Comments on: Avant-Garde and Modern, Part One

By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:56:56 +0000

I rather like the idea of levitation; at the moment, I would be quite happy to levitate out of my body, but not for good (as Frost writes in “Birches,” “May no fate willfully misunderstand me/And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love”), just for a vacation until my body is done with its little pas des deux with pain.
I am afraid that one little typo has completely reversed the meaning of my phrase. I blame the fever and the fatigue. What I meant to write (and have since corrected the text to read) is, “the sublation of art into the praxis of life,” that is, the abolition of art as an autonomous or semi-authonomous sphere. It is only art’s distance from the given (or the imposed) that allows it to present other possibilities, alternatives to what is. That does not mean that art doesn’t reflect the “real world” (Joseph’s quotes), the material circumstances of human lives, but that it reflects upon them and is not simply a social byproduct, but an entity of its own both in and outside of the world, which speaks back to the world.
It’s true that Guy Debord et al. were rather arrogant, smug, and self-righteous. Proudly so, even.
I have to go get my IV antibiotic infusion. More later.
Reginald
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By: john

john — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:01:03 +0000

In Bürger’s terms, the avant-gardists were insincere: They were constantly engaging with the institutions of art. Engagement is, to some extent at least, affirmation. And, of course, the institutions of art have absorbed the historical avant-garde. I’d be curious to know where Bürger places Marinetti and the Futurists, who were more explicitly contemptuous of the institutions of art than the later Dadaists and Surrealists. (I don’t know the Russian Constructivists well enough.)
In Bürger’s terms, the graffiti artists of the ’70s and ’80s were more avant-garde than the original avant-gardists. Completely eschewing the institutions of art (for a long time, anyway), the graffiti artists’ work was all about the praxis of daily life.
Latter-day graffiti artists who alter billboards toward political and/or social purposes are equally avant-garde.
The closest literary equivalent is O’Hara’s Personism — or, it would have been if it had not been so tongue-in-cheek. (That’s not a complaint; I adore the Personist Manifesto.) I can’t think of a real literary equivalent, or a musical one either.
The art institutions have done a poor job of integrating graffiti art into the history of art. Some graffiti artists have made it into art careers, but the original stuff was impossible to collect, and so it has successfully resisted the history of art. The historians of poetry have completely ignored the textual elements of graffiti art — even historians of visual poetry have ignored it.
Avant-garde?
I’m reminded of Dylan’s epigram:
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
If there’s an avant-garde today, literatteurs wouldn’t know about it. We’re in the Captain’s Tower by definition.
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By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:37:16 +0000

I think that Avant-Garde, as I believe Bürger contends, was a very specific movement. It is not a failure of the art and literary world today, it just means that we need to be more exacting in our terminology.
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By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:12:29 +0000

Welcome back, Reginald! And thanks for this essay, which is stimulating even though it seems to encourage us to float a foot or so off the ground. I like levity but am incapable of levitation. So, let me ask a couple of questions for the sake of getting me back to earth.
Are you agreeing with Bürger that “the sublation of art into the praxis of art can only be destructive of art’s capacity to critique and imagine different shapes for reality”? I’m taking for granted, of course, the reality of our capitalist situation.
Secondly, are you arguing for the view that poetry cannot or should not reflect the real world—if by “real world” we mean the historical forces that shape our daily lives?
As for Debord, is it not true that his first book had a cover made of sandpaper in order to damage books placed next to it on the shelf? What a clever little vandal…
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By: Jordan

Jordan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:23:29 +0000

Debord did have a name-calling streak, didn’t he.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:44:08 +0000

“McLuhan, the spectacle’s first apologist, . . . seemed to be the most convinced imbecile of the century. . . .” — Guy Debord.
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