ABSTRACT
By the 1970s, a consensus was emerging that the avant-garde was extinct. Such was the conclusion reached by the Theory of the Avant-Garde proposed in 1974 by a German critic, Peter Bürger: the “advanced guard” that used to challenge the entire institution of culture had now dispersed.1 Of all the experiments with art that stretched back at least as far as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the unique contribution of the fully “avantgarde” work that peaked in an extraordinary concentration in the early twentieth century (with Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and the early Soviet experiments in revolutionary culture) was that it turned against art itself. In other words, the true avant-garde spurned the ‘autonomy’ that separated art from the rest of life, thereby challenging bourgeois society. Notorious avant-garde “works of art” had really been the bombs to wreck bourgeois consciousness. By contrast, the art still trading as “avant-garde” after the Second World War was failing to revolutionize everyday life, and had itself become an artistic institution (that is, treated as a product of individual genius, housed in bourgeois galleries and museums, serenely set apart from collective political struggle). The shock value of avant-garde art, once a weapon against bourgeois sensibilities, was now an expectation of the audience, the museum and the dealer. A distinction would have to be drawn, it seemed, between art that was truly avant-garde, created with the intention of revolutionizing the world at large, and that which was simply “Modernist,” created to revolutionize art. The “historical” avant-gardes of the early twentieth century had been politically “engaged”; by contrast, the “neo-avantgarde”2 of the late twentieth century, like the Pop Art movement, seemed politically disengaged, and ironic in its rapprochement with bourgeois capitalism.
