The term 'avant-garde art' is usually used in a narrow sense or in a broad sense.
'Avant-garde art' in a narrow sense is an umbrella term for the art movements of the first two decades of the 20th century. 'Avant-garde art' in a broader sense is art forms created in 20-21st century with a strong innovative element. Here it is usually used in the first,
9 Robert Doran (2015), The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
164-165.
10 Boris Falikov (Борис Фаликов, 2016), ‘Astral color: Kandinsky and Theosophy (Астральный цвет: Кандинский и теософия)’ in Art Studies (Искусствознание), vol. 1-2, p. 68.
11 Pablo Bris-Marino (2014), ‘The influence of Theosophy on Mondrian’s neoplastic work’ in Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, vol. 26 (3), p. 490.
12 Mark C. Taylor (2012), Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 22.
13 Aleksandra Shatskikh (2003), ‘Kazimir Malevich – a writer and a thinker’ in Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, (ed) Alexandra Shatskich, Saint-Petersburg: Azbuka klassica, p. 23.
14 Pablo Picasso (2003), ‘Discovery of African art’ in Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History, (eds) Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, p. 33.
narrow sense with a capital 'A', it is 'Avant-garde art' as a name of a period and creative methods unique for that period. There are a lot of alternative terms for what is called here 'Avant-garde art'. For example, Jesus Pedro Lorente calls this set of art practices and theories ''avant-garde experimental phase''15 (cursive is as in the original). For Hal Foster it is ''historical avant-garde''16 and Miwon Kwon designates the period as ''traditional avant-garde''17. Mark Silverberg uses the term ''classic avant-garde''18. Grant H. Kester writes about ''authentic avant-garde art practice''19. What Charles Jencks means by ''Late Modernism''20 or Jason Gaiger means by ''canonical modernism''21 can be, with some modifications, presented as synonymous to what is meant by 'Avant-garde art' here.
Moreover, just as the Renaissance's name, the name of 'Avant-garde art' is often used as a metaphor. Some writers speak about Persian or Chinese Renaissance, in a sense that something cultural is restoring. The same can be said of Avant-garde art, when it is trendy to break new grounds in art and aesthetics, art criticism will say something about 'avant-garde'. It is a fine metaphorical usage, but it is wrong to jump to the conclusion that such indirect usage removes Avant-garde art as a period from existence. Moreover, the position of Avant-garde art is less favorable in contemporary scholarship than that of the Renaissance. The problem is that Avant-garde art is much more international than the
15 Jesus Pedro Lorente (2011), The Museums of Contemporary Art: Notion and Development, Burlington: Ashgate, p. 231.
16 Hal Foster (1996), The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, p. xii.
17 Miwon Kwon (2002), One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, London and Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 97.
18 Mark Silverberg (2010), The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company, p. 201.
19 Grant H. Kester (2011), The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 138.
20 Charles Jencks (1987), ‘Postmodern and Late Modern The Essential Definitions’ in Chicago Review, vol. 35 (4), p. 42.
21 Jason Gaiger (2009), ‘Dismantling the Frame: Site-Specific Art and Aesthetic Autonomy’ in The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 49 (1), p. 46.
Renaissance. Avant-garde art is also highly de-centralized.
The second big problem is that despite its international nature, Avant-garde art in its integrity is not well presented in the English language. This fact has puzzled Poggioli, the author of the very first systematic theory of Avant-garde art. Probably, the reason is that the international language has received Avant-garde art gradually, and didn't have its own booming period of creativity linked to such a reception near the 20s. Instead, and chronologically after the Avant-garde art, New York and Los Angeles replace Paris as the global art capitals and begin a booming period of their own art life. Lyotard has seen it, in the 70s he believes that ''Paris was in decline; new centers were arising on both Atlantic [New York] and Pacific [Los Angeles] horizons.''22
The situation is even more complicated, since Avant-garde is highly decentralized.
The center – Paris, is obvious, but has no total domination over the period. In fact, one of the biggest findings of the Avant-garde art, abstract painting, comes from the outside of Paris. The first theories of abstract art are formulated not by metropolitan artists: one such theory is by Kandinsky (Münich, 1911),23 another is by Larionov (Moscow, 1912),24 and the third one is by Malevich (Petrograd, 191525).
The time frame of the Avant-garde art is debatable. The time frame of the Renaissance is debatable as well. There are even approaches which use so big a brush that the Renaissance disappears, like is the case of Albert Borgmann, for whom the
22 Sara Wilson (2010), The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 158.
23 Vasily Kandinsky (1911), Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Münich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag. The text does engage in the theme of abstract art while acknowledging that the world is not ready for it yet and in the end presents the situation of art as a freedom between the two not excluded poles of the 'absolute abstraction' and 'new absolute realism', compare Vasily Kandinsky (1992), On the Spiritual in Art, Moscow: Archimedes, p. 55 and p. 96. At the same time, Kandinsky does speak about ''abstract art of the future''.
24 Mikhail Larionov (1913), ‘The Rayonists and Futurists: A Manifesto’ in A Donkey Tail and A Target, Moscow: Ts. A.
Munster Publishing.
25 See Aleksandra Shatskikh (2003), ‘Commentaries and Notes’ in Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, (ed) Alexandra Shatskich, Saint-Petersburg: Azbuka klassica, pp. 499-500.
Medieval period ends with the discovery of America and Luther (1483-1546) and Modern time begins after a 'generation' with Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650), and John Locke (1632-1704).26 This approach does not mean that the Renaissance does not exist for Albert Borgmann. The Borgmannian global view only uses the brush too big to provide such a little detail. If Borgmann would speak especially about Italy or France in the 14th or of the 15th centuries, then 'Renaissance' will be an inevitable term to use. The same holds for Avant-garde art. A narrative about Malevich requires a reference to Avant-garde art period, but a narrative about contemporary art can avoid it.
Do we need such thing as Avant-garde art as a period? Some conceptualizations of time frames are unuseful. Thus, Lucie Varge believes that 'Dark Ages' is not a scientific term, but rather a battle-cry [Schlagwort], ''a denunciation of the medieval conception of the world, of the medieval attitude toward life, and of the culture of the Middle Ages.''27 And often conceptualizations of time periods can be viewed as myths. But it is a good question, what the word 'myth' here means. Of course Renaissance in some sense is a myth. It is a theoretical construct a scholar should view as a convention, as a way of the organisation of tremendous amount of information related to the first half of the second millennia CE in Western Europe. To orient all this information not to the 'mythic' Renaissance but rather to the Big Bang would be a more positivist view. But it also will confuse the scholars and the readers. What people want from history, philosophy of history, and philosophy of art is help in some kind of understanding the culture at hand rather than more confusion. And therefore ''[i]f, however, the term [Renaissance] is used, without prejudice to the achievements of the Middle Ages, or those of the world beyond Europe, to refer to a particular cluster of changes in western culture, then it may be regarded as an organizing concept which still has its uses.''28
26 Albert Borgmann (1993), Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, pp. 21-22.
27 Quoted as in Theodore E. Mommsen (1942), ‘Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages'’ in Speculum, vol. 17 (2), p. 227.
28 Peter Burke (1987), The Renaissance, Houndmills and London: Macmillan Education, p. 5.
Avant-garde art as a period is also a useful tool for the cognition of art. Moreover, Avant-garde re-defined the borders of what art is. As Clement Greenberg, 'one of the very best' art critics in history,29 has stated:
[i]f in some large enough part high art in the West is still quite alive and moving, as I think it is, there is one very important, maybe all-important reason. Western tradition and Western society have produced something historically unique: the avant-garde.30
There is a special field in the art studies, dedicated to answering the question 'what is Avant-garde art?' The main classical works in this field are two books, one is The
Theory of the Avant-garde by Renato Poggioli (1907-1963), originally published in
Italian in 1962 (English translation 1968) and Peter Bürger's (1936-2017) Theory of theAvant-Garde originally published in 1974 (in German) and translated in English into
1984. Poggioli and Bürger believe that Avant-garde art has appeared because of an awareness of the historical nature of art. Of course, the idea that art has a history, predates garde art. But, it did not influence artists on the same scale before Avant-garde art. In fact, Avant-Avant-garde art can be considered as a practical way answering the philosophical question 'what is art?' Lyotard in the Lessons on the Analytic of theSublime claims that Kant's third Critique gives us something more valuable than method
– a manner. Manner is a way to proceed without determined concepts. But is art such a 'Lyotardian manner'? In this thesis art is taken as an idea which can be defined.Moreover, Avant-garde art is viewed not only as an example of art, but also as an
29 Thierry de Duve (2010), ‘A Public Debate with Clement Greenberg’ in Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, (ed) Thierry de Duve, (tr) Brian Holmes, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, p. 121.
30 Clement Greenberg (1999), Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p. 35.
attempt to define art. Hence, Avant-garde art is a kind of a self-defining conception.
When Duchamp presented to the public his first ready made, he was asking: 'is it art?' With fame and recognition, Duchamp received a positive answer to his question.31 The questioning by Avant-garde art can be presented as follows:
1. Is art with no similarities to the world as appearance, non-realistic art – art?
2. Is art of so-called 'primitives', tribal societies far away from Europe fine art?
3. Is art without figuration, when there is no reference to something outside the artwork, no representation, like radially abstract or non-objective painting, possible?
Poggioli and Bürger differ in their views on the Avant-garde art time frame. Thus, for Bürger Avant-garde art is something, which happened in the beginning of the 20th century. But for Poggioli Avant-garde is only a part of the bigger movement of Romanticism. What makes Bürger's book more preferable (although not in the ultimate way, because Poggioli's argument is definitely a valuable alternative) is the time of its publication. Poggioli writes before the turmoil of 1968, in the age of cultural and political transition in Europe. Bürger has seen 1968, the year of the 'failed revolution', as he himself called it.32 On the other hand, at the time of Poggioli's book the English-speaking global art market has not reached its current dominance. Pop art and Conceptual art are more in intuition, than in actual existence. Not surprisingly, Poggioli doesn't address the problem of collage, which plays a structural role in Bürger's theory, nor does he pay much attention to photography. Bürger on the contrary acknowledged
31 Thierry de Duve elaborated on this problem in very close terms, see Thierry de Duve (1996), Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, pp. 3-30.
32 Peter Bürger (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, (tr) Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature #4, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, p. 95.
photography in full scope and incorporated the thought of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
Moreover, Poggioli writes his book before many fundamental texts on contemporary art are published, like the work on aesthetics by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969). As Poggioli himself states, before his theory of Avant-garde art there is only an approach by José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). This Spanish philosopher is for Poggioili the first who analyzes the phenomenon of Avant-garde art “in its totality.”33 Probably Poggioli exaggerates in this regard. At the time when Ortega y Gasset publishes his groundbreaking The Dehumanization of Art in 1925, there is already an account of Avant-garde art by Nikolai Berdyev (1874-1948).34 Poggioli's background in Russian literature could have helped him in knowing about it. But even together, Berdyev and Ortega y Gasset are not much of the secondary literature.
For Bürger Kant's thought is relevant not only for Avant-garde art, but rather for art as a whole. The relations between Kant's aesthetics and avant-gardism is set by relations Bürger has seen between Avant-garde art and art as a socio-cultural phenomenon. To put it briefly, Bürger believes that already in Kant ''the subjective aspect of the detachment of art from the practical concerns of life is reflected''.35 Thus, according to Bürger, an important condition for art to enter its maturity as a social institution is fulfilled. Bürger explicitly stated, that “not until the eighteenth century, with the rise of bourgeois society and the seizure of political power by a bourgeoisie that had gained economic strength, does a systematic aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and a new concept of
33 Renato Poggioli (1981), The Theory of the Avant-Garde, (tr) Gerald Fitzgerald, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harward University Press, p. 5.
34 Berdyaev writes mainly on Picasso. However, the aim, despite being centered on one artist, is to understand the new age of art and Picasso as its harbinger. See Nikolai Berdyaev (1914), ‘Picasso’ in Sophia, vol. 3.
35 Peter Bürger (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, (tr) Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature #4, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, p. 41.
autonomous art come into being.”36 For him the rise of bourgeois society is the actual birthdate of art in a modern sense of the word. Or, as Hal Foster puts it, according to Bürger ''by the end of the eighteenth century (...) the autonomy of art is proclaimed as an ideal, in Enlightenment aesthetics.''37 Of course, art in this understanding has a long prehistory, when it is not an autonomous institution, but only a subordinated part to other social functions, such as ritual of ancient civilization or court live of the Early Modern absolutist monarchies.
Andrew Bowie discussing the Kantian turn in the history of the Western thought suggests ''five main interrelated dimensions in which previously established orders tend to disintegrate in modernity'',38 autonomy of art being one of them:
[a]rt, which had been seen mainly as either entertainment for those in power or as connected to religious observance, comes to be seen as 'autonomous', subject only to its own changing rules and to the freedom of the artist. At the same time, however, art itself also becomes a commodity which can be bought and sold like any other commodity.39
The question of the autonomy of art was discussed also by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Greenberg, and others. Recently the question of the autonomy of art has gotten a new momentum because of the idea that art now is losing its autonomy, as it was discussed by Gaiger and Kwon.
36 Peter Bürger (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, (tr) Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature #4, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 41-42.
37 Hal Foster (1996), The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, p. 21.
38 Andrew Bowie (2003), Introduction to German Philosophy From Kant to Habermas, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, p. 3.
39 Ibid., p. 4.
Bürger draws on Karl Marx's earlier works to create a conception of Avant-garde art as self-criticism of art as a social institution. At first, art emancipates itself from the ritual and then its quest for autonomy begins. It finds its conclusion in complete independence of art from all other social institutions. For Bürger it has happened at the end of the 19th century in aestheticism and different l'art pour l'art movements.40 According to Bürger, Avant-garde is in a sense a 'meaning of art', by which is meant a kind of realization of an idea in social reality. This approach is a famous feature of Marxism and of all of Hegelianism in general.
However, at an earlier stage, before self-criticism of art, Kant is no less important to Bürger than Hegel. Bürger has seen a special relation between autonomy and the modality of aesthetic judgment: the universality of 'bourgeois' aesthetic judgment can be contrasted with “the particularity of the judgment to which the bourgeois social critic subjects the feudal lifestyle (...)”.41 Thus, for Bürger, ''in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), the subjective aspect of the detachment of art from the practical concerns of life is reflected.''42 Therefore, the radical autonomy of art can be found in the third section of the Critique of the Power of Judgment:
[i]f someone asks me whether I find the palace that I see before me beautiful, I may well say that I don’t like that sort of thing, which is made merely to be gaped at, or, like the Iroquois sachem, that nothing in Paris pleased him better than the cook-shops; (...) All of this might be conceded to me and approved; but that is not what is at issue here. One only wants to know whether the mere representation of the object is accompanied with satisfaction in me, however
40 Peter Bürger (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, (tr) Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature #4, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 26-27.
41 Ibid., p. 43.
42 Ibid.
indifferent I might be with regard to the existence of the object of this representation. (5: 205)