OPPOSITIONAL OPPOSE, OPPOSED

One important theoretical category in a set of three – the others being specialist and alternative – that seeks to identify and explain the importance of modern and avant-garde^ artistic^ forms and movements within the historical^ development of culture and society, particularly since the later nineteenth century. Along with these other two terms, oppositional is a concept whose value in art^ history lies in how it may help to explain the place of, for instance, an artist, or artwork, style, or artists’ formation in a particular historical and social moment. In the first third of the twentieth century a wide range of move-

ments had emerged following the decline of academic art, the state^ institutions that supported it, and – in Britain – the conservatism of Victorian culture and social values in general. In an essay on the ‘Bloomsbury group’ of artists, critics, and writers, Raymond Williams identified this formation based in England (living in the Bloomsbury district of central London) during the 1920-40s as alternative – rather than oppositional – in aesthetic, social, political, and intellectual terms. By this he meant that, though, for instance, the group’s modernist art critic Clive Bell and feminist novelist Virginia Woolf emphatically rejected Victorian culture and Tory political and philosophical values, their own proposals for transformation in modern art and civil society offered only to gradually improve – rather than fundamentally challenge – the class structure then constituting British social-democratic capitalist society. As a miniature social world of its own, the Bloomsbury group itself formed an alternative way of life – in aesthetic, social, sexual, and moral terms. In contrast, it is possible to identify, for example, the central European

dadaists as oppositional in their direct attacks upon the conventions of bourgeois culture, the power of the Church, and the nationalistic militarism of the great western^ nation-states during and immediately after the First World War. That is to say, manifestations of their artistic and cultural values – for example, their calculated disruption of public events, such as theatre performances; printing of anticlerical pamphlets and obscene drawings; attempts to avoid military service; the later involvement of some, such as George Grosz, in the German Communist Party; and creation of ‘anti-art’ objects such as Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal (1917) – constituted a revolutionary rejection of, and opposition to, the prevailing social order. This set of terms – oppositional/alternative/specialist – seems particularly suited to analysis of late-nineteenth-century and 1900-1950

avant-garde artists’ groups. This is because the period saw the general emergence of mass democratic, industrial and consumer^- capitalist societies in Europe and North America – modernity – within which (and sometimes against which) artists forged their varying senses of identity and role. By the 1950s and 1960s, however, avant-garde art and culture had, to an important extent, itself begun to become institutionalised – collected by state art museums, funded and encouraged by government arts councils, and made a part of official cultural policy. In this sense it could be argued that most artistic avant-gardism shifted from its earlier oppositional or alternative stances, and became reduced to a niche, or specialist, element within the massively-expanded consumer-culture of the last thirty years.