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Avant-Garde Art and Artists
Avant-Garde Art and Artists Diana Crane, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The concept of the avant-garde has been applied to three types of changes in the arts: in the aesthetic content of art, in the social content of art, and in the norms surrounding the production and distribution of artworks. First used in France in the 1830s, the term acquired new meanings and connotations in the twentieth century, ranging from aesthetic innovation to alienation. The best-known literary and philosophical theories of the avant-garde have concentrated on the content of avantgarde works, while sociological theories and research have been concerned with the production and reception of these works. In the context of postmodernism at the end of the twentieth century, alternatives to the aesthetic and social values of art establishments are less likely to come from avant-gardes than from artists outside the system. The visual strategies and tactics of artistic avant-gardes of the prewar period have been appropriated by the electronic media and other forms of popular culture such as advertising, fashion design, and music videos. Works created for popular consumption that use avant-garde techniques are unlikely to contain critical content. As high culture has become less distinct from popular culture, the concept of the avant-garde has lost many of its former connotations. The avant-garde’s mission as iconoclast and social rebel has been taken over by cultural avant-gardes in the form of a wide variety of micropolitical movements.
Since the concept of the avant-garde appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been applied to a wide variety of aesthetic and social practices. Analysis of different uses of the term shows that it has been applied to three types of changes: in the aesthetic content of art, in the social content of art, and in the norms surrounding the production and distribution of artworks (Crane, 1987: pp. 14–15). For example, the term avant-garde is applied to the aesthetic content of art objects: (1) when those works represent a redefinition of conventions for creating art, often in such a way that they are perceived as violating taboos and as shocking or offensive; (2) when they involve the use of new tools and techniques, or concern the nature or use of techniques per se; and (3) when they redefine what can be considered an artwork. The term is applied to the social content of artworks when they express social or political values that are critical of or different from the dominant culture, when they attack art institutions, and when they attempt to redefine the boundaries between high and popular culture. Finally, the term is applied to creators of artworks when they attempt to alter the social context for the production of art (e.g., appropriate role models, critics, and publics for artists), the organizational context in which art is displayed and distributed, and the social role of the artist in terms of his or her participation in other social institutions, such as education, religion, and politics. This article examines the evolution of artistic avant-gardes since the nineteenth century, theories of the avant-garde, and sociological research on the social organization and reception of avant-gardes.
Origins and Evolution of the Term Originally referring to a section of an army that marched ahead of the troops, the term avant-garde was first used in France in the 1830s to refer to artists as leaders and creators of a new social order (Nochlin, 1968: p. 5). Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the term generally meant that an artist
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was both politically and aesthetically progressive. The artist was expected to lead society in new directions and to be in conflict with tradition and the establishment. Subsequently, the term began to refer to artists whose works expressed alienation from bourgeois society in the form of ironic or destructive commentaries on social and artistic values rather than commitment to specific programs for social or aesthetic change. These different elements associated with avant-gardes – political rebellion, aesthetic rebellion, and alienation – continued to be important in the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of the avant-garde as alienation was given a new dimension by Marcel Duchamp who created artworks or ‘ready-mades’ by making minor changes in existing artworks or by arbitrarily declaring that commonplace objects, such as a mass-produced urinal, were artworks. This conception of the avant-garde became the basis for the Dadaist movement consisting of groups of artists, located in several European cities and in New York, whose members attempted to destroy artistic conventions and to shock the public. In this period, the Dadaists shared with the Italian Futurists (whose aesthetic innovations were very different) “a belief that they were ahead of the society in which they lived and that they were breaking social bonds of restraint” (Taylor, 1968: p. 97). This attitude led the Futurists to engage in flag burnings and to stage assaults on theaters and opera houses, although they were not actually interested in changing the social order but in aesthetic change and in “continuous revolution as a way of art” (p. 100). During the twentieth century, the term was applied to groups of artists who developed new aesthetic programs, many of them concerned with problems of visual perception and the interpretation of visual experience. This type of art dealt with aesthetic and technical issues and was detached from the concerns of everyday life. Although the term avant-garde appeared before the development of modernism in the arts, there was a pronounced affinity between avant-gardes and modernism, which was reflected in the modernist’s
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Avant-Garde Art and Artists
commitment to the development of a particular style. At the end of the 1930s, Clement Greenberg, an American art critic, provided a theoretical justification for the type of avant-garde that has proven to be most characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century, one which engages in art for art’s sake and which is concerned with aesthetic values rather than with social conflict or political struggle (Orton and Pollock, 1981: p. 322). Another American art critic, Harold Rosenberg (1968), argues that the suppression of avant-garde art by the Communists and later by the Nazis marked the beginning of the separation of political and artistic avant-gardes. As an example of this rupture during the postwar period, he cites the 1968 Venice Biennale where militant students denounced the artworks as ‘art for dealers and the rich.’ In the late twentieth century, the success of Pop Art, Conceptual art, and neo-Expressionism signaled both the triumph of the ironic, alienated conception of the avant-garde and a decline in the priority attached to aesthetic innovation, reflecting the increasing influence of postmodernism in all forms of culture. Unlike the modernist, the postmodernist is not interested in style conceived as a consistent, integrated set of aesthetic elements or in using a style to express opposition to the dominant culture. Instead, the postmodernist engages in pastiche, bringing together disparate elements from many previous texts, regardless of whether they produce a coherent unity. According to Goldman (1992: p. 214), the meaning of postmodernist texts cannot generally be discerned from analyzing the texts themselves but only by asking where the elements in the text come from. Postmodernist works tend to expose or reinterpret rather than criticize or attack the dominant culture. The relevance of the concept of the avant-garde was confirmed in the 1990s by the intensity of controversies surrounding government funding for artworks that challenged conventional attitudes and values. The allocation of funds by the United States government agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, to support exhibitions of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and André Serrano, whose works were perceived as having transgressed moral and religious boundaries, created enormous opposition and even pressure to dissolve the agency itself. However, it is significant that these artists were not members of art movements and that their activities did not engender such movements. Some authors claim that the avant-garde is dead and that contemporary artists do not correspond to this concept. Dunn (1991: p. 124) argues that, in the highly fragmented and ambiguous context of postmodern culture, artistic avant-gardes have been replaced by cultural avant-gardes to which the term avant-garde is seldom applied. These movements engage in collective protest and challenge tradition and hegemonic structures on a wide range of social and cultural issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, peace, and ecology.
Theories of the Avant-Garde Theorists who have written about the avant-garde have generally based their analyses on certain types of avant-gardes, particularly those that have rebelled against the dominant culture and excluded others from consideration. A major strand
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of theory concerning the avant-garde derives from the critical theorists, known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno despised popular culture produced by culture industries on the grounds that it provided shallow entertainment that distracted and manipulated the unsophisticated public. He interpreted the role of high culture and its avant-gardes as that of challenging dominant institutions and conventional ways of thought. For Benjamin (1968), the significance of Dadaism as an avantgarde was that the Dadaists deliberately attempted to produce artworks that lacked an aura of uniqueness and authenticity, thus undermining the status of the arts as sacred. Two leading theorists of the avant-garde are Bürger (1984) and Poggioli (1968). A contemporary critical theorist, Bürger examines the activities of avant-gardes and the social content of their work, arguing that what is most characteristic of avantgardes is their challenge to art institutions. Instead of creating works of art that were autonomous, complete, and separate from social life, the avant-garde attempted to create works that challenged the public to make sense of them and to relate them to their daily lives. On this basis, he restricts the title of avantgarde to a small number of movements, including Dadaism, early Surrealism, and some aspects of Futurism. Poggioli (1968) argues that the dominant characteristic of avant-garde art is alienation in all its forms – psychological, social, economic, historical, aesthetic, and stylistic. Bourgeois, capitalist, and technological society provides avant-garde artists with freedom to create while the tensions underlying this type of society provide them with ‘a reason for existing.’ In Poggioli’s view, the avant-garde artist is motivated by nostalgia for an earlier period when the artist was treated as a creator rather than as a parasite and a producer. Recent debates about the contribution of artistic avantgardes to politics in the postwar period also suggest that avant-garde artists in the 1960s perceived themselves as having broader social and political roles than those that are ascribed to artists today. Rasmussen (2009) analyzes three art movements of the 1960s – the Situationist International, the Artist Placement Group, and the Art Workers’ Coalition – all of which attempted to use avant-garde art as a political tool to address social issues and bring about social change. Huston (1992) is critical of these theories on the grounds that they are unable to explain and often do not even consider factors affecting the production and social reception of avantgarde arts. He argues that most styles of avant-garde art ultimately succeed in winning the support of the art establishment, which initially rejected them but that theories of the avantgarde are not helpful in explaining these developments. In his view, these theories tend to legitimate avant-garde art as true art and “a certain vision of the artist as a great artist” (p. 78). In other words, he sees the concept of the avant-garde as an ideological category that accepts uncritically artists’ conceptions of their situation and tends to be used in such a way as to legitimate certain types of art rather than others (p. 79). These theories of the avant-garde can also be faulted on the grounds that they treat the distinction between high culture and popular culture as unproblematic and view high culture and its avant-gardes as being the most influential and prestigious forms of culture. In fact, the enormous proliferation of different forms of popular culture (film, television, and popular music) has made it difficult to ignore the aesthetic
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influence of these cultures on traditional arts and in everyday life, and has, at the same time, decreased the influence of the traditional arts such as painting, theater, dance, poetry, and experimental music. The latter tend to be appreciated by distinct and relatively small subgroups within the middle and upper classes, generally located in a few major cities. Bauman (1997: p. 95) argues that avant-gardes have disappeared in this postmodern context because there is no longer any clear-cut distinction between styles that can be considered more or less advanced or more or less progressive than others. Instead, while there is a great deal of change in contemporary arts, these changes are ‘random, dispersed, and devoid of clearcut direction.’ The importance of an artwork is determined less by aesthetic elements than by publicity and the notoriety that results from it. Several factors, such as the enormous increase in the prices of works by successful artists as well as in demand for these works, have contributed to a situation where successful artists have more to gain from creating artistic brands, making their work instantly recognizable to art collectors and dealers, than from creating works that critique the status quo or that are difficult to understand (Lury, 2005).
Sociological Studies of Avant-Gardes While theorists of the avant-garde such as Bürger and Poggioli emphasize the aesthetic, political, and ideological programs of avant-gardes, sociological research has focused on (1) the relationships among artists and (2) the reception of artworks by art institutions and by the public. The dominant view underlying recent studies in the sociology of art is that the significance of all types of art is socially constructed. The question becomes one of identifying the social processes through which this takes place. A major concept is that of the art world, in which art is produced through the efforts of artists in collaboration with members of many other occupations (Becker, 1982). White and White (1965) document changes in social and institutional structures that supported the activities of artists in nineteenth-century Paris. These changes facilitated the emergence of avant-garde styles. Specifically, the transition from academic art to Impressionism, a style that transformed the aesthetic conventions of the period, necessitated the development of a new occupation for buying and selling paintings, that of the art dealer, and the appearance of a new type of collector, drawn from the expanding middle class. Becker (1982: pp. 304–305) does not use the term avantgarde, preferring to use the concept of ‘artistic revolution.’ The latter is set in motion by ideological and organizational activities among art world participants. Ideological changes are revealed by the appearance of ‘manifestos, critical essays, aesthetic and philosophical reformulations, and revisionist histories,’ while organizational changes lead to shifts in control over ‘sources of support, audiences, and distribution facilities.’ Like White and White, Becker argues that the most important factor affecting the success of revolutions is the extent to which their proponents are able to take over the art world’s organizational structure and facilities. He says (p. 310): “Ideas and visions are important, but their success and permanence rest on organization, not on their intrinsic worth.”
Crane (1987: pp. 137–143) traces changes in the roles of artistic avant-gardes during the twentieth century and particularly in the decades after World War II. She identifies three artistic roles that existed in the prewar period, that of the aesthetic innovator who analyzed visual reality in terms of its constituents such as color and form, the iconoclast, who attacked bourgeois conventions and art institutions, and the social rebel whose target was political and economic institutions. In the postwar period, these three roles were gradually transformed. The role of the aesthetic innovator emerged as the dominant role but in response to the expansion of public, private, and corporate expenditures and the creation of new cultural institutions, these artists are increasingly identified with the middle class in terms of lifestyle and the content of their works. Iconoclasts thrived during the 1960s but after that decade concentrated upon exploring the limits of art itself or eliminating the boundaries between the arts and the media. Artists who moved in the latter direction came to see themselves as entertainers rather than members of an alienated avant-garde. There was little support for the role of social rebel. Political art and a humanistically oriented representational art remained on the periphery of the art world. The role of social rebel was replaced by the democratic artist who communicated social and aesthetic ideas to audiences in poor urban neighborhoods and who had virtually no contact with the art world (for an examination of art avant-gardes in Israel see Greenfeld, 1988). At the end of the twentieth century, in the absence of strong avant-garde movements within the art world, alternatives to the aesthetic and social values of the art establishment often came from outside the system, specifically from the works of untrained and often uneducated artists, including folk and ethnic artists, the homeless, prison inmates, elderly people in nursing homes, and hospice patients (Zolberg and Cherbo, 1997: p. 1). The so-called outsider artists who worked alone and who had formerly been completely ignored by the art establishment were now supported by a network of dealers, curators, and collectors. Drawing on poststructuralist theories, sociologists view the meaning of an artwork as being constructed in the process of reception as much as in the process of creation. The response of the audience constitutes part of the meaning of the artwork. Consequently, the meaning of an avant-garde movement changes in different social contexts as different social groups with particular institutional interests engage in ‘a struggle over the text.’ Using this perspective, Halley (1985) examined the reception of the Dada movement and showed that, in its own time, its importance was not recognized. Audiences were very small and the movement was overshadowed by Surrealism. Subsequently, different social groups such as art historians, curators, critics, and artists themselves developed competing and conflicting interpretations of Dada and often misunderstood or ignored the original intentions of Dadaist works. From the beginning, there was more interest in Dada in the United States than in Europe, which helps to explain its influence on American avant-garde groups in music, dance, and art in the postwar period. These groups incorporated Dadaist ideas into their own artworks, contributing to wider recognition of the movement. Bourdieu’s (1984) theory argues that support for art movements is associated with social class but that a specific
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aesthetic statement will appeal to different social strata, depending on its significance in the definition of taste in different time periods. The social positions of supporters of an emerging avant-garde movement differ from the social positions of those that admire the movement after it has received recognition. For Bourdieu, the important aspect of the avantgarde is not its aesthetic characteristics but its structural position in the art world, which is subject to change over time. Attempts to show the relationship between social class and support for artworks that have been considered avant-garde in the past, such as abstract art, have yielded ambiguous results (Halle, 1992). However, appreciation of artworks that are still considered avant-garde is confined to relatively small groups even within the middle and upper classes, as is suggested by the intensity of the conflicts that arise when such works are displayed in public places (Heinich, 1997). At the present time, the concept of the avant-garde is most meaningful in countries outside Europe and the United States, such as Japan, and particularly in developing countries, such as China and Latin America. Recent studies include (1) an ethnographic study, which attempts to interrogate the notion of the avant-garde in Japan through an analysis of avant-garde music and its audience in Japan (Plourde, 2010); (2) case studies of artists and art worlds in Beijing, which reveal an evolution, not unlike what has taken place in the West, away from avant-garde underground movements toward the development of a profitable, entrepreneurial art market in which market forces define the content of art (Tang, 2009); and (3) an analysis of changes in the types of discourse adopted in the literary works by a group of Mexican avant-garde writers (Parodi, 2006).
Avant-Gardes and Popular Culture In the past two decades, the electronic media have appropriated most of the visual strategies and tactics of artistic avant-gardes from the prewar period. Caldwell (1995: p. 8) claims that “every framework of the avant-garde . had become highly visible in some form in the corporate world of the new television.” Kaplan (1987: p. 55), in an attempt to classify music videos in the mid-1980s, found that all the categories she identified used avant-garde strategies. The originators of punk music used many of the tactics identified with early twentiethcentury avant-gardes, such as the blurring of boundaries between art and everyday life, intentional provocation of the audience, and disorganization of accepted styles and procedures of performance (Henry, 1984). Recent studies have examined avant-gardes in popular music (Lena and Peterson, 2008; Lena, 2012), jazz (Currie, 2010; Krnic, 2010), fashion design (Mears, 2008; Kawamura, 2004), culinary innovation (Hollows and Jones, 2010; Cunningham, 2008), and video games (Kirkland, 2010). These studies show the importance of the concept in understanding the emergence and development of these forms of culture. Use of the term increases the legitimacy of these types of culture. In their analysis of types and trajectories of music genres (which they define as “systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that bind together an industry, performers, critics and fans in making what they identify as a distinctive sort
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of music”), Lena and Peterson (2008: p. 698) identify four types of genres, one of which they labeled ‘avant-garde.’ Avantgardes in popular music “engage in experimental practices, including playing standard instruments in unconventional ways, creating new musical instruments, and modifying objects that have not previously been used in the production of music” (p. 703). Two-thirds of new forms of music that appeared in the United States during the twentieth century originated as avant-garde genres. The term, avant-garde, performs an important role in the long-term controversy over whether jazz is a form of high or popular culture (Krnic, 2010). Currie (2010) treats jazz improvisation as an avant-garde and attempts to understand the formation of subcultural communities surrounding this type of music. Avant-garde practices are often used by emerging fashion designers to attract attention to their collections. Several, very influential Japanese designers have frequently been labeled avant-garde (Kawamura, 2004; Mears, 2008). Their work has been recognized in many museum exhibitions. The Italian fashion house, Prada, has benefited from its patronage of avant-garde artists and architects, which included gallery ownership, contemporary art collecting, and commissioning architects to design its stores. The company’s connection with these artists and architects enhanced its symbolic capital and the distinctiveness of the brand (Ryan, 2007). Recently, the term, avant-garde, has begun to be applied to culinary innovation. Hollows and Jones (2010) show that an emphasis on avant-garde innovation and experimentation is being used by chefs in high-end restaurants to increase their profits. In one case, a series of television shows in which a British chef demonstrated his intellectual and aesthetic practices had the effect of securing for him the label of ‘culinary alchemist.’ Finally, an analysis of a survival horror video game series, Silent Hill, argues that the series qualifies as an art form on the basis that its texts exhibit formal devices used by art cinema, such as ‘realism, ambiguity, psychological complexity, and selfreflexivity,’ that its advertising emphasizes these qualities rather than gaming, and that its production has been the subject of a documentary (Kirkland, 2010). However, assimilation by the mass media of oppositional stylistic devices associated with avant-gardes raises the question of the extent to which oppositional themes are being disseminated. High-culture institutions frame oppositional messages in such a way as to highlight their effect: an entire evening at the theater devoted to a particular playwright, an entire gallery or museum wing devoted to the work of a particular artist for several weeks. By contrast, the sheer volume of messages of all kinds being transmitted by the mass media tends to obliterate the effect of oppositional messages when they do appear. Kaplan (1987: p. 65) points out that oppositional messages are likely to be ‘overridden by the plethora of surrounding texts.’ The commitment of popular culture creators to the tenets of the avant-garde may be questionable. Bourdieu (1993) differentiates between high culture and popular culture using the concept of the cultural field. Esoteric works are created in cultural fields in which autonomous creators have substantial control over standards for content and economic criteria for success are less important than aesthetic criteria. Popular works
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are created in cultural fields in which creators are subject to the demands of managers and entrepreneurs who control the distribution of these forms of culture. Economic interests predominate. When fashion designers incorporate avant-garde devices in luxury clothing for wealthy clienteles, does this activity represent a genuine avant-garde or is it simply a marketing strategy to attract attention, either to the clothes or to products licensed under their names? (Crane, 2000). Using Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields, the luxury fashion market could be classified as belonging to what he calls the field of ‘restricted production,’ where commercial interests are subordinate to aesthetic considerations (Bourdieu, 1993; Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1975). This interpretation is plausible in relation to relatively small companies operating in a single location. It becomes more difficult to defend in relation to large fashion firms with clienteles over the world. Benetton, an Italian clothing manufacturer, has commissioned advertisements in which photographs, often reprinted from the press, graphically portray social and political crises and calamities in order to increase public awareness of social, political, and environmental issues (Guerrin, 1998). However, critics have not accepted this advertising strategy at face value but have claimed that the company is exploiting tragic situations as a means of publicizing its products. The ambiguity that emerges when an avant-garde creator associates with a commercial enterprise is seen in the outcome of the collaboration between Rem Koolhaas and Prada (Ryan, 2007). The avant-garde architect was selected to design several avant-garde stores for the company because his status of being on the ‘cutting edge’ was considered desirable for the company’s image. The stores he created have dual functions, as art centers and as shops, but may be incomprehensible to many customers who lack the appropriate cultural capital. Koolhaas himself denounced the Prada project in print as an example of ‘junkspace’ in which all public spaces have been turned into shopping centers. He was in turn accused by critics of appropriating high culture for commercial ends. Curiously, as some of the properties of high culture are being assimilated or co-opted by certain forms of popular culture, the old hierarchy of high and low is reappearing in the latter. For example, in popular music, certain genres are deemed superior to others and some artists’ works are considered ‘classics’ in comparison with all the rest (Regev, 1994).
The Contemporary Relevance of Avant-Gardes An analysis of the evolution of avant-gardes in art history, as well as a review of theories of the avant-garde and of relevant sociological research, suggests that the concept of the avantgarde applies to the behavior and activities of artists during a period of about 150 years. At the present time the term is being less frequently used because it is more difficult to identify avant-gardes in an era when diverse and fragmented postmodernist styles predominate. Ironically, the term now tends to be applied to works created for popular consumption that incorporate techniques but not ideological content from avantgarde movements that existed earlier in the century. Meanwhile, the avant-garde artist’s mission as iconoclast and social
rebel has been assumed by a broad range of ‘micropolitical’ movements outside the arts.
See also: Art History; Art and Culture, Economics of; Artists, Competition and Markets; Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002); Cultural Mediators and Gatekeepers; Culture, Production of: Prospects for the Twenty-First Century; Frankfurt School: Institute for Social Research; Globalization and World Culture; Markets: Artistic and Cultural; Popular Culture; Postmodernism in Sociology.
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Abstract The concept of the avant-garde has been applied to three types of changes in the arts: in the aesthetic content of art, in the social content of art, and in the norms surrounding the production and distribution of artworks. First used in France in the 1830s, the term acquired new meanings and connotations in the twentieth century, ranging from aesthetic innovation to alienation. The best-known literary and philosophical theories of the avant-garde have concentrated on the content of avantgarde works, while sociological theories and research have been concerned with the production and reception of these works. In the context of postmodernism at the end of the twentieth century, alternatives to the aesthetic and social values of art establishments are less likely to come from avant-gardes than from artists outside the system. The visual strategies and tactics of artistic avant-gardes of the prewar period have been appropriated by the electronic media and other forms of popular culture such as advertising, fashion design, and music videos. Works created for popular consumption that use avant-garde techniques are unlikely to contain critical content. As high culture has become less distinct from popular culture, the concept of the avant-garde has lost many of its former connotations. The avant-garde’s mission as iconoclast and social rebel has been taken over by cultural avant-gardes in the form of a wide variety of micropolitical movements.
Since the concept of the avant-garde appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been applied to a wide variety of aesthetic and social practices. Analysis of different uses of the term shows that it has been applied to three types of changes: in the aesthetic content of art, in the social content of art, and in the norms surrounding the production and distribution of artworks (Crane, 1987: pp. 14–15). For example, the term avant-garde is applied to the aesthetic content of art objects: (1) when those works represent a redefinition of conventions for creating art, often in such a way that they are perceived as violating taboos and as shocking or offensive; (2) when they involve the use of new tools and techniques, or concern the nature or use of techniques per se; and (3) when they redefine what can be considered an artwork. The term is applied to the social content of artworks when they express social or political values that are critical of or different from the dominant culture, when they attack art institutions, and when they attempt to redefine the boundaries between high and popular culture. Finally, the term is applied to creators of artworks when they attempt to alter the social context for the production of art (e.g., appropriate role models, critics, and publics for artists), the organizational context in which art is displayed and distributed, and the social role of the artist in terms of his or her participation in other social institutions, such as education, religion, and politics. This article examines the evolution of artistic avant-gardes since the nineteenth century, theories of the avant-garde, and sociological research on the social organization and reception of avant-gardes.
Origins and Evolution of the Term Originally referring to a section of an army that marched ahead of the troops, the term avant-garde was first used in France in the 1830s to refer to artists as leaders and creators of a new social order (Nochlin, 1968: p. 5). Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the term generally meant that an artist
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was both politically and aesthetically progressive. The artist was expected to lead society in new directions and to be in conflict with tradition and the establishment. Subsequently, the term began to refer to artists whose works expressed alienation from bourgeois society in the form of ironic or destructive commentaries on social and artistic values rather than commitment to specific programs for social or aesthetic change. These different elements associated with avant-gardes – political rebellion, aesthetic rebellion, and alienation – continued to be important in the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of the avant-garde as alienation was given a new dimension by Marcel Duchamp who created artworks or ‘ready-mades’ by making minor changes in existing artworks or by arbitrarily declaring that commonplace objects, such as a mass-produced urinal, were artworks. This conception of the avant-garde became the basis for the Dadaist movement consisting of groups of artists, located in several European cities and in New York, whose members attempted to destroy artistic conventions and to shock the public. In this period, the Dadaists shared with the Italian Futurists (whose aesthetic innovations were very different) “a belief that they were ahead of the society in which they lived and that they were breaking social bonds of restraint” (Taylor, 1968: p. 97). This attitude led the Futurists to engage in flag burnings and to stage assaults on theaters and opera houses, although they were not actually interested in changing the social order but in aesthetic change and in “continuous revolution as a way of art” (p. 100). During the twentieth century, the term was applied to groups of artists who developed new aesthetic programs, many of them concerned with problems of visual perception and the interpretation of visual experience. This type of art dealt with aesthetic and technical issues and was detached from the concerns of everyday life. Although the term avant-garde appeared before the development of modernism in the arts, there was a pronounced affinity between avant-gardes and modernism, which was reflected in the modernist’s
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commitment to the development of a particular style. At the end of the 1930s, Clement Greenberg, an American art critic, provided a theoretical justification for the type of avant-garde that has proven to be most characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century, one which engages in art for art’s sake and which is concerned with aesthetic values rather than with social conflict or political struggle (Orton and Pollock, 1981: p. 322). Another American art critic, Harold Rosenberg (1968), argues that the suppression of avant-garde art by the Communists and later by the Nazis marked the beginning of the separation of political and artistic avant-gardes. As an example of this rupture during the postwar period, he cites the 1968 Venice Biennale where militant students denounced the artworks as ‘art for dealers and the rich.’ In the late twentieth century, the success of Pop Art, Conceptual art, and neo-Expressionism signaled both the triumph of the ironic, alienated conception of the avant-garde and a decline in the priority attached to aesthetic innovation, reflecting the increasing influence of postmodernism in all forms of culture. Unlike the modernist, the postmodernist is not interested in style conceived as a consistent, integrated set of aesthetic elements or in using a style to express opposition to the dominant culture. Instead, the postmodernist engages in pastiche, bringing together disparate elements from many previous texts, regardless of whether they produce a coherent unity. According to Goldman (1992: p. 214), the meaning of postmodernist texts cannot generally be discerned from analyzing the texts themselves but only by asking where the elements in the text come from. Postmodernist works tend to expose or reinterpret rather than criticize or attack the dominant culture. The relevance of the concept of the avant-garde was confirmed in the 1990s by the intensity of controversies surrounding government funding for artworks that challenged conventional attitudes and values. The allocation of funds by the United States government agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, to support exhibitions of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and André Serrano, whose works were perceived as having transgressed moral and religious boundaries, created enormous opposition and even pressure to dissolve the agency itself. However, it is significant that these artists were not members of art movements and that their activities did not engender such movements. Some authors claim that the avant-garde is dead and that contemporary artists do not correspond to this concept. Dunn (1991: p. 124) argues that, in the highly fragmented and ambiguous context of postmodern culture, artistic avant-gardes have been replaced by cultural avant-gardes to which the term avant-garde is seldom applied. These movements engage in collective protest and challenge tradition and hegemonic structures on a wide range of social and cultural issues such as class, gender, sexuality, race, peace, and ecology.
Theories of the Avant-Garde Theorists who have written about the avant-garde have generally based their analyses on certain types of avant-gardes, particularly those that have rebelled against the dominant culture and excluded others from consideration. A major strand
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of theory concerning the avant-garde derives from the critical theorists, known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno despised popular culture produced by culture industries on the grounds that it provided shallow entertainment that distracted and manipulated the unsophisticated public. He interpreted the role of high culture and its avant-gardes as that of challenging dominant institutions and conventional ways of thought. For Benjamin (1968), the significance of Dadaism as an avantgarde was that the Dadaists deliberately attempted to produce artworks that lacked an aura of uniqueness and authenticity, thus undermining the status of the arts as sacred. Two leading theorists of the avant-garde are Bürger (1984) and Poggioli (1968). A contemporary critical theorist, Bürger examines the activities of avant-gardes and the social content of their work, arguing that what is most characteristic of avantgardes is their challenge to art institutions. Instead of creating works of art that were autonomous, complete, and separate from social life, the avant-garde attempted to create works that challenged the public to make sense of them and to relate them to their daily lives. On this basis, he restricts the title of avantgarde to a small number of movements, including Dadaism, early Surrealism, and some aspects of Futurism. Poggioli (1968) argues that the dominant characteristic of avant-garde art is alienation in all its forms – psychological, social, economic, historical, aesthetic, and stylistic. Bourgeois, capitalist, and technological society provides avant-garde artists with freedom to create while the tensions underlying this type of society provide them with ‘a reason for existing.’ In Poggioli’s view, the avant-garde artist is motivated by nostalgia for an earlier period when the artist was treated as a creator rather than as a parasite and a producer. Recent debates about the contribution of artistic avantgardes to politics in the postwar period also suggest that avant-garde artists in the 1960s perceived themselves as having broader social and political roles than those that are ascribed to artists today. Rasmussen (2009) analyzes three art movements of the 1960s – the Situationist International, the Artist Placement Group, and the Art Workers’ Coalition – all of which attempted to use avant-garde art as a political tool to address social issues and bring about social change. Huston (1992) is critical of these theories on the grounds that they are unable to explain and often do not even consider factors affecting the production and social reception of avantgarde arts. He argues that most styles of avant-garde art ultimately succeed in winning the support of the art establishment, which initially rejected them but that theories of the avantgarde are not helpful in explaining these developments. In his view, these theories tend to legitimate avant-garde art as true art and “a certain vision of the artist as a great artist” (p. 78). In other words, he sees the concept of the avant-garde as an ideological category that accepts uncritically artists’ conceptions of their situation and tends to be used in such a way as to legitimate certain types of art rather than others (p. 79). These theories of the avant-garde can also be faulted on the grounds that they treat the distinction between high culture and popular culture as unproblematic and view high culture and its avant-gardes as being the most influential and prestigious forms of culture. In fact, the enormous proliferation of different forms of popular culture (film, television, and popular music) has made it difficult to ignore the aesthetic
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influence of these cultures on traditional arts and in everyday life, and has, at the same time, decreased the influence of the traditional arts such as painting, theater, dance, poetry, and experimental music. The latter tend to be appreciated by distinct and relatively small subgroups within the middle and upper classes, generally located in a few major cities. Bauman (1997: p. 95) argues that avant-gardes have disappeared in this postmodern context because there is no longer any clear-cut distinction between styles that can be considered more or less advanced or more or less progressive than others. Instead, while there is a great deal of change in contemporary arts, these changes are ‘random, dispersed, and devoid of clearcut direction.’ The importance of an artwork is determined less by aesthetic elements than by publicity and the notoriety that results from it. Several factors, such as the enormous increase in the prices of works by successful artists as well as in demand for these works, have contributed to a situation where successful artists have more to gain from creating artistic brands, making their work instantly recognizable to art collectors and dealers, than from creating works that critique the status quo or that are difficult to understand (Lury, 2005).
Sociological Studies of Avant-Gardes While theorists of the avant-garde such as Bürger and Poggioli emphasize the aesthetic, political, and ideological programs of avant-gardes, sociological research has focused on (1) the relationships among artists and (2) the reception of artworks by art institutions and by the public. The dominant view underlying recent studies in the sociology of art is that the significance of all types of art is socially constructed. The question becomes one of identifying the social processes through which this takes place. A major concept is that of the art world, in which art is produced through the efforts of artists in collaboration with members of many other occupations (Becker, 1982). White and White (1965) document changes in social and institutional structures that supported the activities of artists in nineteenth-century Paris. These changes facilitated the emergence of avant-garde styles. Specifically, the transition from academic art to Impressionism, a style that transformed the aesthetic conventions of the period, necessitated the development of a new occupation for buying and selling paintings, that of the art dealer, and the appearance of a new type of collector, drawn from the expanding middle class. Becker (1982: pp. 304–305) does not use the term avantgarde, preferring to use the concept of ‘artistic revolution.’ The latter is set in motion by ideological and organizational activities among art world participants. Ideological changes are revealed by the appearance of ‘manifestos, critical essays, aesthetic and philosophical reformulations, and revisionist histories,’ while organizational changes lead to shifts in control over ‘sources of support, audiences, and distribution facilities.’ Like White and White, Becker argues that the most important factor affecting the success of revolutions is the extent to which their proponents are able to take over the art world’s organizational structure and facilities. He says (p. 310): “Ideas and visions are important, but their success and permanence rest on organization, not on their intrinsic worth.”
Crane (1987: pp. 137–143) traces changes in the roles of artistic avant-gardes during the twentieth century and particularly in the decades after World War II. She identifies three artistic roles that existed in the prewar period, that of the aesthetic innovator who analyzed visual reality in terms of its constituents such as color and form, the iconoclast, who attacked bourgeois conventions and art institutions, and the social rebel whose target was political and economic institutions. In the postwar period, these three roles were gradually transformed. The role of the aesthetic innovator emerged as the dominant role but in response to the expansion of public, private, and corporate expenditures and the creation of new cultural institutions, these artists are increasingly identified with the middle class in terms of lifestyle and the content of their works. Iconoclasts thrived during the 1960s but after that decade concentrated upon exploring the limits of art itself or eliminating the boundaries between the arts and the media. Artists who moved in the latter direction came to see themselves as entertainers rather than members of an alienated avant-garde. There was little support for the role of social rebel. Political art and a humanistically oriented representational art remained on the periphery of the art world. The role of social rebel was replaced by the democratic artist who communicated social and aesthetic ideas to audiences in poor urban neighborhoods and who had virtually no contact with the art world (for an examination of art avant-gardes in Israel see Greenfeld, 1988). At the end of the twentieth century, in the absence of strong avant-garde movements within the art world, alternatives to the aesthetic and social values of the art establishment often came from outside the system, specifically from the works of untrained and often uneducated artists, including folk and ethnic artists, the homeless, prison inmates, elderly people in nursing homes, and hospice patients (Zolberg and Cherbo, 1997: p. 1). The so-called outsider artists who worked alone and who had formerly been completely ignored by the art establishment were now supported by a network of dealers, curators, and collectors. Drawing on poststructuralist theories, sociologists view the meaning of an artwork as being constructed in the process of reception as much as in the process of creation. The response of the audience constitutes part of the meaning of the artwork. Consequently, the meaning of an avant-garde movement changes in different social contexts as different social groups with particular institutional interests engage in ‘a struggle over the text.’ Using this perspective, Halley (1985) examined the reception of the Dada movement and showed that, in its own time, its importance was not recognized. Audiences were very small and the movement was overshadowed by Surrealism. Subsequently, different social groups such as art historians, curators, critics, and artists themselves developed competing and conflicting interpretations of Dada and often misunderstood or ignored the original intentions of Dadaist works. From the beginning, there was more interest in Dada in the United States than in Europe, which helps to explain its influence on American avant-garde groups in music, dance, and art in the postwar period. These groups incorporated Dadaist ideas into their own artworks, contributing to wider recognition of the movement. Bourdieu’s (1984) theory argues that support for art movements is associated with social class but that a specific
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aesthetic statement will appeal to different social strata, depending on its significance in the definition of taste in different time periods. The social positions of supporters of an emerging avant-garde movement differ from the social positions of those that admire the movement after it has received recognition. For Bourdieu, the important aspect of the avantgarde is not its aesthetic characteristics but its structural position in the art world, which is subject to change over time. Attempts to show the relationship between social class and support for artworks that have been considered avant-garde in the past, such as abstract art, have yielded ambiguous results (Halle, 1992). However, appreciation of artworks that are still considered avant-garde is confined to relatively small groups even within the middle and upper classes, as is suggested by the intensity of the conflicts that arise when such works are displayed in public places (Heinich, 1997). At the present time, the concept of the avant-garde is most meaningful in countries outside Europe and the United States, such as Japan, and particularly in developing countries, such as China and Latin America. Recent studies include (1) an ethnographic study, which attempts to interrogate the notion of the avant-garde in Japan through an analysis of avant-garde music and its audience in Japan (Plourde, 2010); (2) case studies of artists and art worlds in Beijing, which reveal an evolution, not unlike what has taken place in the West, away from avant-garde underground movements toward the development of a profitable, entrepreneurial art market in which market forces define the content of art (Tang, 2009); and (3) an analysis of changes in the types of discourse adopted in the literary works by a group of Mexican avant-garde writers (Parodi, 2006).
Avant-Gardes and Popular Culture In the past two decades, the electronic media have appropriated most of the visual strategies and tactics of artistic avant-gardes from the prewar period. Caldwell (1995: p. 8) claims that “every framework of the avant-garde . had become highly visible in some form in the corporate world of the new television.” Kaplan (1987: p. 55), in an attempt to classify music videos in the mid-1980s, found that all the categories she identified used avant-garde strategies. The originators of punk music used many of the tactics identified with early twentiethcentury avant-gardes, such as the blurring of boundaries between art and everyday life, intentional provocation of the audience, and disorganization of accepted styles and procedures of performance (Henry, 1984). Recent studies have examined avant-gardes in popular music (Lena and Peterson, 2008; Lena, 2012), jazz (Currie, 2010; Krnic, 2010), fashion design (Mears, 2008; Kawamura, 2004), culinary innovation (Hollows and Jones, 2010; Cunningham, 2008), and video games (Kirkland, 2010). These studies show the importance of the concept in understanding the emergence and development of these forms of culture. Use of the term increases the legitimacy of these types of culture. In their analysis of types and trajectories of music genres (which they define as “systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that bind together an industry, performers, critics and fans in making what they identify as a distinctive sort
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of music”), Lena and Peterson (2008: p. 698) identify four types of genres, one of which they labeled ‘avant-garde.’ Avantgardes in popular music “engage in experimental practices, including playing standard instruments in unconventional ways, creating new musical instruments, and modifying objects that have not previously been used in the production of music” (p. 703). Two-thirds of new forms of music that appeared in the United States during the twentieth century originated as avant-garde genres. The term, avant-garde, performs an important role in the long-term controversy over whether jazz is a form of high or popular culture (Krnic, 2010). Currie (2010) treats jazz improvisation as an avant-garde and attempts to understand the formation of subcultural communities surrounding this type of music. Avant-garde practices are often used by emerging fashion designers to attract attention to their collections. Several, very influential Japanese designers have frequently been labeled avant-garde (Kawamura, 2004; Mears, 2008). Their work has been recognized in many museum exhibitions. The Italian fashion house, Prada, has benefited from its patronage of avant-garde artists and architects, which included gallery ownership, contemporary art collecting, and commissioning architects to design its stores. The company’s connection with these artists and architects enhanced its symbolic capital and the distinctiveness of the brand (Ryan, 2007). Recently, the term, avant-garde, has begun to be applied to culinary innovation. Hollows and Jones (2010) show that an emphasis on avant-garde innovation and experimentation is being used by chefs in high-end restaurants to increase their profits. In one case, a series of television shows in which a British chef demonstrated his intellectual and aesthetic practices had the effect of securing for him the label of ‘culinary alchemist.’ Finally, an analysis of a survival horror video game series, Silent Hill, argues that the series qualifies as an art form on the basis that its texts exhibit formal devices used by art cinema, such as ‘realism, ambiguity, psychological complexity, and selfreflexivity,’ that its advertising emphasizes these qualities rather than gaming, and that its production has been the subject of a documentary (Kirkland, 2010). However, assimilation by the mass media of oppositional stylistic devices associated with avant-gardes raises the question of the extent to which oppositional themes are being disseminated. High-culture institutions frame oppositional messages in such a way as to highlight their effect: an entire evening at the theater devoted to a particular playwright, an entire gallery or museum wing devoted to the work of a particular artist for several weeks. By contrast, the sheer volume of messages of all kinds being transmitted by the mass media tends to obliterate the effect of oppositional messages when they do appear. Kaplan (1987: p. 65) points out that oppositional messages are likely to be ‘overridden by the plethora of surrounding texts.’ The commitment of popular culture creators to the tenets of the avant-garde may be questionable. Bourdieu (1993) differentiates between high culture and popular culture using the concept of the cultural field. Esoteric works are created in cultural fields in which autonomous creators have substantial control over standards for content and economic criteria for success are less important than aesthetic criteria. Popular works
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are created in cultural fields in which creators are subject to the demands of managers and entrepreneurs who control the distribution of these forms of culture. Economic interests predominate. When fashion designers incorporate avant-garde devices in luxury clothing for wealthy clienteles, does this activity represent a genuine avant-garde or is it simply a marketing strategy to attract attention, either to the clothes or to products licensed under their names? (Crane, 2000). Using Bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields, the luxury fashion market could be classified as belonging to what he calls the field of ‘restricted production,’ where commercial interests are subordinate to aesthetic considerations (Bourdieu, 1993; Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1975). This interpretation is plausible in relation to relatively small companies operating in a single location. It becomes more difficult to defend in relation to large fashion firms with clienteles over the world. Benetton, an Italian clothing manufacturer, has commissioned advertisements in which photographs, often reprinted from the press, graphically portray social and political crises and calamities in order to increase public awareness of social, political, and environmental issues (Guerrin, 1998). However, critics have not accepted this advertising strategy at face value but have claimed that the company is exploiting tragic situations as a means of publicizing its products. The ambiguity that emerges when an avant-garde creator associates with a commercial enterprise is seen in the outcome of the collaboration between Rem Koolhaas and Prada (Ryan, 2007). The avant-garde architect was selected to design several avant-garde stores for the company because his status of being on the ‘cutting edge’ was considered desirable for the company’s image. The stores he created have dual functions, as art centers and as shops, but may be incomprehensible to many customers who lack the appropriate cultural capital. Koolhaas himself denounced the Prada project in print as an example of ‘junkspace’ in which all public spaces have been turned into shopping centers. He was in turn accused by critics of appropriating high culture for commercial ends. Curiously, as some of the properties of high culture are being assimilated or co-opted by certain forms of popular culture, the old hierarchy of high and low is reappearing in the latter. For example, in popular music, certain genres are deemed superior to others and some artists’ works are considered ‘classics’ in comparison with all the rest (Regev, 1994).
The Contemporary Relevance of Avant-Gardes An analysis of the evolution of avant-gardes in art history, as well as a review of theories of the avant-garde and of relevant sociological research, suggests that the concept of the avantgarde applies to the behavior and activities of artists during a period of about 150 years. At the present time the term is being less frequently used because it is more difficult to identify avant-gardes in an era when diverse and fragmented postmodernist styles predominate. Ironically, the term now tends to be applied to works created for popular consumption that incorporate techniques but not ideological content from avantgarde movements that existed earlier in the century. Meanwhile, the avant-garde artist’s mission as iconoclast and social
rebel has been assumed by a broad range of ‘micropolitical’ movements outside the arts.
See also: Art History; Art and Culture, Economics of; Artists, Competition and Markets; Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002); Cultural Mediators and Gatekeepers; Culture, Production of: Prospects for the Twenty-First Century; Frankfurt School: Institute for Social Research; Globalization and World Culture; Markets: Artistic and Cultural; Popular Culture; Postmodernism in Sociology.
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