Cinegraphic: Some thoughts on the Avant-Garde

from Cinegraphic.net:

Some thoughts on the Avant-Garde

URL: https://www.cinegraphic.net/article.php?story=2008082321144379

Terrorism is a terrible thing, but fortunately for most of the world, it is also very rare; "aesthetic terrorism," however, isn't. It has certain features in common with the more violent variety: a fanatical devotion to a singular, unchanging world; the need to enforce doctrine on everyone uniformly; aggressive responses to deviations; and--most importantly--an inability to recognize that alternatives to dogma not only do exist, but are also equally valid positions.

The OTW (One True Way) is key to understanding "aesthetic terrorism." Every avant-garde's manifestation is a prime example of this OTW, as is the academy which they assaulted: there can be only one way to making true, real art--and anything else that doesn't tow the party line is not only non-art, it must be destroyed and its practitioners banished: Right now, immediately!

The idea that the OTW is a corrosive, bad thing has some consequences: it confuses art education to the point that academic training and rigorous technical expertise mistakes itself for OTW in the minds of some artists. Certainly some of the avant-garde versus academic conflict of the past originates with this confusion of training with application. The issue, as the history of the twentieth century has abundantly demonstrated, is not one of technique or skill, but rather a matter of control, development over time and relationships to historical precedents (both sanctified and not). The problem that technical training and expertise has is that techniques dictate their own terms--and are absolute in their application: it is either technically correct or not. The OTW problem arises when this technical distinction becomes an aesthetic distinction, or more precisely, THE aesthetic distinction. Along such paths is academic art.

"Aesthetic terrorism" is fundamentally an expression of insecurity; the inability to tolerate difference--whether of opinion, aesthetics, or politics--suggests a personality that is uncertain of itself and thus validates its claims through the denial of otherness. OTW creates a uniformity where change is impossible because change implies failing. It is a rigid aesthetic that cannot grow that is reflected in terrorism.

The militaristic metaphor that accompanies the idea "avant-garde" is not accidental in this regard. The avant-garde and the OTW are mirror reflections of one another, each is canonical, absolutist, definite--only the terms differ. Where OTW is the dominant and avant-garde is invasive. Both act to dogmatize their subjects--and it is this rigidity that dooms the avant-garde to success and eventually dominance as OTW. It is simply timing that decides which is which.

The change that has emerged since Conceptual Art came to dominance in the 1970s is an awareness of this oppressive dimension to the avant-garde. The so-called dogmas of the present--contingency, variability, plurality and the absence of any singular meaning--can be understood as an attempt to escape from (perhaps even to negate) the ability to dominate that is innate to avant-garde positions. The collateral effects of this transformation of the avant-garde's activities and polemics, however, are that where once there was a single, clear position, what remains now is instead only a necessity not to repeat the past. That alone is enough to identify the contemporary as the inheritor of the avant-garde.