NeEO-AVANTGARDE AND CULTURE INDUSTRY Essays ON EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN ART From 1955 To 1975 Besyasiy H. D. Buemon Ax OCTOBER Book Tue MIT Press (Cavmmmpce, Massacueserts Lonvow, EPienty on Norwin: From Yves Kuein's Le vrpe 10 AnMan’s Le PLein ‘The judgment of Pola concerning the end of modern art might essive against the background of thinking have appeared a litde about the subject in 1954. Since nobody seems to have been able t0 ‘come up with any explanation, people have actually started to doubt we know in the meantime from rather lengthy experience, namely that since 1954 we have never seen anywhere the appearance ‘ofa single arise whose work would be truly of any interest ‘uy Debord, “Iurodution ro Potlatch” (1985) Artistic truth claims in post-World War II Europe were frst ofall deter the dialectics of seemingly immutable social restrictions (¢.g., collectively en= forced historical diswvowal or the acceleration of object consumption) and their ‘opposite, the arbitrariness of artistic memory and radical change (such as the ran dom reclamation of decontextualized modernist paradigms in the immediate Fine published in Proms: Iansted Spates in Vinal Ans, Anitasune ad Design fiom Fran, 1958-1998, ed, Berard Bliténe (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), pp. 86-99afiermath of World War Il in Paris). The halves ofthat dialectic governed aes- thetic production and the object perception of everyday life in unequal measure: the voluntarstic surplus of aesthetic choices seems to have fled just as much as the sudden restriction of culture to serve asa politcal project (as, for example, in the belated introduction of Socialist Realism into postwar France, or in Sartre’ in 1948) Paradoxically, ie appears that precisely those artists who did not comply manifesto “What is Literatu with eater forms of avant-garde aspirations (as Guy Debord would describe wine Potlatch in 195. them for example, recrospectively as the task of his m create certain links to constitate a new movement which most of all should reestablish a fasion between the cultural creation of the avant-garde and the Fev= olutionary critique of society"), and those projects chat did nota all correspond to the most important political and philosophical theorization of art at the time, ‘would come to represent some ofthe central moments of French reconstruction culture "This essay attempes to clarify a lest dhrve questions: the fist one comid- ‘ers production, asking why these artists grasped the accessible mediations be- tween discursive prohibitions and newly avaible artiste epistemes better than their ethically and theoretically superior colleagues. In other words, what changes were necescary five the definition of wigial cultire se thar these artists ‘who ignored restrictions and prohibitions could eventually be recognized as the new produce! diation berween social production and artistic production, integral to the de- mands of reconstruction cules ‘And what made their project appear as a more convincing me~ ‘The second question addresses the process of reception. It attempts to lar= iff why these practices (some of them distinetly apolitical and anti-social, if not skogether eynicaly indifferent to the problems of legitimacy and the posibility of artisic ruth claims after the war) actually succeded more than the "commit~ ted” literary and artistic forms in establishing he neo-avantgarde in the 1950s, ‘And the thied question would inevitably have to be one of eritieal judg iment, specifying the criteria aecording to which neo-avantgarde production ne how aesthetic and ethical could be evaluated altogether. That is, to deterFrom Yves Keen's Li vipe ro ARMAN's LE PLerN claims of earlier and of oppositional avant-garde models, once they had proven, to be ineffective or inadequate in the advanced forms of late capitalist consumer culture, could be reassessed without lpsing either into the latent authoritarian ism of Debord's prohibitive doubt about even the slightest historical possibility of any cultural production whatsoever, or into the opposite of that annihilation, embodied, for example, in the writings of Pierre Restany from the same period, which enthusiastically assign the neo-avantgarde the role of a cultural aque celebrating the new techno-scientific society of consumption, spectacle, and control? To answer any of these questions atleast partially, examining how this di- ly radical develop in the fol- lowing a somewhat experimental comparative model alectic of a radical eansformation of spaces and objects, and eg changes in the paradigms of visual representation, could be traced ina relatively focused moment of postwar French culture, We compare two artists who entered the discursive amework of postwar culture in the nid-195th in order to trace how they would-—within the relatively narrow time of a decade—not only re define the discursive traditions of painting and sculpture in France in ways that \were not at all anticipated in local art development, but also position themselves in the center of a dialectic of historical disavowal and spectacularization that we suggest is on of the constitutive conditions of reconstruction culture ‘The painter Yves Klein emerged from the modemist history of reductivist abstraction, specifically monochrome painting, whereas the sculptor Arman de parted from the equally ceneral paradigm of the readymade. If we accept that ‘hese paradigms were in fact essential to the formation of the discursive framework ofthe neo-av garde, we still have to identify the specific conditions determin~ ing the formation of a historical framework. Our primary argument is that the repression of catastrophic historical experience and its opposite, the rapid devel ‘opment ofa new culture of spectacle and consumption, were among the found- ing conditions of the artistic production of that posowar moment. This dialectic ofsilence and exposure was all the mor repression of historical memory had been so ficient on European ground since the nphatically established in every- day life on a collective level, so that most of the visual neo-avantgarde practicesNeo-Avastcanpe ann Cutrune Ixpusray between 1958 and 1968 were formulated as part ofa larger project of social mod emization and amnes Discursive Memony vensus HistoaicaL Memory While it has been firmly established that one of the epistemic specifies of mod- cemist painting had been to prohibit any representation of the historical and to dismantle any referentiality to the material world, it continues to surprise us how vehemently this quest for visual autonomy and self-referentiality was reestab- lished immediately after the most cataclysmic destruction in European history This was observable in the postwar period in all the European countries, but itis ies of disavowal and modernization in particularly poignant to study the dy those contexts where the encounters with fiscism and the Holocaust had been most dramatic, in the country of the viesimizer as much as in those ofthe vie~ timized Numerous parameters of historical mediation have to be brought into the