Avant-garde

• 1. Introduction

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  Avant-garde is a French military term that once described a reconnaissance unit sent ahead of the main army to scout unknown terrain. By the mid-19th century, that same word had crossed from the battlefield into the studio, the concert hall, and the printed page. What does it mean to be genuinely ahead of your time? And what happens to the advance guard when the rest of the culture finally catches up?

  Henri de Saint-Simon, writing in 1824, gave artists a specific charge: they were to "serve as the avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to bring about social, political, and economic reform. That vision of the artist as a kind of cultural scout planted a question that would trouble critics and theorists for the next two centuries. Can an art movement that sets out to overthrow the establishment survive being embraced by it? And what becomes of radical creativity once it proves profitable?

• 2. A Word from the Front Line

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  In 19th-century French politics, avant-garde named the left-wing reformists who were pushing hardest for radical change in French society. The word carried the smell of gunpowder and urgency. When artists adopted it, they were making a claim: that aesthetic innovation and political change were not separate projects but the same project.

  By the 20th century, this claim had expanded into a sociological category. Novelists, writers, artists, and architects formed what theorists described as a distinct stratum of the intelligentsia. Their works were understood to challenge, as one framing put it, "the cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society." In the United States of the 1960s, the cultural upheaval following the Second World War gave avant-garde artists a particular opening. They directed their work against the conformity embedded in popular culture and in consumerism as a way of life, treating everyday commercial society itself as the terrain to be scouted and disrupted.

  The literary critic Peter Bürger captured a sharp distinction in his 1974 work "Theory of the Avant-Garde" ("Theorie der Avantgarde"). For Bürger, the avant-garde is not just modernism with an edge. Modernism updates artistic forms; the avant-garde rejects "the institution of art" entirely and brings political, social, and cultural factors into the work itself.

• 3. Theorists and the Institution Problem

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  Renato Poggioli's "The Theory of the Avant-Garde" ("Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia"), published in 1962, offered one of the earliest sustained analyses of artistic vanguardism as both a historical phenomenon and an aesthetic movement. Poggioli surveyed the historical, social, psychological, and philosophical dimensions of the avant-garde and found that its practitioners shared certain values and ideals with contemporary bohemians.

  Bürger's 1974 work sharpened the problem considerably. He argued that the establishment's willingness to embrace socially critical art amounted to capitalist co-optation. The phrase he used cuts directly to the issue: "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work of art." Once a museum hangs the canvas, the argument goes, the canvas stops arguing.

  Benjamin H. D. Buchloh pushed back in his 2000 collection "Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975." He called for a dialectical approach to these political stances, refusing to treat co-optation as the whole story. The debate between these three positions, stretching across four decades of scholarship, forms the theoretical spine of how critics still read avant-garde work today.

• 4. Kitsch, Aura, and the Spectacle

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  Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" drew the sharpest possible line between the vanguard and the mass-produced. Greenberg argued that the avant-garde opposes not just low culture but the artifice of high culture too, because both can serve the same dumbing-down function. In a capitalist society, he wrote, each medium of mass communication operates as a factory producing artworks. The results, by that logic, are kitsch: simulations and simulacra of art rather than art itself.

  Walter Benjamin's 1939 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" arrived the same year with a related diagnosis. Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction voids the "aura" of a work of art. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer extended the argument in their 1947 "Dialectic of Enlightenment," describing a capitalist culture industry that churns out artificial culture for mass consumption, with the profitability of art as commodity coming to determine its perceived artistic value.

  Guy Debord, writing in "The Society of the Spectacle" in 1967, took the critique one step further. Financial and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by neoliberal capitalism, he argued, makes it genuinely doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant if they prefer profit to cultural change. Paul Mann returned to this diagnosis in 1991, arguing in "The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde" that the avant-garde had become economically integral to the very institutions it once opposed.

• 5. Uncomfortable Alliances

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  Critics and scholars have drawn attention to a troubling thread running through some avant-garde movements: their associations with authoritarian politics and right-wing movements in Europe, including Nazism and Fascism. The American poet Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti each formed alliances with 20th-century authoritarian politics that have remained sources of controversy.

  Harold Rosenberg, writing in "The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks" in 1983, traced a different kind of political failure. Drawing on Greenberg's late-1930s claims and Poggioli's early-1960s insights, Rosenberg argued that since the middle of the 1960s, the politically progressive avant-garde had ceased to be genuine adversaries to artistic commercialism. That disconnection, he wrote, had transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing the profession of being an artist."

  Matei Calinescu in "Five Faces of Modernity" (1987) and Hans Bertens in "The Idea of the Postmodern: A History" (1995) each concluded that Western culture had entered a post-modern period in which the modernist ways of thought and art production had become redundant within a capitalist economy.

• 6. Sound, Stage, and Lens

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  Avant-garde music in the 20th century produced one of the most contested lists in all of cultural history. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pauline Oliveros, and Diamanda Galás each pushed against inherited musical structures in ways their contemporaries found either thrilling or unlistenable. The musicologist Larry Sitsky drew a careful line: composers such as Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, and György Ligeti were modernists, he argued, but not avant-gardists, because "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an audience."

  The 1960s brought a wave of free and avant-garde jazz, with artists including Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis pushing the genre past its own conventions. In rock music of the 1970s, the "art" label was generally understood to signal something aggressively avant-garde or, critics suggested, pretentiously progressive. Post-punk artists in the late 1970s broke with traditional rock sensibilities in favor of that same avant-garde aesthetic.

  In theatre and performance art, movements including Fluxus, Happenings, and Neo-Dada contributed to avant-garde traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Photography developed its own vanguard practice through Bauhaus-linked experimentation, cameraless techniques like the photogram, and radical framing. László Moholy-Nagy became emblematic of the Bauhaus approach, while Man Ray produced his cameraless "rayographs." In the Soviet context, Constructivist photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko used dramatic high and low angles to make viewers see familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. In Japan, poet-photographer Kansuke Yamamoto participated in the Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde, one of the circles that emerged from an interwar movement of "avant-garde photography" shaped by contact with Surrealism and abstraction. A significant conduit for Surrealist imagery in Japan was the 1937 touring exhibition Kaigai Chogenjitsushugi Sakuhinten, which circulated Surrealist images primarily through prints and photographic reproductions.

• 7. The Rear Guard's Answer

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  Every advance guard implies a rear guard. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde, the rearguard counterpart to avant-garde, is not simply a label for kitsch or reactionary work. In their reading, it describes artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while remaining aware that doing so is, in some sense, anachronistic.

  The critic Charles Altieri stated the relationship with precision: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde." That interdependence suggests that the avant-garde defines itself not only by its opposition to the mainstream but also by the shadow it casts backward. The arrière-garde works in that shadow, knowing the terrain has already been scouted, deciding what to do with the maps that were left behind. Avant-garde art's traceable line, from Dada (1915-1920s) through the Situationist International (1957-1972) to the postmodernism of the American language poets in the 1960s-1970s, is also a record of what each successive generation of arrière-garde artists chose to inherit, reject, or ironize.