ABSTRACT
The avant-garde begins with the nineteenth-century Romantic notion of the artist-as-outsider, pitted against bourgeois society, and has its roots in particular historical conditions. Gianni Vattimo implies two directions in which avant-garde practice could move: towards ‘social and political action’ or towards the ‘overcoming’ of a set of received aesthetic values. The history of the avant-garde up to 1930 was suffused with various, ultimately futile calls to revolutionary action and moral renewal, all formed by the hope that painting and sculpture might be the primary, dominant forms of social speech they had been before the rise of mass media. The bleakness of Manfredo Tafuri’s view led to protests that he was forcing upon the world the ‘death of architecture’. Bleak or not, what he had to say about the avant-garde during its early twentieth-century Modernist project is as pertinent today as it was then, and merits not only revisiting, but recasting in terms of today’s debates and enquiries.
