ABSTRACT
The space where several lacks overlap is, at first sight, unpropitious for any theoretical perspective on the current set of confusions, valedictions and euphoric disavowals concerning the concept of avant-gardism. It is tempting to bracket the term ‘avant-garde’ and substitute ‘radical’ or even to abandon the commitment to specific forms and put ‘culture’ in their place. The forced connection between the radical and the cultural, terms which are equally empty and even contradictory, we will leave to the entrepreneurs whose promotion of culture is indistinguishable from advertising, and whose grasp of the radical content of cultural forms is identical with the ideology of enterprise. For culture now, despite the best efforts of Raymond Williams, means the opportunity for bourgeois society to consolidate its economic gains in a festival of tawdry bric-à-brac pulped of content and dressed as stylish, multicultural goods whose primary motifs are acquisition, display, and self-aggrandisement. While the theoreticians of aesthetics bemoan the demise of avant-garde art, its incorporation into the prevailing culture, the sixties left sniffs the air and senses the imminent demise of even that culture, in all its splendid mediocrity. It may be worth inspecting the lacks lamented by the quotations, so as to give an indication of what any putative avant-garde will be up against. The note of ironic valediction and morbidity struck by contemporary commentators may be fitting, for the historical avant-gardes always celebrated the very end of a culture as their opportunity. Ronald Jones, in the Arts Council-funded artscribe, surveys the art-historical treatment of the avant-garde from the perspective of Clement Greenberg’s classic essay, ‘Avant-garde and kitsch,’ which appeared on the eve of the war against fascism in the house journal of the American left, the Partisan Review. Greenberg hit on the most startling feature of the contemporary culture he surveyed: the simultaneous presence of ‘such different things as a poem by T.S.Eliot (avant-garde) and a Tin Pan Alley Song (kitsch); today we would say: a poem by J.H.Prynne and a song by Kylie Minogue.1 Although his love and knowledge of kitsch is suspect, Greenberg noticed that it absorbed as its raw material ‘the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture’ to produce ‘vicarious and faked sensations’ for the urban masses, hungry for diversion: the very masses the Partisan Review sought, theoretically, to liberate.2 Kitsch supplied readily consumable content, while the avantgarde immersed itself in form and the aesthetic problems of its material making: although it contained the best hopes of humanity as represented in the most advanced art, it remained inaccessible to humanity at large. Greenberg sees this obsessive formalism, together with avant-garde art’s vaunted autonomy, its refusal to represent anything other than itself, as a sign of its ‘emigration from the markets of capitalism’, caused by the decline of aristocratic patronage. The avant-garde was driven to repudiate the capitalist class which had destroyed its link with patronage and ruthlessly commercialized the hinterlands of the moral and the aesthetic which had been its preserve, and retire from public view. The dilemma which faced the avant-garde already in the ‘fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century’ was that it depended on the capitalist class it hated, the
bourgeoisie, for its economic existence: hence the ambivalent motifs of ressentiment and worship which the modern avantgardes have inherited from Flaubert, Manet, and Baudelaire. The dilemma for the modern avant-garde of Greenberg’s day was that the elite which supported the ‘advanced intellectual conscience’ was beginning to shrink and disinvest from advanced art through the process of democratization it had itself put in train: the cultured bourgeois elite is succeeded by a class of aggressive Philistines and the ‘umbilical cord of gold’ which attached the avant-garde to the bourgeoisie is broken.3
