The Brooklyn Rail

“The history of any term needs to be decisive for its present-day use… though a term cannot be returned to any of its original meanings.” René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism

So much art these days seems to be discussed in terms of its politics. Some suggest that the art of a work is obscured by its, or the artist’s, politics. Others reflect on the loss of art-ness in the discourse being so dedicated to politics. Some grumble that art should stay in its lane and leave the politics to activism; more tempered versions argue, with due credit to cultural capital, that art nevertheless can’t achieve significant political goals precisely because it is in the realm of art. A few chuckle at political efforts within the laundromat of art markets.

Poor Art. Can’t win for trying. It does too much. Too little. Too effusive. Too vague. Too siloed. Too compromised. Incorporate technology, and it becomes even more inaccessible, opaque, or perfidious.

Whether it succeeds or not, that art is a space where politics are being expressed deserves some recognition. No one argues that art is preferable to political leaders taking action… or refraining from excess force. By all means call your representatives. Vote. Participate in activist causes as you can, every time you can. With politics as a discourse refused at family suppers, in the classroom, and even among friends, or isolated to major donor dinners and well-funded lobbying, impact can feel arbitrary, isolating, uncertain, or even impossible.

The very fact that art is a milieu in which political conversations occur, particularly as they are expressed with such ardor, suggests that personal, intentional, meaningful engagement is not possible elsewhere. For all its flawed efforts, the art world provides a town square for the debates society needs. The complex politics of our day deserve the subtleties and inflections, the space of ambiguity, that art manages particularly well. Rather than the binary of antagonism, art can offer an agonistic encounter of shifting contexts and identities, situated histories and values, care-full material and ideological analyses and syntheses.

The swirling use of the term avant-garde amidst so many contemporary positions and novel technologies leans heavily on presumptions that innovation breaks with the currency of current practices. That seems a superficial compliment, if not potentially misguided. A focus on novelty can veer towards anarchy, libertarianism, dehistoricization, or material fetishism that can wind up reinforcing the very power structures needing to be addressed. As a French military term, it is imbued with politics. Often understood to mean those at the forefront, and presumed to mean the front line of attack, it also refers to a reconnaissance team, crossing camp lines to scout the positions and intentions of the other side.

This two-part column focuses less on a specific show or event, but muses on this idea of an avant-garde to observe the term’s dramatically shifting meaning across various art movements and practices. This month’s column focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth century references, with the second part in April examining its relevance to new media and digital art.

PART 1: Avant-Garde and Art: A Nineteenth Century Development

“Avant-garde” first appears in reference to art in 1825, in an essay either by the former French aristocrat Saint-Simon or his friend and disciple, the banker and mathematician Olinde Rodrigues. For both, the notion aimed to position the artist as capable of producing social change, equal to the engineer and industrialist, whom they find equals, and a connection to which I’ll return in tracing this history.

For art to be able to impact society in this way, it needed agency and therefore autonomy—that is, the ability to act on the world also requires a degree of separation so as to be independent of external influence or control. Art’s agency and autonomy was additionally made possible by intellectual efforts at the time, extending an Enlightenment mission, described recently by Hal Foster as seeking “to separate knowledge into the three spheres of science, morality, and art and to develop their ‘inner logic’ professionally.” Art’s separation realizes this autonomy with the late nineteenth century Decadent movement, and the notion of art for art’s sake, where form is emphasized over content.

This art movement’s adoration of grandeur, glamour, refinement, idleness and aesthetic excesses may reject art as being a mode of production with social consequences, but the performance of the dandy also makes a life into art—an ironic twist. The rise of industrialization and budding commercialization of all things made the artifice inherent to these into a quality to be emphasized in everyday life, which Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde (among others) exemplified and for which they were also reviled. Their flâneurie was in direct opposition to the churning machine of labor seeping into every part of society. Gautier’s introduction to Les Fleurs du Mal (1868) would argue that art in the nineteenth century could no longer take inspiration from nature but must turn to art itself, and offer stylization, refinement, complexity, and sensory reflection to achieve beauty, which is artificial and deliberate in its perfection.

Clement Greenberg in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” specifically mentions the Decadent movement for its effort to make “something valid solely on its own terms…. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.” This is the abstraction that turns away from content and simulation to focus entirely on the medium. He identifies Impressionism, Cubism and, of course, Abstract Expressionism, as avant-garde in this regard. There’s a depoliticization of the avant-garde in his work that is ironic given how modern art’s success stems partly from its political mobilization during World War II and subsequent Cold War foreign policy by the back and forth relations between art institutions (like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art) and the US government (particularly the CIA and State Department). Greenberg’s take that the avant-garde resisted the consumer culture of capitalism may have been true, except that these works were adopted to promote democratic constructs tied to consumerist capitalism. Their form became the empty vessel to fill with market based values of democracy.

The problem with dissolving the distinction between art and commodity products, as certain modernist movements had proposed, also enabled the commodification of art—items to be sold for increasingly niche needs—while commodities gain the luster of art’s provocations to think, engage, and change the world. Greenberg’s formalism can be seen as an attempt to rescue the form from its commodification. Even if it failed, it served a purpose we are cautioned against ignoring.

The focus on form appears sometimes within certain trenches of the NFT landscape, particularly with generative art: the work’s appearance as derived from the combination of algorithm and the hash incorporated into the project by the collector’s participation made to stand for a practice true to the medium of blockchain. The seeming indifference to content across so much of the work makes sense when perceived from this angle. Others, however, see the singularity of the NFT as undoing the endless reproducibility of digital objects and so denying the fundamental expansion that digital expression permitted. Given the distaste for the high level of consumerism associated with NFT art, and a desire to return the community to an appreciation of the art for its own sake, the NFT platform zeroone offered an entirely new model, of art traded for other art—which is valiant, was certainly needed, and reinterprets the aspirations of Decadence.

The steady separation of art from society across the nineteenth century had the negative effect of making semblances and imagination the realm of Culture. If something was imaginative, did not conform to the status quo, then it was relegated to culture, losing the imaginative force needed for social
change—note the rise of science fiction during this period when dubious scientific propositions were being problematically assimilated into social systems, from criminal identification to healthcare to education. At the same time, engagement with change and reimagining society was something that people could do through art and culture, rather than expending that effort in society. We see this in the contemporary: through concerns about artists making political work rather than participating in the politics (which winds up including rejections of their participation in and income from certain institutions, but also their lifestyles knit to the privileges of their cultural capital); and dismissals of collectors purchasing political art without participating in changing the society that enables the problematic politics addressed by the art.

For these reasons—to briefly go back in time—another set of modernists—Dadaists, Futurists and Russian Constructivists—saw the need to “reintegrate art into the praxis of life,” as the literary scholar Peter Bürger writes in Theory of the Avant Garde (1974/1984). The institution of art, as such, needed to be critiqued; only later would this drift into institutional critique, where art is not being critiqued but the institutions surrounding it are. Think here of the use of newspapers in Dada collage less as a formal rejection of academic standards but as positing that mundane materials already were art. Many Constructivist artists advocated for their work within commercial spheres like graphic and product design. Art wasn’t some separate object, but was already in life and the world through those social-economic-political spheres. Using newspapers, for example, could make that visible. This effort, despite its specific intent to reject the high aestheticization of such movements like Decadence, can also be seen as an application via materials of dandyism’s performance of everyday life. Art, situated as design, was already changing the world. If utility led to rejection as art, sidelined and adopted as design instead, then art was being emptied of any possibility. This utter negation had to be combatted. Theirs was a reclamation project.

Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant Garde condemns the adoption of techniques from that particular set of modernists by contemporary artists because their attempts to dismantle the autonomy of art failed and therefore offer no means of transformation. The English language translation of Bürger’s text—explains scholar Nicolas Heimendinger in a historical review of the text’s arrival on the American scene and its impact on the crew of October journal—however, was interpreted as providing theoretical anchors to differentiate a broad modernism from this particular set, deemed avant-garde. That distinction gave postmodernism new conceptual constructs to temper its seeming “anything goes” poststructuralism.

This highly theoretical debate amidst critics and academics swirled with Frankfurt School critical theory, French post-structuralism, and a strong tendency towards anti-Greenbergian formalism. It developed a new notion of the avant-garde as aligned with postmodernism, while postmodernism was also allowed to supersede it; the refiguration of the avant-garde as producing a critique of modernism—of which it had formally seemed a part—allowed a rejection of formal tendencies (and any kind of fetishization of the medium), and shifted the critique of art’s rarefaction into institutional critique (thereby embracing research-based practice or political art and accepting art’s inability to produce radical social reform as enabling it instead within the arts). Not focused on formal qualities, its politics become oriented around art worlds. This postmodern avant-garde wasn’t embroiling art in the socio-political milieu but retaining its distinct cultural space and addressing politics as they appeared within it.

These histories are subtle and sensible only through their respective social contexts. So much media art and digital art refers back to the modernist avant-garde: chance effects of Dada, uncanniness of Surrealism, passion of Abstract Expressionism. These claims in the contemporary, however, bizarrely disown agency, in a complicated reversal of the self-awareness, interest in the unconscious, and embodied activation of the oft-referenced movements. Alternatively, identifying contemporary use of media tools and computational systems as a reappropriation of industries’ products to emerge a social impact deviates from the outright politicization of art and industry insisted upon by the earlier avant-garde and overstates the position of other modernisms like Surrealism or even Socialist Realism. At any rate, later twentieth century theorists would point out, those modernist efforts were institutionalized as art. Art failed as political. This art didn’t do anything but fall back into art’s rarified space. These modernist works entered museums as objects, not government as ideas.

Part 2 pursues the exploration of the term avant-garde as it was channelled for the rise of new media and digital art.