boredom is always counter-revolutionary

‘Is the avant-garde passé?’

This was the question posed as to begin a debate/discussion arranged as part of the Battle of Ideas events, held in Brick Lane with a panel of curators, artists and writers. The Chair, in introducing the issue, referred to two current exhibitions against which to hold our notions of avant-garde artistic practise: Banksy in New York and Cut’n'Paste at the Estorick gallery. It was agreed fairly early on that no avant-garde as such exists today, although it was not agreed whether that means that avant-gardism was an historical moment now passed, or whether art’s engagement with politics is not as confident as it once was, though perhaps avant-gardism could be discovered in other forms. Unfortunately, the discussion culminated in a very vague and non-commital tone of continued optimism in art’s elucidatory political agency, and that somewhere out there (probably China, it was suggested!) is an avant-garde waiting to be found (although I personally want nothing to do with an avant-garde that doesn’t, so to speak, spit in my face or blow my mind). I think it best to gloss over the Chair’s blind faith in aestheticism and art for art’s sake, and remorse failing to heckle her when she asserted the incontrovertible truth that Lucien Freud is ‘just a good artist’.

Asger Jorn, ‘The Avant-Garde doesn’t give up’ (1962)

A foundational, teleological, error was made in how this particular discussion approached the question of the existence of a contemporary avant-garde. Possibly because so many of the panel worked within what could be called the Art World, their conception of the avant-garde was in terms of specific artists, artworks and exhibitions. Avant-gardism, though, would surely exist as a primarily discursive tradition. To adopt an approach that looks for the artefact, the individual or the moment is to be confronting the avant-garde after its decisive moment: exhuming its theory after its recuperation by the Art World and the market, two entities which most self-respecting avant-gardes would be seeking to destroy. Likewise, so much avant-gardist discourse has never been actualised, never moved beyond manifesto (oh wait, they’ve made an exhibition of that too!), or has simply had its artworks serve the secondary role of illustrating the theory.

Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) – which posits the historical avant-garde as having existed outside of the ‘canon of permissible procedures’ that is the period style – claims that these movements did not even develop their own styles or representative artefacts. ‘What did happen is that these movements liquidated the possibility of a period style when they raised to a principle the availability of the artistic means of past periods’. To deny the eventual formation, however unwilled, of a Dada style or Surrealist aesthetic seems contentious, although it is certainly beneficial to articulate the historical avant-gardes in terms of bringing to the present artistic means that had been consigned to the past, especially as avant-gardism was often so fiercely insistent on its own originality and forward vision. Avant-gardism has always been historically situated yet claimed its own detachment.

Yet if we are to look for a contemporary avant-garde without taking recourse to the institutional outlets of artistic practise, it is difficult in these (deep breath) postmodern times to find the necessary unity and continuity where such a grouping could emerge. Burger’s conception of the historical avant-garde (what follows is hugely simplified, these are some heavy German dialectics to be dealing with on a Friday night) casts it as the self-criticism of art as an institution, an inevitable stage in the development of art after it has imagined itself to be autonomous of the material conditions of society. As such, the avant-gardes of the early Twentieth Century have as their precursory, catalytic moment the Aestheticism of the Nineteenth Century. The objectivity of this self-recognition can only occur when art feels that it has space to breath, to reflect upon itself, navel-gaze a little. However, avant-gardism begins from the disruption of this self-referentialism, attacking the ineffectual status of art in bourgeois society. Burger continues to say that what the European avant-garde movements have worked towards has been a negation of art as an institution ‘unassociated with the life praxis of men’, and its replacement with forms that address themselves directly to lived experience:

Institution and work contents had to coincide to make it largely possible for the avant-garde to call art into question. The avant-gardistes proposed the sublation of art – sublation in the Hegelian sense of the term: art was not simply to be destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form.

Regarding Burger’s conception of the two-fold historical development of art and society, I imagine two lines – one art and one society – traced along a chart of history. Sometimes these lines run parallel, touching occasionally, and sometimes they veer away from each other. The historical avant-gardes have emerged when the lines have been separate and attempted to pull them together, then dissipated when its formal revisions are recuperated (Burger mentions the contradictory function of avant-gardism in criticising the present order of things, but ‘in realising the image of a better order in fiction, which is semblance only, it relieves the existing society of the pressure of those forces that make for change’, and art becomes merely affirmative rather than concretely effectual). And so it is difficult to imagine our present age in these terms, due to a seeming lack of Grand Narratives coming from the Art World, which is constituted instead in terms of celebrity, ever-inflated scandal and tabloid novelty. Likewise, to adopt a more immediately oppositional political stance is passé in itself: everyone opposes the war, everyone is alienated in the city, everyone feels duplicitous within consumer capitalism.

So I tend to agree with what was Joe Kerr’s final analysis that the avant-garde is not so much passé, as passed: I paraphrase, ‘we’ve taken the avant-garde out for an hour and played with it, but lets put it away now’. To claim avant-gardism is to feed the living with the dead. This isn’t to say, however, that oppositional political art is extinct, but if it is to have any genuine agency it certainly needs to find new and genunely radical forms (radical, following Burger, in its original etymological meaning), and address itself to an Art World which, if nothing else, is endlessly self-reflexive to the point of disappearing up its own diamond-encrusted arsehole.