Reginald Shepherd

Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Four

Like the previous post, this fourth and final post on this topic was largely prompted by Brent Cunningham’s comments on the second post. Some of it will be more clear if readers refer back to that post and its comment stream while reading this entry.
I like the terms “Modern” and “Modernist” because of their bare descriptiveness: they make few claims but the chronological, their efflorescence coinciding with the transformation of western culture and society into what we now call the modern world. Modern art is the art of the modern world: perhaps one could call modernist art the art that is self-consciously so. Though Bürger undoubtedly means a disparagement in comparing avant-garde and modern/modernist art, the art that has lasted has been that which, like Cubism (again, his example) has set itself to explore the possibilities of the medium.
If by “experimental” one means “trying something out to see what happens,” then that still seems useful as a term and a procedure. Wallace Stevens wrote that all good poetry is experimental poetry; that may be an overstatement, but there is a great deal of truth to it. It’s when the term “experimental,” like the term “avant-garde,” begins to be used evaluatively rather than descriptively that it becomes problematic. The attitude and activity of exploration and experimentation was and isn’t restricted to those who either proclaimed themselves or were proclaimed to be “avant-garde.” As Henry Gould has pointed out on a different post’s comment thread, much of John Berryman’s work is in style and attitude as wildly exploratory as anything in The New American Poetry, about which there was so much discussion some time ago.

06.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (25)