Avant-garde

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For other uses, see Avant-garde (disambiguation).

The Love of Zero, a 1927 avant-garde short film by Robert Florey

The avant-garde (/ˌævɒɒˈɡɑːrd/;[1] French pronunciation: [avɑɒɡaʁd];[2] from French,
"advance guard" or "vanguard", literally "fore-guard")[3] are people or works that are
experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.[3][4][5] It
may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial
unacceptability,[6] and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and
consumer.[4]
The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or
the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by
some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism[citation needed].
Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still
continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to
postmodern artists such as the Language poets around 1981.[7][not in citation given]
The avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was
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.[8]

Contents
[hide]

 1Theories
 2Relation to mainstream society
 3Examples
 o 3.1Music

o 3.2Theatre

 4Art movements
 5See also
 6References
 7Further reading
 8External links

Theories[edit]

Fountain, a 1917 avant-garde work of art by Marcel Duchamp; photograph by Alfred

Stieglitz
Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity. The
Italian essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the earliest analyses of vanguardism
as a cultural phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The
Theory of the Avant-Garde).[9]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 share certain ideals or
values which manifest themselves in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopt: He
sees vanguard culture as a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism.[10] Other authors
have attempted both to clarify and to extend 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 political content of the individual
work".[11]
Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-
historians such as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (born 1941). Buchloh, in the
collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for
a dialectical approach to these positions.[12] Subsequent criticism theorized the
limitations of these approaches, noting their circumscribed areas of analysis,
including Eurocentric, chauvinist, and genre-specific definitions. [13]

Relation to mainstream society[edit]

Further information: Mainstream
See also: Media culture and Spectacle (critical theory)
The concept of avant-garde refers primarily to artists, writers, composers and
thinkers whose work is opposed to mainstream cultural values and often has a
trenchant 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 by
New York art critic Clement Greenberg, published in Partisan Review in 1939.
[14]
Greenberg argued that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to "high"
or "mainstream" culture, and that it has also rejected the artificially synthesized mass
culture that has been produced by industrialization. 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: phony, faked or
mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using
formal devices stolen from 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.

Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in
the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg, West Germany.
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 influential "The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935, rev. 1939). [15] Where Greenberg
used the German word 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, and the electronic media). [16] 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 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 justification, of
everything. Consumer culture now ruled.[16]
The avant-garde's 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 Mann's Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde demonstrates how completely the
avant-garde is embedded within institutional structures today, a thought also pursued
by Richard Schechner in his analyses of avant-garde performance. [17]
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, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and
commercial cinema. It has become 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),[page needed] and Hans Bertens in The
Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995),[page needed] 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. [18]
Nevertheless, an incisive critique of vanguardism as against the views of mainstream
society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s.
[19]
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".[20]

Examples[edit]
Music[edit]
Main article: Avant-garde music
Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional
structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. [21] The term is used
loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition
altogether.[22] By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century
include Arnold Schoenberg,[23]Charles Ives,[24] Igor Stravinsky,[23] Anton Webern,
[25]
George Antheil (in his earliest works only), Alban Berg,[25] Henry Cowell (in his
earliest works), Philip Glass, Harry Partch, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Richard
Strauss (in his earliest work),[26] Karlheinz Stockhausen,[27] Edgard Varèse,
and Iannis Xenakis.[23] Although most avant-garde composers have been men, this is
not exclusively the case. Women avant-gardists include Pauline Oliveros, Diamanda
Galás, Meredith Monk, and Laurie Anderson.[28]
There is another definition of "Avant-gardism" that distinguishes it from "modernism":
Peter Bürger, 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.[22] 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 avant-gardists
include Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, György Ligeti, Witold Lutosławski, and Luciano
Berio, since "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an
audience."[29]
Theatre[edit]
Main article: Experimental theatre
Whereas the avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century 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 Neo-Dada.