Avant-garde

The avant-garde (from French, "advance guard" or "vanguard", literally "fore-guard”)

are people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art,
culture, and politics. The concept of avant-garde refers primarily to artists, writers,
composers and thinkers whose work is opposed to mainstream cultural.

The movement sought to eliminate or at least blur the distinction between art and life
often by introducing elements of mass culture. These artists aimed to "make it new" and
often represented themselves as alienated from the established order. Avant-garde
literature and art challenged societal norms to "shock" the sensibilities of its audience.

Central to The Theory of the Avant-Garde is the argument that the concept of the term -
avant-garde - should be understood as an awareness of the pitfalls of modernism and a
radical attack on the dominant institutions of art and literature. According to Burger the
aim of avant-garde should be to re-integrate art into life and to do away with arts
adherence to and association with ideologies and established institutions.

The words avant-garde are an old French military phrase meaning the advance guard.
An advance guard consists of troops sent into battle. In other words, they are the first
wave of warriors encountering the enemy. The original artists in the avant-garde
movement saw themselves as soldiers in the day's culture wars, battling the entrenched
establishment in Paris who deemed their paintings worthy to hang in the coveted Paris
Salon.

The definition of avant-garde today includes artists, musicians and writers who work on
the edge of modern culture. The avant-garde artist breaks new ground by exploring
traditional concepts, but often beyond the bounds of propriety or even cultural norms.
Most avant-garde artists seek art for art's sake, and not for popularity, fame or fortune,
although they may find all three over time as their works become known to the public.
Avant-garde artists urge social, political and cultural changes through their artwork.

The Salon de Refusés

The most coveted art exhibition for painters in the late 19th century was the Paris Salon.
Exhibiting one's paintings in the Paris salon could make or break an artist's career. The
Salon, however, had grown crusty and tired over the years, rejecting more and more
paintings and choosing instead artists whose work reflected pedantic tastes. In 1863,
the salon jury rejected over 3,000 works, an unprecedented amount. The furious artists
banded together to open their own exhibition.

On May 17, 1863, a group of painters, under the aegis of Emperor Napoléon II, opened
the "Salon de Refusés", or salon of rejects. The list of rejected artists reads like a who's
who of brilliant painters: James McNeil Whistler, Edouard Manet, and others. The Salon
de Refusés occupied a gallery attached to the famous Paris Salon, adding insult to
injury to the staid salon executives. The Salon de Refusés was held in 1863, 1874,
1875 and 1886. After this, it was no longer the exciting, counter culture event it was

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back in 1863 and was discontinued. Each generation produces a wave of avant-garde
artists. Other avant-garde artistic concepts include Cubism, Dada, and Fauvism.

Dada
Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th
century. Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, began in 1916, spreading to Berlin and New York.
The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913
Dada, in addition to being anti-war, had political affinities with the radical left and was
also anti-bourgeois. Dada is a nonsense word and the movement, in many ways similar
to the trends of avant-garde and surrealism, "emphasized absurdity, reflected a spirit of
nihilism, and celebrated the function of chance" Major figures include André Breton,
Georges Bataille Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp etc.

Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland. It
arose as a reaction to World War I, and the nationalism, and rationalism, which many
thought had brought war about. Influenced by ideas and innovations from several early
avant-gardes - Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism - its output
was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture,
painting and collage. Dada's aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and
nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including
Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups.
The movement is believed to have dissipated with the arrival of Surrealist in France.

DADA KEY IDEAS

Dada was born out of a pool of avant-garde painters, poets and filmmakers who flocked
to neutral Switzerland before and during WWI.

The movement came into being at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February 1916. The
Cabaret was named after the eighteenth century French satirist, Voltaire, whose play
Candide mocked the idiocies of his society. As Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Zurich
Dada wrote, "This is our Candide against the times."

So intent were members of Dada on opposing all the norms of bourgeois culture that
the group was barely in favor of itself: "Dada is anti-Dada," they often cried.

Dada art varies so widely that it is hard to speak of a coherent style. It was powerfully
influenced by Futurist and Expressionist concerns with technological advancement, yet
artists like Hans Arp also introduced a preoccupation with chance and other painterly
conventions.

Dadaism is an art and international literary movement that used nonsense and ridicule
to emphasize the meaningless of the modern world. Originally, it started 1916 as a
protest against World War I and formally ended in 1923. Although short lived, it had a
huge impact on art and literature movements of 20th century . It wasa revolt by certain
20th-century painters and writers in France, Germany, and Switzerland against

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smugness in traditional art and Western society; their works, illustrating absurdity
through paintings of purposeless machines and collages of discarded materials,
expressed their cynicism about conventional ideas of form and their rejection of
traditional concepts of beauty.
Main characteristics:

 Established artistic freedom

 Nonsensical poems
 Combining words randomly

Cubism was a twentieth century avant-garde art movement used in music , painting
and literature. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in
an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts
the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to present the piece in a greater context.
Cubism in literature, especially in poetry, by Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob and
Gertrude Stein. Such poets adopted a number of techniques which could be classed as
close to Analytic Cubism (destruction of grammar, strange or absent punctuation, free
verse, etc.) Coming off groundbreaking advances in the social sciences, particularly the
theories of Sigmund Freud, cubists were more concerned with the internal landscape of
the individual than the external landscape of the objective world.

Cubist writing is liberating. It adds to a writer's toolbox for telling his or her story. We've
always had description and dialogue to set scenes, to build moods, and to create
consistent, compelling characters. It feels good to now have the text of an e-mail
message to do any or all of those things. We can also tap into poems, personal notes,
grocery lists, and any other form of written media. These can all be used to great effect
to show a lifestyle, to define a character's motives and psyche, or to paint the tensions
and emotional contours of a relationship.

Futurism

The most important Italian avant-garde art movement of the 20th century, Futurism
celebrated advanced technology and urban modernity. Committed to the new, its
members wished to destroy older forms of culture and to demonstrate the beauty of
modern life - the beauty of the machine, speed, violence and change.

Futurism as a literary movement made its official debut with F.T. Marinetti's Manifesto of
Futurism (1909), as it delineated the various ideals Futurist poetry should strive for. Poetry, the
predominate medium of Futurist literature, can be characterized by its unexpected combinations
of images and hyper-conciseness (not to be confused with the actual length of the poem). The
Futurists called their style of poetry parole in libertà (word autonomy) in which all ideas of
meter were rejected and the word became the main unit of concern. In this way, the Futurists
managed to create a new language free of syntax punctuation, and metrics that allowed for free
expression.

Theater also has an important place within the Futurist universe. Works in this genre have scenes
that are few sentences long, have an emphasis on nonsensical humor, and attempt to discredit the

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deep rooted traditions via parody and other devaluation techniques. There are a number of
examples of Futurist novels from both the initial period of Futurism and the neo-Futurist period,
from Marinetti himself to a number of lesser known Futurists, such as Primo Conti, Ardengo
Soffici and Giordano Bruno Sanzin (Zig Zag, Il Romanzo Futurista edited by Alessandro Masi,
1995). They are very diverse in style, with very little recourse to the characteristics of Futurist
Poetry, such as 'parole in libertà'. Arnaldo Ginna's 'Le locomotive con le calze'(Trains with socks
on)plunges into a world of absurd nonsense, childishly crude. His brother Bruno Corra wrote in
Sam Dunn è morto (Sam Dunn is Dead) a masterpiece of Futurist fiction, in a genre he himself
called 'Synthetic' characterized by compression, and precision; it is a sophisticated piece that
rises above the other novels through the strength and pervasiveness of its irony.

Surrealism
Surrealism (also associated with the avant-garde) was initiated in particular by André
Breton, whose 1924 "Manifesto of Surrealism" defined the movement's "adherence to
the imagination, dreams, the fantastic, and the irrational." The word 'surrealist' was
coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les
Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.

Surrealism in literature can be defined as an artistic attempt to bridge together reality

and the imagination. Surrealists seek to overcome the contradictions of the conscious
and unconscious minds by creating unreal or bizarre stories full of juxtapositions.

Founded by André Breton (1896-1966), surrealism began as an artistic movement in

Paris in the 1920s and lasted until the 1940s. Writer and philosopher Breton propelled
this movement with his publication of The Manifesto of Surrealism, as a way of fighting
against the way art was understood at the time. The group aimed to revolutionize
human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to
free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton
proclaimed that the true aim of Surrealism was "long live the social revolution, and it
alone!" To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and
anarchism.

With the horrors of World War I still in Europe's wake, art had become controlled by
politics. It came to be used as a way of maintaining order and keeping the revolution at
bay. However, surrealists wanted to break free from the constraints being posed on art,
and to do so in an extreme, yet positive way. Though they fought against political
control, the movement's goal was not political in nature. Surrealism sought to free
people spiritually and psychologically. These artists and writers wanted to repair the
damage done by WWI. Unfortunately, World War II was on the brink, and such a
movement made the surrealists a target. During the rise of Nazism and Fascism, many
surrealists were forced to seek haven in America. Fortunately for American culture, their
ideas began affecting changes in the States as well.

While the movement itself may have ended, surrealism still exists in much of today's
literature. Using surrealist imagery, ideas, or poetic techniques, writers attempt to
stretch the boundaries, free the mind, and make readers think.

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Characteristics in Literature

Surrealism is meant to be strange and shocking. It is meant to push the envelope in a

way that forces people out of their comfortable ideas, so much so that it has even been
known to cause riots. While the idea of surrealism is complex, surrealist literature does
have common characteristics:

Surrealist literature will have contrasting images or ideas. This technique is used to help
readers make new connections and expand the reader's reality, or rather the reader's
idea of what reality is. They pull from Freudian ideas of 'free association' as a way to
steer readers away from societal influence and open up the individual's mind.

Surrealism will use images and metaphors to compel the reader to think deeper and
reveal subconscious meaning. Instead of relying on plot, surrealist writers instead focus
on the characters, discovery, and imagery to force readers to dig into their unconscious
and analyze what they find.

Surrealism also uses poetic styles to create dreamlike and fantastic stories that often defy logic.
Rather than incorporate the normal prosaic structure like linear plots and structured settings,
surrealism uses poetic techniques, like leaps in thinking (free association), abstract ideas, and
nonlinear timelines.

Literary Examples: Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was a French poet known for his obscure
and surreal writing style. One collection of poetry, Les Poésies de S. Mallarmé, is known to
have inspired and pushed the surrealist movement forward.

(excerpt taken from the poem 'Les Fenêtres')

'And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium

Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn,

Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land

Where beauty flourishes.'

In this excerpt, notice Mallarmé's shift away from reality and towards the 'dream'. Surrealism
strives to expand the reader's idea of what reality is. Here, Mallarmé writes of how he uses art
to get closer to this new reality, where dreams can be worn like a 'diadem' (or crown), meaning
something to show off proudly.