Many of my past posts have touched on the avant garde and the neo avant garde, but in this post I would like to cumulate two of my courses to talk about theories of the avant garde. What does the term mean exactly? Was in successful and what were its main features? All of these questions are vital to our understanding of the term, and to understand that helps our understanding of many movements from the 20th century.
The avant garde has been hotly debated over by critics during the last century, with many of them have different opinions on its impact and influences. Whilst Rosalind Krauss believes originality to be at the centre of the avant garde, T.J Clark counters this stating that if originality was at the heart of the practice then, the repetitive nature of their works negates the concept. This 'originality' is born out of a political and social desire to go against tradition, and when your tradition is dominated by the institute and classic mediums of representational art, creating something that is the opposite of that is by default original. Andreas Huyssen describes the dialectical relationship with the past as a key feature of the avant garde, which is usually perceived as being nihilistic. For Huyssen, this dialectic is how it becomes possible to distance the future with the past, and new advancements with tradition. In order to create something that is so against all the usual traditions of art, new methods of making have to be deployed, and with the advancements of photography and printed media this was made possible. 'Art can no longer exist as it used to now that photography exists' - here, Benjamin highlights the importance of the existence of photography in reshaping art - his famous work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction from 1936 tells of the importance of technology as a way of creating works of art that no longer have the 'aura' of the original, as the work is mass produced and circulated. This circulation helps to remove the work of art from the institute. giving it more exposure to a general public rather than an elite few. This was an important part of the avant garde, as gaining public awareness bought art into life and life into art, a pivotal aim of the European movements.
As well as using mechanical reproduction in their art making process, print media was used as a means of circulated manifestos created by the movements. In 1909, Le Figaro, a leading French newspaper, published F.T Marinetti's futurist manifesto, a document that took the form of a political manifesto, outlining the aims of the Futurist movement. Krauss describes the Futurists as being an example of her idea of originality in the avant-garde, as their work and ideals were born out of nothing that came before them, and instead had a direct link with technology and breaking with traditional Italian art. During the Futurist movement, some 400 manifestos were written, ranging from sculpture through to food. Their manifestos are a prime example of how the avant garde wanted to bring art into life and life into art, with a genuine belief that art can change the conciousness of society. This belief fuelled almost all of the European avant garde movements, and is a main reason as to why Peter Burger believes the historic avant gardes failed.
When Constructivism and Suprematism were shunned by Stalin in 1934 in favour of Social Realism, or Dada, Bauhaus and New Objectivity were pushed aside after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, as well as Surrealism also falling during this time due to German occupation, it seems that the avant gardes desire to change society through art wasn't achieved.
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