ABSTRACT
The identifying signature of avant garde art, all the way back to Bakunin and his anarchist journal L’Avant-Garde in 1878, has been an unremitting hostility to contemporary civilization. Its most obvious aspect has been negative: the rejection of social organization and artistic conventions, aesthetic values and materialistic ideals, syntactical structure and logic, as well as everything associated with the bourgeoisie. But this apparent nihilism always implied a utopian alternative to the status quo, which has three aspects. Broadly speaking these can be called the philosophical, the populist and the primitive-although such avant garde categories are often inseparable, equally political and tend to be expressed in psychological terms.
