Avant Garde
Avant Garde
Avant Garde
1 Theories
Photograph by Alfred
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (born 1941), while older critics like Brger continue to view the postwar neo-avantgarde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from
the rst two decades of the twentieth century, others
like Clement Greenberg (19091994) view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specic conditions of
cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the
collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to
these positions.[6] Subsequent criticism theorized the limitations of these approaches, noting their circumscribed
areas of analysis, including Eurocentric, chauvinist, and
genre-specic denitions.[7]
Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right),
and Jrgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at
Heidelberg, West Germany.
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,
and the electronic media).[10] They also pointed out that
the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was
displaced by sales gures as a measure of worth: a novel,
for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it
became a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts
and to 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 justication, of everything. Consumer
culture now ruled.
The avant-gardes co-option by the global capitalist market, by neoliberal economies, and by what Guy Debord
called The Society of the Spectacle, have made contemporary critics speculate on the possibility of a meaningful avant-garde today. Paul Manns Theory-Death of
the Avant-Garde demonstrates how completely the avantgarde is embedded within institutional structures today, a
thought also pursued by Richard Schechner in his analyses of avant-garde performance.[11]
Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and
others, various sectors of the mainstream culture industry have co-opted and misapplied the term avant-garde
since the 1960s, chiey as a marketing tool to publicise
popular music and commercial cinema. It has become
common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated lm-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.[12]
Various members of the Frankfurt School argued similar views: thus Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass-Deception (1944), and also Walter Benjamin in
his highly inuential "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" (1936).[9] Where Greenberg
used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis
of avant-garde culture, members of the Frankfurt School Nevertheless, the most incisive critique of vanguardism
3
as against the views of mainstream society was oered
by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late
1960s.[13] 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 fulll its former adversarial role. Since then it has been anked 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.[14]
3
3.1
Examples
Music
Whereas the avant-garde has a signicant history in 20thcentury music, it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, and often in conjunction with music and
sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to the
avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus, Happenings, and NeoDada.
COBRA
Conceptual art
Constructivism
Creacionismo
Cubism
Dadaism
De Stijl
Drop Art
Epic theater
Expressionism
There is another denition of Avant-gardism that distinguishes it from modernism": Peter Brger, for example, says avant-gardism rejects the institution of art
and challenges social and artistic values, and so necessarily involves political, social, and cultural factors.[23] According to the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky,
modernist composers from the early 20th century who
do not qualify as avant-gardists include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky; later modernist
composers who do not fall into the category of avantgardists include Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Gyrgy
Ligeti, Witold Lutosawski, and Luciano Berio, since
their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of
goading an audience.[24]
Fauvism
3.2
Impressionism
Theatre
Fluxus
Futurism
Grati
Gutai
Happening
Hungry generation
Imaginism
Imagism
Incoherents
Land art
6
Lettrisme
5 See also
Les Nabis
Lyrical Abstraction
Anti-art
Mail art
Bauhaus
Minimal art
Experimental lm
Musique concrte
Neoavanguardia
Experimental literature
Experimental music
Experimental theatre
Neo-Dada
L'enfant terrible
Neoism
REFERENCES
Outsider art
Russian avant-garde
Vanguardism
Pop art
Postminimalism
Prakalpana Movement
Primitivism
Rayonism
Serialism
Situationism
Stridentism
Superat
Superstroke
Suprematism
Surrealism
Symbolism
Tachisme
Theatre of Cruelty
Universalismo Constructivo
Viennese Actionism
Vorticism
6 References
[1] Avant-garde denitions. Dictionary.com. Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. Retrieved 2007-03-14.
[2] UBU Web List of artists from Dada to the present day
aligning themselves with the avant-garde
[3] Calinescu, Matei (1987). The Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Duke University Press.
[4] Poggioli, Renato (1981). The Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-67488216-4., translated from the Italian by Gerald Fitzgerald,
2nd ed.
[5] Brger, Peter (1974). Theorie der Avantgarde. Suhrkamp
Verlag. English translation (University of Minnesota
Press) 1984: 90.
[6] Buchloh, Benjamin (2001). Neo-avantgarde and Culture
Industry: Essays on European and American Art from
1955 to 1975. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02454-3.
[7] Harding, James M. Cutting Performances: Collage
Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde.
University of Michigan, 2010.
[8] Avant-Garde and Kitsch
[9] The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
by Walter Benjamin
[10] Theodor W. Adorno (1963), "Culture Industry Reconsidered".
[11] Richard Schechner, The Conservative Avant-Garde.
New Literary History 41.4 (Autumn 2010): 895913.
Bazin, Germain. 1969. The Avant-garde in Painting. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-67120422-X
Berg, Hubert van den, and Walter Fhnders (eds.).
2009. Metzler Lexikon Avantgarde. Stuttgart: Metzler. ISBN 3-476-01866-0 (German)
[17] Larry Sitsky, Music of the Twentieth-Century AvantGarde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002), xiv. ISBN 0-313-29689-8.
[18] Larry Sitsky, Music of the Twentieth-Century AvantGarde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002), 222. ISBN 0-313-29689-8.
[19] Larry Sitsky, Music of the Twentieth-Century AvantGarde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002), 50. ISBN 0-313-29689-8.
[20] Larry Sitsky, Music of the Twentieth-Century AvantGarde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002), xiiixiv. ISBN 0-313-29689-8.
[21] Elliot Schwartz, Barney Childs, and James Fox, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1998), 379. ISBN 0-306-80819-6
Maerhofer, John W. 2009. Rethinking the Vanguard: Aesthetic and Political Positions in the Modernist Debate, 1917-1962. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Press. ISBN 1-4438-1135-1
[22] Larry Sitsky, Music of the Twentieth-Century AvantGarde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002), xvii. ISBN 0-313-29689-8.
Further reading
Barron, Stephanie, and Maurice Tuchman. 1980.
The Avant-garde in Russia, 19101930: New Perspectives: Los Angeles County Museum of Art [and]
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Los Angeles,
CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ISBN 087587-095-3 (pbk.); Cambridge, MA: Distributed
by the MIT Press ISBN 0-262-20040-6 (pbk.)
Novero, Cecilia. 2010. Antidiets of the AvantGarde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art. (University of Minnesota Press)
Pronko, Leonard Cabell. 1962. Avant-garde:
The Experimental Theater in France. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Schechner, Richard. The Five Avant-Gardes or ...
[and] ... or None?" The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Huxley and
Noel Witts (New York and London: Routledge,
2002).
Schmidt-Burkhardt, Astrit. 2005. Stammbume
der Kunst: Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde. Berlin
Akademie Verlag. ISBN 3-05-004066-1 [online
version is available]
8
Sell, Mike. The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War.
Seagull Books, 2011.
Shishanov, V. A. 2007. Vitebskii muzei sovremennogo iskusstva: istoriia sozdaniia i kollektsii
(19181941). Minsk: Medisont. ISBN 978-9856530-68-8 Online edition (Russian)
External links
The Blue Mountain Project, Historic Avant-Garde
Periodicals for Digital Research, Princeton University Library
EXTERNAL LINKS
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9.3
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