The Brooklyn Rail

This two-part column focuses less on a specific show or event, but reflects on this idea of the avant-garde to observe its dramatically shifting application to art movements and practices. Part one focused on the nineteenth and twentieth century references. This second part continues last month’s history of the term avant-garde, to consider its application in new media and digital art.

PART 2: What About Computer Art as Avant-Garde?

The questions around modernism and postmodernism, reconstructing a group of modernists as an avant-garde, occurred alongside the rise of media art and computer arts. The early computer artists really weren’t acknowledged by mainstream contemporary art—marginalization suggesting even some level of attention and interest in their practices. It was a small group of quirky gallerists, collectors and curators who sustained this period, despite visual and pragmatic similarities among some of those artists to LeWittian rule-bound conceptual art (see Grant Taylor’s When the Machine Made Art). The need to explain algorithmic systems, computer and plotter structures, led to misunderstanding many of these artists as techno-fetishists with a formalist sensibility that didn’t suit the interest in psychoanalysis, pop culture, globalism and social history expressed by art critics and theorists. By the mid-1990s, more people had personal computers and email, but the connectivity it allowed was yet to develop the mundane or socially significant potential that would interest many writers. Net.art had a clear, radical agenda.

In May 2000, Rachel Greene would write about this group of artists for Artforum, describing net.art as a “détournement,” as if to position and legitimate it as an offspring of the much lauded Situationist Internationale, readily perceived as avant-garde in its disruptions within common social spaces (streets or restaurants) to foreground and critique pervasive cultural politics. Net.art’s hijacking websites, tactical use of email and internet’s global reach, and disruption of the corporate patenting and closed source model, presents a resistance to the nullifying “ease” of UX that obscured or blocked active participation by manipulating the means of communication or information production. Such efforts were seen in contrast to the increased consumerism of a booming contemporary market that kept art distinct from politics in trade for profit.

The artist and theorist Lev Manovich published “Avant-garde as Software” in 2002 with the journal Artnodes (on his website the article is dated 1999). Art’s use of computers had been around for a couple decades, and with kinetic machines even longer, but Manovich particularly examines the legacy of avant-garde film. He notices how certain techniques of that earlier period reappeared within the experience of software: collage as cut-and-paste; montage as overlapping windows; readymades as objects compiled for computation (bits of code, icons, etc). Manovich argues that avant-garde communication techniques were transformed into principles of computational labor.

Another similarity between many of the modernist avant-garde, particularly the Constructivists, and net.art or software artists was their “day jobs” working in the industries that enabled their creative activity—advertising, software engineers, etc. This was an argument against electronic and computer art since the 1960s, when it was perceived as being in the pocket of the military-industrial complex, but it also reiterates the demand on artists to be “pure” and somehow avoid the dysfunction of capitalism, which either requires they be commercial artists, then questioned for participating in the art market, or survive on grants. Artists must be removed from the socio-economic milieu or its politics, yet make art that is of and for that milieu? The yearnings for a Decadent attitude of art for art’s sake distinct from the ugliness of the world confronts an expectation to be situated, and know the issues of, the world that all others live. For many artists working with technology, then and now, access to the tools requires working for—or accepting artist in residence positions for—the institutions producing them. Also, however, such jobs translated into an interest in their use for the arts.

For example, the artist Jane Dickson, who was part of the collective Colab, was hired to run the first digital light board in Times Square in 1978, thereby learning how to code while accessing a new medium and making it available to others through that job; she encouraged many artists, notably Jenny Holzer, to engage with the digital within their art practice. Her labor, both economic and social, arguably established the possibility of Midnight Moment, a Times Square Arts public art project, for which companies donate access to their advertising boards to showcase, in the three minutes before midnight, some of the bright lights in contemporary art.

Manovich acknowledges that software naturalizes the radical techniques of the 1920s, but he also argues that software changes them:

1. …The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information.…

2. The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media.…

Novelty isn’t positioned via the medium, despite its nomenclature, but via its mode of engagement.

If medium did not matter but its use did, then the tools associated with the former military-industrial complex, now an emerging techno-capitalism, could only be avant-garde, aka postmodern, in their disruption. But that disruption wasn’t attending to the milieu of art, as the postmodern avant garde had, and so wasn’t legible within that ideological formation. It seemed too much like the modernist avant garde in its blurring of art and politics, which had been deemed by the reinterpretation of Burger’s Theory of the Avant Garde as failed. Net.art arrived to refute the constraints of an emergent socio-economic context, but the Windows into this new Office aesthetically conjured by these artists remained opaque to most audiences and critics. This all seems so obvious now, which is part of the point of tracing this history, precisely in order to observe the shifting rhetorical and polemical potential of the term avant-garde across different historical and social contexts.

Avant-Garde Now: Possibilities and Problems

So, at long last, this brings me to what on earth an avant-garde might be today. Twenty years on from Manovich’s astute article, the ways of accessing and manipulating accumulated media have become mainstream, seen in the broad application of “curation” as a concept a dozen years ago. From social media’s reposting and algorithmic frameworks to AI public generators’ repackaging of so much material scraped from the internet, software’s avant-garde potential requires a new understanding of avant-garde.

As we look back at two centuries worth of art and avant-garde activity, I’m reminded of a meme going around these days that says:

Do y’all remember, before the internet, that people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information?

Yeah. It wasn’t that.

Novelty, amidst the persistent and insistent, latest, newest, best products coming out of one business sector or another, would seem hardly avant-garde at all. And yet, the term’s association with radical reform or renewal makes disassociating novelty difficult. Perhaps then newness is not appropriate, but a kind of historicizing or contextualizing might be avant-garde today? The rapid obsolescence of digital technologies is the flip side of their insistent novelty. In the endless digital hoarding that we all do, the value of loss has been lost. Some recent digital projects that allowed for degeneration, distortion, and loss seem to encourage a confrontation with mutability, transience, decay, and the meaning that emerges through impermanence. How might art contain loss, given its cultural project to hold ideas for future rediscovery and debate?

The 1825 essay introducing the avant-garde was titled “The Artist, the Scientist and the Industrialist,” equating artists to businessmen and engineers, but that was at a time when all three represented a departure from aristocratic fiat towards creative intellectual solutions for budding state systems. Their distinction by an Enlightenment model of thought was emerging but not yet antagonistic. In due course, those disciplines would find themselves in different academic discourses, and university buildings. The three have remained connected and opposed ever since, but now the industrialization of arts and science for a state running on capital growth and valuation puts in question their equal footing, despite various efforts at interdisciplinarity. If we keep each as distinct, then an interesting question could be how science, or art, might reform the other two? Alternatively, if we reject the specialization that inheres to disciplinary constructs, we might uncover what yet unites them that supports the reforms we seek?

When Theodor Adorno wrote Walter Benjamin that “l’art pour l’art is … in need of a defense,” this was not meant to suggest that art should be exempt from consideration as a mode of production with a social role, but to question the binary that denied the possibility of a dialectic regarding art’s dual position as both autonomous and deeply social. That the two have been situated as opposing poles, with Adorno as a modernist avenger and Benjamin as a proto-postmodernist ignores subtleties in both their arguments as well as the fruitfulness of their friendship.

Scholar and critic Edward A. Shanken in “Contemporary Art and New Media: Digital Divide or Hybrid Discourse?” argues that new media puts in question the fixed object orientation of mainstream contemporary art. Digital objects are both specific and universal (as in Alan Turing calling the computer a universal machine), situated and distributed, synchronic and diachronic, one and both until we turn our gaze upon it. This is the challenge of the hybridity of our moment. Gains and losses. In so much avant-garde discourse the focus is on the gains of these movements and what they accomplish. We might be due a revisitation of what they abandoned and lost with those gains. Most of the avant-garde discourse focuses on a Western history, which scholar Partha Mitter admirably discloses in a 2008 article “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery”—ideas posited by other postcolonial scholars, too. There are lessons here regarding adoption, appropriation, suppression that seem apt for digital art where emergent technologies thrill with the promise of global cultural exchange, which can also–dangerously–lead to a flattening.

Returning to where I started, the term’s military resonance was apt in the revolutionary momentum of the early nineteenth century. Sidelining its common sense as the first part of a military advance, in favor of a reconnaissance mission, could be fruitful. Transforming the expectations of an avant-garde from fighting to information gathering shifts away from the antagonism rife in politics and towards a discursive, communal piazza model of art as sharing in the ambiguities of knowledge and the agonism of praxis. For its array of meanings and references, an avant-garde is never singular or individual. Nor is it all-inclusive. It’s a small group of people who despite everything that surrounds them, think they can do something together. For a while. Not, forever.

“The life of language does not essentially differ from the life of any other organism—plants or animals.”

-August Schleicher

While writing this essay, auto-correct (a form of AI) kept trying to fix the term to “avant garden.” Gardens are constructs and yet every gardener also knows they cannot be assured of what they planned. The plot thickens with other systems—weather, temperature, streams, soil and fungi, migrating birds and scurrying insects, rambling mammals and a person pacing a path day after day. It’s a network of relations. Maybe, the term avant-garde doesn’t provide the field of flourishing we need now.

Maybe, we need other conceptual environments, like heresy, entanglement, symbiosis. The legacy of the avant-garde and the term’s theoretical maneuvers, however, haunt us. Its persistence hints that we still need to resolve what it failed to accomplish, which would occur not by endlessly invoking the modernist or neo-avant garde, but by coming to terms with the terms of engagement proposed back then and addressing how, or if, they still apply. In the arts, can our language broaden beyond decisive and divisive borders and deepen to appreciate the layered strata of experience? To think creatively without invoking novelty, to progress without presuming to perfect and advance without forgetting to review how we got to where we are, to reform our current formulations with more tender mediations, to plant ourselves and yet let others thrive, that might present, for these fraught climes, something more supple...perhaps even, an avant-garden.