ABSTRACT
Borrowed from military terminology by Bakunin, who titled the short-lived anarchist journal he published in Switzerland in 1878 L’Avant-Garde, the label was first applied to art by his followers. Their aim in revolutionizing aesthetics was to prefigure social revolution; and avant garde art is still characterized by a radical political posture. Envisioning a revolutionary future, it has been equally hostile to artistic tradition, sometimes including its immediate predecessors, as to contemporary civilization. Indeed, on the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic subgroups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work, and representing the amorphous complexity of post-industrial society in a multiplicity of dynamic but unstable movements focused on philosophic abstractions. Hence the use of‘-isms’ to describe them: symbolism, futurism, expressionism, formalism, surrealism.
