’s currency, its demise, or its survival today” – Paul Mann
“Where in the past such critical tools or paradigms as ‘neo-avant-garde’ or ‘postmodernism’ could illuminate or explain substantial aspects of Western contemporary art, now they clearly have little critical purchase in the crowded – and, one might add, resplendent – space that has become global contemporary art.” – Chika Okeke-Agulu
“To understand what constitutes the avant garde today, one must begin not in the field of contemporary art but in the field of culture and politics, as well as in the economic field governing all relations that have come under the overwhelming hegemony of capital. If the avant gardes of the past (Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, let’s say) anticipated a changing order, that of today is to make impermanence, and what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls aterritoriality, the principal order of today’s uncertainties, instabilities, and insecurity. With this order in place, all notions of autonomy which radical art had formerly claimed for itself are abrogated.” – Okwui Enwezor
“The arts and culture sector is now claiming that it can solve the United States’ problems: enhance education, solve racial strife, help reverse urban blight through cultural tourism, create jobs, reduce crime, and perhaps even make a profit. This reorientation of the arts is being brought about by arts adminstrators.” – George Yúdice
“So, in official art, ideology is realized in an objective form: the inscription of the work of art in the space of that sort of objectivity. In a militant art, ideology is a subjective determination, not of an artist, but of a process, or struggle, or resistance.” – Alain Badiou
“The encounter between Leninist politics and modernist art (exemplified in the fantasy of Lenin meeting Dadaists in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich) cannot structurally take place; more radically, revolutionary politics and revolutionary art move in different temporalities – although they are linked, they are two sides of the same phenomenon which, precisely as two sides, can never meet.” – Slavoj Žižek
“We have then to recall that the politics of the avant-garde, from the beginning, could go either way. The new art could find its place either in a new social order or in a culturally transformed but otherwise persistent and recuperated old order. All that was quite certain, from the first stirrings of modernism through to the most extreme forms of the avant garde, was that nothing could stay quite as it was: that the internal pressures and the intolerable contradictions would force radical changes of some kind. Beyond the particular directions and affiliations, this is still the historical importance of this cluster of movements and of remarkable individual artists. And since, if in the new forms, the general pressures and contradictions are still intense, indeed have in many ways intensified, there is still much to learn from the complexities of its vigorous and dazzling development.” – Raymond Williams
“In so far as the historical avant-garde movements respond to the developmental stage of autonomous art epitomized by aestheticism, they are part of modernism; in so far as they call the institution of art into question, they constitute a break with modernism. The history of the avant-gardes, each with its own special historical conditions, arises out of this contradiction.” – Peter Bürger
“The myth in the art world was that the avant garde disappeared. No it didn’t, it just had nothing to do with the art world anymore, because when art becomes contemporary art, it’s just another category of commodity production. The avant-garde move on, to media, design, and beyond. There’s still a project to kind of recover those old heroic avant-garde stories, extract what’s living and what’s dead, extract the concepts, make it available for folks to do it all over again. Avant-gardes are always extremely historically aware. They just want to deny it and pretend they’re not repeating.” – McKenzie Wark
"New Ancestors: A Conversation with McKenzie War," available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/new-ancestors-a-conversation-with-mckenzie-wark/ (Apologies to Bill Brown.)
In his text, Wark concludes: "Art does not have to be endless iterations of the Duchampian gesture. We don’t have to revive Lenin, as if no other radical thought ever existed. I’m rather drawn to heretics. If we must have ancestors, let’s not have the Name of the Father. Let’s have funny aunts and queer uncles. It’s much more fun, and maybe it’s even a way to unblock the stasis in contemporary art and theory. You have to admit that it’s been a bit boring." This is an odd passage since in its wording at least it avoids the implications of exactly what it is that Lacan meant by the concept of the Name of the Father, which, to keep things short, implies the very heresy and enjoyment that Wark alludes to. For more on this, see Lacan's discussion of Freud and Lévi-Strauss in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-1970). See also Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Verso, 2008).
Thérèse Mastroiacovo, Art Now (Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, 1995), 2010. Art Now (2005 to present) is an ongoing drawing project with a clear beginning but no definitive end. There are approximately 80 drawings to date, each of them is graphite on paper and 55.9 x 76.2 cm (22 x 30”). Collection of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Marc James Léger This Is Not an Introduction Adrian Piper Political Art and the Paradigm of Innovation Andrea Fraser From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique David Tomas Dead End, Sophisticated Endgame Strategy, or a Third Way? Institutional Critique’s Academic Paradoxes and Their Consequences for the Development of Post-Avant-Garde Practices Catherine Lescarbeau Factures Hal Foster Precarious Laura Mulvey Mary Kelly: An Aesthetic of Temporality Bruce LaBruce Don’t Get Your Rosaries in a Bunch Santiago Sierra 300 PEOPLE Derek Horton Richard Kostelanetz and Michael Butterworth in Conversation Christine Wertheim The Poetics of Late Capital: Or, How Might ‘Avantgarde’ Poetry Be Thought of Today? Lyn Hejinian Avant Garde in Progress: An Allegory Marjorie Perloff The Madness of the Unexpected Wu Ming 2 How to Tell a Revolution from Everything Else Nikolaus Müller-Schöll Poverty of Experience: Performance Practices After the Fall Rabih Mroué Spread Your Legs Judith Malina Political Theatre, Theatrical Politics: Epic Theatre in the 21st Century Moe Angelos The Avant Garde is Present Bill Brown It Was Only Just a Stage The Errorist International Errorist Kabaret Jonas Mekas My Definition of Avant Garde Thomas Elsaesser The Politics and Poetics of Obsolescence Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt Closer to the Concrete Situations Travis Wilkerson Creative Agitation Evan Mauro The Death and Life of the Avant Garde: Or, Modernism and Biopolitics Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen The Self-Destruction of the Avant Garde Gene Ray Towards a Critical Art Theory John Roberts Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant Garde Zanny Begg and Dmitry Vilensky On the Possibility of Avant-Garde Compositions in Contemporary Art Owen Hatherley A High- Performance Contemporary Life Process: Parametricism as a Neoliberal Avant Garde Michael Webb Le Devant Garde Mitchell Joachim Hackerspace in Synthetic Biological Design: Education and the Integration of Informal Collaborative Spaces for Makers Beatriz Colomina Little Magazines: Small Utopia Boris Groys The Russian Avant Garde Revisited Vitaly Komar Avant Garde, Sots-Art and Conceptual Eclecticism Victor Tupitsyn Factography of Resistance Gregory Sholette and Krzysztof Wodiczko Liberate the Avant Garde? Marc James Léger Refining Our Doublethink: An Interview with Critical Art Ensemble BAVO Why Contemporary Artists Are Not Fascist Enough Alexei Monroe Sponsored by Self-Management? Re-Constructing the Context and Consequences of Laibach’s Monumental Retro- Avant-Garde Jean-Hervé Péron Art Is an Error Chris Cutler Thoughts on Music and the Avant Garde: Considerations on a Term and Its Public Use Charles Gaines Manifestos Jason Robinson Playing Regular: The Jazz Avant Garde Sara Marcus Notes on Future Perfect Cosey Fanni Tutti The Avant Garde Subsumed in a Tangled Web Thanos Chrysakis Asunder Ray Kim Cascone The Avant Garde as Aeromancy Marc Couroux Towards Indisposition Thérèse Mastroiacovo Art Now (2005 to present) Chrysi Papaioannou In a Critical Condition Bill Dane Acheter. révolutionnaires d’avant-garde babioles plus vite possible.
Frenhofer's Beast by Csaba Polony
A THOUSAND DEPARTED FRIENDS
The Idea of the Avant Garde is dedicated to Amiri Baraka, Chris Marker and Lebbeus Woods. The reason for this is that all three of these invaluable artists had at one point shown interest in contributing to the book but eventually did not due to circumstances and their untimely deaths.
The most significant absence for this book is due to the passing away of Left Curve editor Csaba Polony. In March of 2013 I received a copy of issue #37 of Left Curve, to which I had contributed an essay on Pasolini’s rediscovered 1963 film La Rabbia. At that time I had been working on the book. After receiving issue 37 I decided to ask Csaba Polony if he would be interested in publishing this book project. I knew that the book was experimental and I never thought of it as a textbook or even an “anthology,” but rather as something designed to fill or even create a gap in today’s discussions.
Much to my delight, Csaba was interested in this, what he called, “worthy project” right away and sent me an essay of his titled “Bifurcated Meditations Out of a Blank Decade” as a way of relating his understanding of the main issue addressed by the book. His text is concerned with the revolutionary replacement of cultural forms that have become reified through the process of commodification. “Art as praxis,” he says, has been unable to resolve the split between subjective sensibility and objective processes. The possibilities today, he asks? First, the sublimation of vestiges of use-value, and secondly, negation of the commodity form. The goal of a global consciousness? The realization of the autonomous personality in harmony with the essential forces of social, historical and natural development. The process, then, for Csaba, is from the “dialectic of enlightenment” to the “logic of reconstruction.”
I agreed with Csaba’s view that activist art is troubled by the absence of a “genuine revolutionary group subject of appropriate universality” and we set off on this collaboration. We contacted potential co-publishers and while we waited for their replies we worked on the design of this very large book, about 300 pages and 180,000 words in length. Csaba worked on the design in California and we finished the copy-editing while he was on holidays in Europe. This process took a very long time and we must have exchanged hundreds of emails, making it such that we got to know each other fairly well. We eventually pitched the project to a California publisher, who turned the book down, the editors said, among other practical reasons, because it “serves art discourse”! Towards the end of 2013 we decided to go ahead with our original plan to publish the book together. We were anticipating a print date of Winter or Spring 2014. In January, however, Csaba sent me an unexpected message, out of nowhere, letting me know about his illness and suggesting that I would likely need to finish the book myself. He sent me all of the zip files we had worked on and I wished him all the best on what was anticipated as an operation for stomach cancer. Sadly, Csaba passed away in March.
I eventually negotiated the publication of the book with Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press. Csaba and Left Curve are given full credits in the title pages of the book for the work that he did. I worked to find a publisher and negotiated a deal in which the publisher would accept to keep all of the design work “as is” and in this way, to preserve and honour the work that Csaba and I had accomplished together. With only a few small modifications, even the back cover is as Csaba had designed it.
SURPLUS JOUISSANCE
There are two supplements to the book that were produced as side projects. In the summer of 2013 Krzysztof Wodiczko decided to write a manifesto, which he modestly called a 'manifest,' on the avant garde and what it means today. Because Krzysztof had already contributed to the book through his conversation with Greg Sholette, we decided to publish it separately. “The Transformative Avant-Garde: A Manifest of the Present,” was published in Third Text in March of 2014 and “Aesthetic Responsibility: A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko on the Transformative Avant-Garde,” was published in the same issue. Thanks to Krzysztof for taking this project so seriously as to review his own working method in terms of a continuing relation with the avant garde. "Where would we be without them," he says in his text, and "where would they be" he adds, without the continuing activity of today's socially engaged artists.
While I was working on the book, Victor Tupitsyn and I discussed the possibility of a published conversation between him and Margarita Tupitsyn on the subject of a contemporary avant garde. Given that we decided to print his essay "Factography of Resistance" in the book, the prospect of the interview was left aside. In the interim, Csaba invited me to write something for the journal announcing the project and I thought to ask the Tupitsyns if they would like to do the interview, which is now in print in issue #38 of Left Curve, which was made available posthumously as the last issue: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC38WebPages/LC38ToC.html
Entrance to the exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, curated by Margarita Tupitsyn with Vicente Todoli for the Tate Modern, 2009. Courtesy of Victor and Margarita Tupitsyn.
ENDORSEMENTS
“The avant garde never gives up! Léger’s excellent anthology gives ample proof that the struggle to bring aesthetic transformation to everyday life, and to bring everyday struggles into aesthetic transformation is alive and well and taking on ever new forms. Every aspiring avant-gardist could learn a thing or two from this book. Study it, steal from it, stick it in the blender and concoct your mix with some new ingredients. The world needs the avant-garde spirit now more than ever.” – McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto and The Spectacle of Disintegration
“In the age of deception, when everything presents itself as something else, where militants perform as artists and business people imagine themselves as revolutionaries, can we still recognize the ‘avant garde’? This highly informative anthology engages several generations of artists and thinkers to question the meaning and identity of the avant garde in a post-everything world of blurred horizons, distorted perspectives, and disguised authorities.” – Eda Čufer, dramaturg and founding member of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst)
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