The avant garde is

dead

“Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most advanced social tendencies; it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore to know whether art worthily fulfils its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly avant garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is…”

Laverdant “De la mission de l’art et du role des artistes” 1845

Quoted in Linda Nochlin The Invention of the Avant Garde in “The Politics of Vision” pg. 2

At the vanguard

Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde

• Avant Garde art should be above, beyond, distinct from the academy and market. The symbolic embodiment of arts freedom. An alternative and antidote to the commercial, managerial ‘spirit’ of capitalism.

• SHOCK AND TRANSGRESSION• The power of the ‘new’.

Permanent revolution. Overthrowing the tyranny of tradition.

Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde Transgression and Critique

• Socially, morally, sexually transgressive

• (Politically) critical of the status quo

• Avant gardist work expresses a sense of alienation from the norms of society - explicitly and implicitly advocating a social, political revolution as well as an artistic one.

• The avant gardist is viewed as an outsider, a rebel, a martyr

Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde

• Questions what is permissible as art

• Focuses on subject matter and material previously ignored as ignoble, base, vulgar or banal

• Asserts that this trash or kitsch possesses aesthetic and intellectual value

Key Features of the Modernist Avant GardeThe paradox of avant gardism..new forms for new audiences?

• “The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague” Andre Breton

Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde

• Opposition and absorption.

• The radical is domesticated.

Changes to the Avant GardeThe Loss of the ‘Enemy’The death of the bourgeois - post 45

• The Sociologist Max Weber defined the bourgeois as a social class with its own sense of collective identity, characteristic moral codes and a set cultural habitus. Their culture was premised on a sense of propriety and morality.

• The wide ranging social changes that occurred post Second World War radical altered the power and position of this class.

Changes to the Avant GardeThe birth of the culture industry - the start of a cultural cold war

• The old enemies and old certainties of avant gardist work were threatened by the rapid growth of popular culture post 45.

• For many self professed avant gardists popular, mass or kitsch was the new enemy

“Our culture, on its lower and popular levels, has plumbed abysses of vulgarity and falsehood unknown in the discoverable past; not in Rome, not in the Far east or anywhere has daily life undergone such rapid and radical change as it has in the West in the last century and half”

Clement Greenberg ‘The Plight of Culture’

The cultural apocalypse

“Pop was slowing to a halt..suffice to say that it goes down like candy...it’s not bad art, but art on a low level, and fun on a low level too.”

Clement Greenberg quoted in Brandon Taylor ‘Art of Today’

Retreat?Advance? or

Avant Gardism and Political Radicalism

Avant garde practice “no merchant trades in my soul” • Performance• Video• Installation• Feminist• Conceptual• Political• Anti Aesthetic

Martha Rosler“The Bowery: In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (detail) 1974-75

POSTMODERN AVANT GARDISM IN THE 1980’S“A zeitgeist of cynicism” David Hopkins

Death of the avant garde?

All art was reduced to the level of a commodity. There was no distance or alternative space for the kind of critical, oppositional ‘alternative’ position modernist avant gardists had adopted.

From resistance to complicity.

Haim SteinbachUntitled (3 drinking containers), 1992plastic, laminated wood shelf with objects21 x 23 x 7 cm

From resistance to complicity -the neo avant garde

Haim Steinbachpink accent 2, 1987.Two “schizoid” rubber masks, two chrome trash receptacles, and four “Alessi” tea kettles on chrome, aluminum and wood shelf.Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Marianne and Sheldon B. Lubar, Vicki and Allen Samson, and Dr. and Mrs. James Stadler.Allan McCollum

Ashley Bickerton‘Le Art’ 1987

Jeff Koons

The Anti Avant Gardist? - Reasons to be Cheerful Part 1Bravo Bravo - baiting the art world

An ex wall street brokerKoons actively sought toprovoke a kind of moralqueasiness and repulsionamongst the art worldintelligentsia. In his personae, hisunapologetic embrace of selfpromotion, his relaxed attitude toopenly discussing money (theelephant in the room for the liberal,politically correct component of theart world) and his dedication toopening up the Pandora’s box oftaste and class, he ‘succeeded’ inprovoking the kind of shock,irritation and disgust typical of the‘modernist’ avant gardist.

The Anti Avant Gardist?Reasons to be Cheerful part 2No Irony (?)

• While the majority of his contemporaries used or appropriated objects from consumer culture in an ironic, critical reflection of the soullessness of consumer culture, Koons openly stated he chose figures like Popples because he had a deep affection for them -because he responded to them -because he ‘loved them’.

"I like the things that I like, I like colour, and I like materialism and I like seductiveness. And to me these things are absolutely beautiful. And if I didn't think these things were beautiful and they weren't spiritual to me I wouldn't work with them".

Jeff Koons

Reasons to be cheerful part 3- Collapsing Critical Distance

“The regimentation of human movement, activity and perception accompanies the geometric division of space/ It is governed by the use of time-keeping devices, the application of standards of normalcy, and the police apparatus. In the factory, human movement is made to conform to rigorous spatial and temporal geometries.”

Peter Halley

I find art's ability to guide, direct, and manipulate to be exciting. The only direction I see for art is as a tool for manipulating it public on every level - a political tool. I don't know if this places art above, below or parallel with advertising. [...] The techniques are the same. The audience is the same. I can never tell the difference between them and us. We are them. I am mass as much as I am I.

Jeff Koons

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 4Crafty anti modernism“my god it actually looks like he loves these…things!”

• In 1986/7 the material execution of Koons work radically changed. While artists such as Haim Steinbach continued to use ready mades, Koons went to extraordinary lengths and costs to have everyday toys and trinkets remade and enlarged by American and Northern European craftsmen .

• For the art world this was disturbing - he appeared to be taking this stuff seriously.

Up until this point the choice had seemed straightforward enough for an artist appropriating popular culture: either you brought suspicion on yourself or you brought suspicion on popular culture. In all appropriationist work suspicion fell squarely on the culture outside art. Despite the talk of postmodern art existing in a transformed position in the culture, there was still the old prejudice that art was a superior form of culture, and therefore the only cultural form in a privileged enough position to criticise.

The unacceptability of being a Fan

Reasons to be cheerful part 5Talking pleasure in learning to love

• For Koons his love of popular forms was a form of submission, for sure, but a submission that casts him/you neither as victim nor victimiser, but in some way both. To think of Koons' relationship to popular culture, as a form of love is to have him entangled in the operations of power, exploitation and seduction to which he is not blind but submits nonetheless. This is the case, anyway, so long as it isn't assumed that love is always sweet, never critical, and can stomach no tension. Koons' love for Popples, in this view, needn't mean that he was utterly naive, nor that consumer culture is innocent, presents no danger, or has no unctuous effects. Rather, Koons 'falls for' popular culture despite himself, and despite its subjection of him.

Made in HeavenDisappearing of the Map

42

43

44

• Koons reimagined or rethought some central ideas about what it might mean to be an avant garde artist in the 1980’s.

• He thoroughly dispensed with the idea that artists could or should operate outside the entertainment or culture industry. For Koons arts absorption into entertainment was inevitable and they might as well seize the opportunities that would arise for making art more popular, accessible and visible.

• While, as with many classic avant gardists he rejected what he saw as outmoded ideas about how art should be made (i.e solely by the artist) his use of other craftsmen to fabricate his work created art works were the technical and material quality of the finished work was central.

• His aesthetic and moral ‘transgressions’, his ‘shocks’ weren’t always typically avant gardist in tone or content. The shocks that accompanied his work arose from his assertion of loving popular culture and loving his wife....

Post Koons

Sylvie Fleury

“In placing her favourite classics from the realms of fashion and design on a pedestal and elevating them to the status of tradition shaping museum exhibits, Sylvie Fleury emphasises the interaction and interchangeability of art, design, and fashion in terms of social value and significance in an attitude of unquestioning acceptance that goes beyond Jeff Koons still deliberately provocative gesture of translating a trivial object into the material of high art”

Renate Wiehager

“The world of luxury, beauty and fashion is a world of utopias, longings hopes and promises, a world that suggests the possibility of creating a whole new life, a freely chosen self designed and self determined existence. Sylvie Fleury gives shape and substance to a realm of our collective fantasy that was for many centuries reserved to art and to religious allegorical art in particular. She presents images of this symbolic exchange to us without the intent to accuse or defame, simply taking note, leaving it to us to comprehend her visually and appealing ensembles as enlightening contributions as well.”

Peter Wiebel

Takashi Murakami

"While in the United States cultural insurgency is associated with an anti capitalist, Marxist attitude, in Japan to have success within the mass culture as an independent producer of works that hail from the subculture of anime fandom may be an equally valid form of resistance"

Amanda Cruz