The Challenge of the Avant

This course-book concentrates on two strands of the avant-garde: that is (1) advancing art for its own sake independent of socio-political commitment and (2) art committed to socio-political change. However, I should add that the term avant-garde has also recently come to be used more loosely to mean art that is out of the ordinary or shocking, leading some contemporary art writers such as Anthony Julius to conclude that it has lost it's cutting edge, that 'it can no longer exceed the capacity of the art world to absorb it,' as he says. However, in the context of art it was initially used by intellectuals, notably Claude-Henri Saint-Simon, to describe French artists committed to political change in the turbulent years in the first half of the 19th century. Later in the 19th century radical artists focused more on opposition to the cultural establishment that seemed increasingly out of touch with modernity*. This led to the subversion of artistic conventions by the group known as the Impressionists for example. This strand evolved into those modern* artists championed by the modernist* Clement Greenberg e.g. The Abstract Expressionists after World War II. It's important to know that not all academic art in the mid 19th century had a politically reactionary objective, and not all avant-garde art such as that of the Impressionists was politically radical.

It's always important to maintain historical perspective, but especially in this part of the course. Some political radicals of the 19th century have been loosely referred to as socialists and some as utopians (who are by definition difficult to locate on the conventional left-right spectrum). It's important to bear in mind that prior to the influence of Karl Marx those on the extreme left had different intellectual reference points, and the extreme left has changed from the time of the Russian Revolution, the 1930s, 1960s through to today's anti-capitalists. It's also important to be aware of the difference between Marxist groups in Western Europe and the new Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution, as Western Marxists had fractionalized so that some were opposed to the Soviet system as well as to western governments. Meanwhile Marxists in the new Soviet Union were (initially at least) not oppositional, committed as they were to the new established order. The strand of the avant-garde that was committed to revolutionary change continued to try to undermine and subvert the political and cultural establishment in Western Europe following World War II. The history of such groups as Cobra, Lettristes, Situationists and Fluxus, riven as they were by ostensibly ideological internal disputes, is a relatively specialist area. Their activities have not attracted much coverage by mainstream art history (which they were ideologically opposed to anyway) due largely to their lack of significance in the art market which, with some individual exceptions, they sought to destroy. Meanwhile, the activities of artists in the Soviet Union in the Cold War years is very interesting, and there are a number of books on that subject.

*In order to avoid confusion, it would be better to not to apply the term modern art to contemporary art. Modern art, as referred in the course, concerns art that comes under the aegis of modernism (see below) which obviously precedes post-modernism, corresponding approximately to the period towards the end of 1960s. However, Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968) is widely credited as being the father of post-modernism, ahead of his time.

It would be easy to get involved in a degree of semantic quibbling about the use of these terms but I'll restrict definitions to those which are agreed on by most art historians, which most importantly is the way they have have been applied in A216 course material. *Modernity is of course the present at any given period. Historically and in most general terms the term is often used to refer to a time of great political, cultural and socio-economic change, which occurred in different countries at slightly different times. In the context of this course it refers to mid 19th century France when artists were affected and influenced by new theories of perception, photography, availability of new materials, exhibiting and selling opportunities; new means of transport providing greater travel possibilities, a rebuilt Paris providing different vantage points and architectural features, new fashions, entertainment and retail outlets all offering new and exciting subject matter. There were also new kinds of imagery for generating ideas and technical methods such as posters and magazines. However, for those (the avant-garde) who contravened the laws of tradition the penalty was ridicule and obloquy.

The 'Painting of Modern Life' exhibition at the Hayward at the end of 2007 was named with Baudelaire's essay 'The Painter of Modern Life' (1863) in mind. I thought it could have been done in a more interesting and informative way on the role of imagery (painted, digital, photo-chemical, still and moving), its application and its manipulation through the modern ages. I felt there are more interesting examples to choose from although probably not restricted to paintings (in which case the title would have been different) that would have provided a deeper understanding of the mediation of reality and of how reality and illusion, truth and fiction, can be perceived as such. It would be interesting to know whether the curator was able to obtain all he wanted or indeed what is involved in obtaining art from its various locations for such a project.

A photograph of Franz Gertsch's Kronenburg 1970 (portraying Gertsch, curator & friends on their way to Gertsch's exhibition) shown at the Hayward Gallery in October 2007.

*Modernism is the political and cultural (e.g. artistic) practice and theory corresponding to the period indicated above. In art it is characterized by a move away from academic realism that culminated in abstraction when art was concerned with itself for its own sake rather than as a medium for telling a story for political or moral effect or for representing the natural world. Modernism is accompanied by a body of theory known by the same name.

Case Study 8 refers to the Volpini exhibition by the Synthetists. I think it's important just to emphasize that an avant-garde exhibition such as this was on the fringe, just as the Salon des Refusés had been in 1863. For the great majority of people the universal exhibitions in Paris during the Third Republic, the most outstanding and memorable features and events were in the nature of academic art, applied art, industrial designs and inventions, shows such as Buffalo Bill's circus, architecture and of course structures like the Eiffel Tower (which has now been returned to its original bronze colour after periods of yellow and red).

The 2010 -11 (12 October - 2 May) Gauguin blockbuster has been largely celebrated by many newspaper art critics, although Brian Sewell (Evening Standard, 14 October, 2010) was critical of the artificial lighting, lack of chronological sequencing and accompanying written information. He ended his piece by saying this was yet 'another example of curators talking to curators instead of to a public willing and anxious to learn.'

The popular peak of cast making mid-19th century coincided with the birth of photography; both conveyed the taint of inferior activities. This is in contrast to the situation today where photographic works and human body casts are considered worthy of being placed in the context of contemporary art.

On January 4th 2004 Israel's ambassador to Sweden destroyed an exhibit at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm. The piece was electronically powered and included the photograph of a Palestinian suicide bomber and a pool of red coloured water. The ambassador declared it not to be art claiming that it was a celebration of suicide bombing. The museum director said the ambassador's action was dangerous and defended the piece as an invitation to think about why suicide bombing happens.

The artists (Israelis Dror and Gunilla Feiler) described the action as vandalism. This case illustrates the difficulty for art in politics, the difficulty in interpreting the intentions of political works of art, not least because of the strength of feelings involved.

Obviously censorship of art and persecution of artists presents the main problem where art addresses political issues.The internet is no longer a safe haven for 'subversive' artists. Currently (June 2004), Steve Kurtz, an American artist opposing GM crops and professor of art at Buffalo University in New York State, is being prosecuted as a bio-terrorist having been charged under sections of the Biological weapons Anti-Terrorism Act . This follows a call he made to the emergency services when he woke up to find his wife of 25 years (now diseased) was not breathing. A paramedic saw laboratory equipment used in Steve Kurtz's art work and reported it, so he was whisked off for questioning as his wife lay in the house. The artist's lawyer described it as a paranoid overreaction that would never have happened before '9/11.'

Barbara Maria Stafford explores how emblems, symbols and elecronic media reveal the brain's grappling to construct mental objects. In her book Echo Objects, University of Chicago, 2007, rich with illustrations, she shows that findings in evolutionary biology and neuroscience can help us to understand aesthetic conundrums such as the urge to imitate and the roles of narrative and non-narrative representation. One of the works of art she mentions is Eduardo Kac’s Genesis which began with the artist’s translation of a line of biblical text into Morse code, which was then encoded into DNA and inserted into bacteria. The resulting live mosaic was then displayed on a microscopic slide and projected, enlarged, onto a screen in a darkened room. The installation could be accessed on-line allowing the user with a click of the mouse to focus ultraviolet light on the display causing mutations in both the bacteria’s genome and in the coded message. Art no longer imitates life; instead, Kac says 'art is creating life.'

'Banksy', who has been called a guerrilla artist, having anonymously (i.e. before he was known as Banksy) sprayed his way to fame or notoriety on many of Britain's town walls before spraying a vision of paradise on Israel's 'security wall', smuggling a stuffed rat wearing sunglasses and backpack into the Natural History Museum and glueing one of his paintings onto a wall of Tate Britain has now targetted celebrity. He has digitally altered 500 copies of the illustrious Paris Hilton's debut album. Ms Hilton's songs have been replaced by Banksy's own compositions and the titles replaced with questions, such as "Why am I famous?", "What have I done?" and "What am I for?". On the CD cover the heiress's head has been replaced with that of a dog and her dress has been lowered to reveal her breasts, amongst other changes. (September 10th, 2006)

I visited an exhibition of the painter Ludwig Hofmann (1861-1945) in February, 2006. It was at the Darmstadt art museum which is on the Matildenhohe, the site of an artist's colony which established some of the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement in Germany. It was severely damaged by British bombing raids at the end of World War II, and the restoration of some magnificent examples of (broadly speaking) Art Nouveau or Jugenstijl architecture. The exhibition showed interesting examples of Hofmann's utopian paintings and prints from the end of the 19th century. Nude youths, male and female, contemplate life and death in landscapes which range from the fantastic to the hyperreal.

Talking about fantastic and hyperreal, the North American painter Thomas Kinkade has recently made quite a name for himself, but mainly for causing offence to art critics and other guardians of aesthetic purity and art market integrity, both by the nature of his work and the work of his nature (described by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, March 25, 2006, as painting 'luridly idyllic landscapes'). As well as being accused of kitsch crimes against aesthetics the self-styled 'painter of light' has also been accused of fraudulent business practice, sexual harassment and urinating in public. A court appointed panel found that he had 'painted an unrealistic picture... of the prospects of success for one art dealer'.

Thomas Kincade

Hometown Lake (1997)

When Manet's Olympia was first exhibited in 1865 it was derided as a 'female gorilla and hung out of reach of the angry public. The painting was ridiculed and caricatured in newspapers. Two years later at the Paris International Exhibition Manet was insuccessful in selling his paintings that were hung in his own separate pavilion. In contrast the academy painter Meissonier sold a still unfinished painting of Emperor Napoleon III for the great sum of 200,000 francs, yet by 1873 after the fall of the Emperor, the work of Manet and the 'Impressionists' was gaining in popularity, and prices for their paintings rising fast. Posterity, in the form of the global art market, has judged Manet to be truly great and modern paintings began to break into 9 figures (in dollars) in 1990.

Mark Wallinger's political installation, State Britain, in Tate Britain is a reconstruction of Brian Haw's notorious eyesore that the anti-war protester assembled opposite the Palace of Westminster before being removed by the police acting under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which designates a one kilometre security zone around Westminster - which would apparently pass through the gallery. According to Peter Campbell in the London Review of Books, vol 29, no 3, Wallinger says he has been careful to draw a distinction between Haw's protest and his own act as an artist which is more concerned with the right to protest and the limits and nature of art in its institutional context. It is hard, as Campbell says, for art in an institutional context to be serious about things other than art these days, adding that it would be perhaps better leave that kind of grand narrative to the movies.

LEFT - Mark Wallinger at Tate Britain

RIGHT - Brian Haw at Westminster

Damage to or subversion of the art market does not only come from artists (nor anti-artists) in the form of exposure, ridicule or parody, but also from buyers using art for short-term investment. This is the subject of Chin-tao Wu's book, Privatising Culture:Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, Verso, 2001. In discussing the relationship between art and finance capital she mentions Japanese buyers in the 1980s who were involved in price fixing and tax dodging which led to recession in the art market.

In complete contrast to the above, Htein Lin, an artist who spent 6 years in a Burmese prison miraculously managed to smuggle out more than 300 paintings, many of which were on the fabric of prison uniforms, and also 1,000 drawings, while he was incarcerated. This record of prison life in Burma was on show At Asia House in London during the summer of 2007

There have been many attempts in the 20th century by art movements and individual artist to parody, subvert or damage the art world, perhaps most notably by Marcel Duchamp's 'urinal'. (See book 2 on artists' personalities). Efforts have been made to create anti-art, non-art, to deface art, or to sabotage art related events, to deal a fatal blow to art world's dependence on fame and the art object.

Jean Baudrillard's text Symbolic Exchange and Death, SAGE publications, 1967, as a response to the Situationists' relative optimism about resistance (to commodification) insists that we are past any time when ideology, political economy, psychoanalysis and dialectics held out hope for altering material existence. Instead, whatever revolution they initiated has by now been consumed by a system that only holds these beliefs up as models of revolution, drained of any further meaning other than the iconic.

Christopher d'Arcangelo deliberately willed his own obscurity; in one group exhibition his contribution consisted in the removal of his name from the installation and catalogue. Thomas Crow (Modern Art in the Common Culture, Yale, 1996) said' no intervention could have caused greater difficulties for the critic and historian. ' D'Arcangelo committed suicide in 1979. Another artist associated with D'Arcangelo in the pursuit of self-effacement was Bas Jan Ader who was lost at sea in 1975.

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Soviet Union & Glasnost era: Belyutin, the Kabakovs, Yankilevski, Steinberg, Zakharov, Shutov.

Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames and Hudson.

A book on contemporary censorship in western democracies ('lands of the free') including a contribution on the marriage of art and money from Hans Haacke, the artist mentioned in course book 6, is very informative and still up to date even though time appears to be moving faster than relativity allows. It is called Censoring Culture; contemporary threats to free expression, ed. R. Atkins & S. Mintcheva

Andrew Hussey, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord, Pimlico, 2002. The author's biography of the founder of the Situationist International (international in name but basically French) presents the subject as a drink-fuelled and glutonous skulking demagogue, cunning, vindictive, captious, sectarian, anarchic, masculinist misanthrope running a cultic clique consisting of a handful of intellectual elitists at its centre and a few hardcore thugs in the outer core, which rose to notoriety in Paris 1968 due to successfully insinuating itself into the centre of the student revolt by its use of slogans and pamphlets and publicity. As the writer struggles to present an impartial account, Debord is alternatively presented as a prophetic philosopher of rare intelligence and intellectual subtlety ahead of his time but in the French tradition, with irresistable charisma, a master tactician in the fight against the social malaise of consumerism, alienation and mass spectacle.

Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, Lund Humphries, 2006

Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals (Taschen); at £120 new this is obviously for enthusiasts with money to spare. Rivera's reputation, outside Mexico, has been affected by the fact that his epic transformation of emblematic buildings cannot be transported to art galleries. He has also been somewhat eclipsed in recent years by the iconisation of his wife Freda Kahlo in some feminist circles.