ABSTRACT
The relationship between various avant-gardes and popular culture is historically fraught, at least in terms of how it is understood by factions of both the avant-garde and popular culture itself. Nevertheless, this relationship is far more dialogical and interdependent than most theorists and practitioners may wish to claim. For this reason, I shall not presently re-hash tired debates about popular culture’s appropriation of the avant-garde leading to its de-fanging, decay and death, along the lines of complaining that the opening credits of David Fincher’s Se7en (USA, 1995) appropriate the aesthetic strategies of Stan Brakhage. Nor am I interested in disparaging the “pretentiousness” of some popular culture texts that take either the avant-garde or high culture as intertextual grist for the mill by appropriating, say, Carl Jung or Vladimir Nabokov (as exemplified by the oeuvre of Sting). Instead, I wish to trace moments of confluence between the avant-garde and popular culture to delineate the productive tension that lies between these two modes of artistic, cultural and ideological expression. This tension is felt both by popular culture artists working in the avant-garde idiom, and avant-garde artists who appropriate from popular culture within their works. I argue that popular culture and the avant-garde have always been in dialogue with each other, despite the plethora of claims that they inherently antithetical. This productive dialogue is exemplified in Walter Benjamin’s methodology for his Arcades Project: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (1999: 460). The question, then, that lies at the heart of the relationship between popular culture and the avant-garde is about how to best engage various publics in debates about industrial and technological society in contemporary culture.
