ABSTRACT
Avant-gardist practices have had a disproportionate influence on the creative underground. They present a range of issues that are of particular concern for artists today in any attempt to forge a new left culture and politics which challenges neoliberal hegemony and post-Fordist enterprise practices. The historical avant-garde was a movement associated with utilizing creative expression to affect revolutionary social change which corresponded to the art manifesto and socially embedded utopianism. Aesthetics were employed as a form of resistant communication rather than as a self-referential or formalistic exercise.
