It is our shared critical understanding that the avant-garde arose, as our own century did, like a flash from the lightning bolt of modernity, laden with portentously exuberant meaninglessness. Modernism, an emergent and fairly global phenomenon (existing in all forms of the arts) arose as a response to the increased pace of industrialized life, and beget an endless series of “isms”: aesthetic movements that have often been termed avant-garde (Dadaism, Surrealism, etc.). There is an important conception of distinction and evolution that should here be made. There have been numerous critical theories of the avant-garde (by the likes of Habermas, Howe, Poggioli, Greenberg, et. all); many have simply lumped the term in wholesale with modernism, using the two words interchangeably. Peter Bürger’s 1974 study, Theory of the Avant-Garde, went a long way towards righting this wrong. In his conception, the avant-gardeemerged as a response to the institution of art, which in modernism, had given up the opportunity for social critique because of a recognition of its insignificance in bourgeois society (art had become just another commodity), and its separateness from social praxis. This became the “content” of modernist artworks, as we can see exemplified in the “pure” aestheticism of artists such as Mallarmé. The avant-garde was therefore a critique of the institution of art itself, as it attempted ideally to merge art and life, unlike the modernist works that sealed were sealed off hermetically from the rest of experience. Still, the post-war generation of avant-gardists seemed to fail in this mission.
As the century progressed, the role of the avant-garde was taken over by such movements as Pop Art, which, challenging the “high/low” distinction and transforming the role of kitsch, critiqued the institution of art from within the mainstream. Andy Warhol is the paradigmatic example of this. While genuine avant-garde movements still existed during the television era, particularly in the American underground cinema and performance art scenes, the apartness of the avant-garde from the mass seemed overall to be disappearing. It was at this uncertain juncture that we see a figure like Andy Kaufmann emerge, someone who—in the tradition of enfant terribles like Ernie Kovacs—utilized mass mediums to subvert them. Indeed, moving into the era of video (with the music video being a particularly divisive medium within the avant-garde) and its proliferation, and finally the ultimately integrative worldwide web, we see two perspectives emerge: one is that the separation between the avant-garde and the masses has become ever more codified, the other that it has begun to disappear entirely. Yes. At the very least, the simplistic dialectical relationship with mass culture that we see in the avant-garde at its inception grew more complicated and ambiguous over the course of the 20th century, paving the way, yea, for its uncertain status in our own era, when the term has already been historicized seemingly endless times over. Yep.
In any conception of the avant-garde we see that it is built primarily upon negation. It is a negative form of art meant to oppose the mass and mass culture, and in Bürger’s conception, the institution of art itself. We can see this tendency epitomized in Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist manifesto, which itself disowns the possibility of a making a manifesto; it can indeed be seen as an anti-manifesto. In it, Tzara writes: “I am writing this manifesto to show that you can do contrary actions together, in one single fresh breath; I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I don’t explain because I hate common sense.” Here, as in the rest of the anti-manifesto, Tzara explicates Dada to be the opposite of common sense; its only logic is that of opposition and negation. For Tzara there is no use for dialectics anymore as they are “an amusing machine which leads us in a banal manner to opinions we would have had anyway.” Hoping to stop the teleological progress of art towards total subordination and irrelevance within society (something Tzara does not hesitate to denounce—for all his claims to apoliticism, one cannot help but sense the burning corpses of World War I battlefields here, an image that was surely haunting Tzara as he feverishly composed the manifesto, holed up in some hotel-room in Zurich), Tzara rallies against the rationality (something that Adorno and Horkheimer will also critique, albeit in a more measured and rigorous manner, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment) that produced the bourgeois system in the first place. The pattern Tzara sets up here of “continual contradiction and affirmation” corresponds exactly with the prerogatives of the avant-garde, now and then. Despite Tzara’s best intentions, this conception of contradiction and affirmation does make sense; the avant-garde cannot exist without mass culture: in order to formulate its contradictions to the mass, it must simultaneously affirm it. This is the eternal lot of the avant-garde, which exists ahead of the ranks of mass culture, yet glances perpetually back at it anxiously as if through a rearview mirror (to rudely transpose a term from Marshall McLuhan’s lexicon).
As we can see, Tzara’s tabula rasa proved impossible, for the avant-garde remained chained at the ankles to the masses. In Clement Greenberg’s seminal work of American art criticism “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” the role of the avant-garde is still limited to negation, to opposition. In Greenberg, the avant-garde must oppose mass culture and cultivate itself within itself in order to serve as a vessel by which culture can progress, traversing the increasingly hostile waters of modern society, which has allowed all other culture to become ossified, withering into entertainment and meaninglessness. Greenberg has no qualms equalizing the culture that the avant-garde is in opposition to, namely tin-pan-alley and pop music, Hollywood, graphic art, and just about any form of popular literature. He casts these vertiginous phenomena under the (very sizable) umbrella of Kitsch. In “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg finds the avant-garde supremely outweighed by the forces of mass culture that surround it. He writes: “the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger, is becoming more and more timid every day that passes. Academicism and commercialism are appearing in the strangest places.”This twilight of the avant-garde that Greenberg so persuasively describes is in fact a fiction, which is closely connected to the undertones of elitism and even classicism in Greenberg’s argument. He writes: “today such culture [the avant-garde] is being abandoned by those whom it actually belongs—our ruling class…the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on—the rich and cultivated.” Here Greenberg is essentially arguing that the only people with taste—the rich and cultivated—are losing it to mass culture. Greenberg, in his arguments, is essentially looking back on an older world order, somewhat nostalgically, rather than apprehending the spirit of his present moment—exactly what the best avant-garde art does achieve. By the sixties, with the advent of Andy Warhol and Pop Art, we will see the idea of taste and class become decisively disconnected.
Of the old world, and of somewhat longstanding traditions, we must still speak of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, philosophers and social critics of the Frankfurt school. Adorno in particular has gained notoriety, even today, some of which is perhaps undeserved (he is a more than competent philosopher and even sociologist but a truly dreadful musicologist). In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, which they wrote while holed up in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood—which, ironically, is one of their prime targets in the Dialectic—during World War II (narrowly escaping Hitler’s regime),Adorno and Horkheimer claim that the avant-garde serves “truth,” whereas the mass art object (they uses the example of the “hit song”) never can. What exactly is defined as “truth” remains unexplained. Indeed, we can conclude that the idea of the avant-garde as the sole bearer for truth is false, lacking as it is in particularity and precision, which for Adorno, a thinker and a philosopher, is a bad sign. He is here set stubbornly on his own schematics, his own system of thought, and just like the culture industry (which he claims is whole), nothing different can penetrate it. If there are any cracks in Adorno’s otherwise sound argument, they begin to emerge here—for when he actually looks with specificity at the potential for merit and quality within the culture industry he finds more complexity than he would have us believe from all his blanket talk: “Whereas the films of Greer Garson and Bette Davis can still derive some claim to a coherent plot from the unity of the unity of the socio-psychological case represented, the tendency to subvert meaning has taken over completely in the text of novelty songs, suspense films, and cartoons.” (109). The emphasis here is my own, as I am trying to highlight that in examining closer and making distinctions, Adorno cannot avoid discussions of merit.
Conversely, though we expect Adorno and Horkheimer to endow nothing but unadorned praise on aestheticism and the avant-garde (for them the ideas are interchangeable), we are surprised by their critique of the art of opposition: “The more seriously art takes it opposition to existence, the more it resembles the seriousness of existence, its antithesis: the more it labors to develop strictly according to its own formal laws, the more labor it requires to be understood, whereas its goal had been precisely to negate the burden of labor.” At any rate, mass culture, as Adorno was perfectly aware,“negates the burden of labor” more than capably by suspending critical thought (or subsuming it cleverly into the Culture Industry) and providing entertainment as a narcotic. This philosophically pessimistic view that Adorno provides, however, has its limits, as we shall see, as it perhaps discounts the relevance of the avant-garde relegating it to an entirely irrelevant position and underrating its potential for mutability.
Before we can further discuss the evolution of the avant-garde we must broaden our definition of mass culture, which up until now has been dominated by, frankly, curmudgeons like Greenberg and Adorno (this, of course is far from a bad thing: great writers and cultural critics provide us with a necessary fountain in which to habitually cleanse ourselves of illusions). In his Philosophy of Mass Art, Noël Carroll writes: “what earlier critics of mass art saw as a reason to condemn mass art—its easy accessibility… is in fact a central design feature…without this ease of accessibility for untutored audiences, mass art could not function to secure or elicit mass consumption.” Carroll here illuminates a very basic nuance that had been absent from previous theories of mass art. Rather than simply as a tool for control and subordination, Carroll argues that mass art is too large and diverse category to make such a blanket statement about. Furthermore, he writes: “unless we can provide some reason why eliciting mass consumption in the world as we know it is always, on principle, condemnable, then the fact that mass art is designed for mass consumption should not present us with any conspicuous problem.”Likewise, Carroll makes the point that there are plenty of avant-garde works that utilize the technology also designed for mass consumption (he uses the apt example of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel). This further complicates the dialectical opposition that we have seen thus far.
The ambiguity of mass art as good or bad and the extent to which the avant-garde is connected or opposed to it (this is a prerequisite) will continue to evolve. In fact, works that emerge as avant-garde eventually cross over into the cultural mainstream (they are societal climbers, so to speak). One simply has to think of the current ubiquity of Pablo Picasso, to take on the most obvious example, versus the radical nature inherent in his art when it first emerged. This process is a phenomenon that Russell Lynes aptly charted out in his The Tastemakers, in which he delineates the idea of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. Most important for Lynes is to emphasize the fickle nature of these types in a time when the world we live in changes with constant dynamism and speed.
One might look at a figure like Marcel Duchamp in this light. With Duchamp the very idea, not just of what was “high” or “low,” but also of what could be made in to art, was called into question. The most famous and notorious example of this is of course his “Fountain.” With Duchamp’s non-art, we seem in a realm similar to the Dadaist idea of “anti-art.” Indeed, perhaps there is a continuity between Tzara’s “anti-art,” Duchamp’s urinal, and the emergent pop and industrial art of the fifties and sixties, which judiciously expanded the material that was capable of being used for art. While new generations avant-gardists embraced the formal and sensory possibility of this possibility, many writers stayed conservative. This is understandable.
One of the main theoretical threads that seems to weave its way through many critiques of modernity is that of ossification. For Adorno and the like mass culture has successfully contributed to the ossification and unfreedom of human experience under modernity. It seemed that by the end of the 1920’s the avant-garde itself had become ossified, if it was not dead entirely. Futurism (in Italy) had hardened into fascism, and Salvador Dali, who famously collaborated with Luis Buñuel around this time, was, in about a decade, to contribute to a major Hollywood film: Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1942). At any rate, whatever potential power the international avant-garde had to overturn the norms of the art market seemed to be waning (this is the moment of crisis that Greenberg is writing in); indeed, the avant-garde seemed to be ossifying into its own kind of intellectual aristocracy, a new artistic elite. Pop Art rebelled vigorously against this state of affairs.
In his “Pop Art: the Words,” Lawrence Alloway writes: “Pop Art, in its original form, was a polemic against elite views of art in which uniqueness is a metaphor of the aristocratic.” In the fifties and sixties Pop Art seemed to be both “high” and “low,” serious and frivolous, avant-garde and mass. Indeed, the primary feature of Pop Art was its incorporation or appropriation of mass media and culture images into its praxis. It must be noted that this is not an entirely unique phenomenon, looking outside of the Anglo-American tradition to Russia for just a moment, we can note that some of the most noteworthy avant-garde art of the twenties was Soviet Propaganda. Indeed, it was the state that commissioned these artists who were to incorporate mass culture in their work.In any case, the Anglo-American tradition of Pop Art that is perhaps best summarized by Warhol’s Campbell’s soup transposes the Duchamp or Tzara idea of non-art onto the realm of mass culture, creating art out of what the avant-garde has implicitly denied as art from its outset. The dialectic between the mass and the avant-garde can be seen to continue here, in however radical a form. Rather than the denial of mass culture paradoxically ensuring its affirmation, the affirmation of mass culture means its denial.
No artist better epitomizes the new ideas of pop art and the changing nature of the avant-garde than Andy Warhol. When Andy Warhol speaks of what people consider to behis “aura” in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, we may compare it illuminatingly with Walter Benjamin’s conception of the term, in order to see just how far we have advanced (or not). For Walter Benjamin the “aura” is the authenticity of the original, which decays with each reproduction it undergoes. Warhol would be nothing without the reproduction of his image and his art. Indeed, it is safe to say that he gained authenticity with reproduction for it allowed his work to reach its full potential and meaning (and as we have learned from Noël Carroll a work can also use mass technology and still be avant-garde).
It is not surprising then, that Warhol was interested in business, in the “art market,” which avant-gardists could no longer disdain but rather needed as a new kind of patron (now that the old aristocratic system was dead). In his memoir-cum-book of aphorisms, Warhol writes: “I had by that time decided that ‘business’ was the best art.” If the avant-garde is attempting to critique the institution of art and its relation to mass culture, than from a certain perspective, Andy Warhol could be seen as radically avant-garde. Transcending simplistic binaries, Warhol’s theory of art presupposes that the mass distribution of art is simply more of a good thing. This view directly contradictspractically every theoretician we have previously encountered, and still challenges the prevalent academic view of art today. For Warhol, business is an art in itself: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business--they’d say, “Money is bad” and “Working is bad,” but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” There is a sense here of the performativity of business. For Warhol, his entire endeavor was art, not merely his art; his image was just as important as his “work,” because his image was his work; this ambiguity between the art and the artist, between life and work, image and “reality,” and most of all between the mass and the “junk” (Warhol’s term), cannot be ignored. This is actually what we’d call avant-garde. After all, when thinking of the happenings (such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, to name just one instance) occurring in Warhol’s factory in the sixties, the word avant-garde is never far from the mind. We can think of Warhol’s models; for, what is more subversive than elevating a trans person like Candy Darling in the way Warhol did? And then of course we cannot overlook the fact of Warhol as a queer artist of immense import, profile, and power, who made no bones about being such. To watch Blow Job is enough to understand this. All of this leads us quite naturally to Warhol’s filmography, which has been widely accepted in the critical lexicon as paradigmatic of the American avant-garde in cinema. Just as Warhol refused to be limited to his work but insisted on the wholeness of his endeavor, so can we see the wholeness of Warhol’s project, both the Pop Artist and the subversive, queer, avant-gardist, both the ultimate celebrity/fashion-icon/media magnet, and the quietly perceptive observer of mass culture and its effects, both a critique and an exoneration, a celebration even. In finding the Camp in mass culture (read: lowbrow) and high culture in kitsch, Andy Warhol was a new, even transcendent kind of avant-gardist. For his subsequent legacy and the general ignorance surrounding his work, he cannot be faulted, but then again, the “masses” are always ignorant.
We have reached a point in our discussion when simplistic monikers such as “high” and “low” and even “avant-garde” and “kitsch” are no longer stable, or perhaps even relevant. Susan Sontag has well outlined this “new sensibility” in the arts, one that makes such distinctions retrograde. For Sontag, the new sensibility encompasses everything from the Beatles and Dionne Warwick to Merce Cunningham, Scöenberg, and the films of auteurs like Antonioni and Godard (who from the outset gleefully smashed together “high” and “low” cultural referents). Still, she insists that the most important work of the new sensibility is “difficult”—precisely what most theorists of the avant-garde have always insisted on: “The most interesting and creative art of our time is not open to the generally educated; it demands special effort; it speaks specialized language.”Sontag likens this specialization to the specialization of modern science. Just because this new art is specialized, however, does not mean it does not use the tools of mass art. For, if in Greenberg’s definition, the post-romantic definition, art is inherently personal, than we have reached a very puzzling juncture (at the time of Sontag’s writing), as many of the most progressive works of art are impersonal, or at least allow for the authority of their work to be tampered with (one might think of John Cage as an exemplary example in the field of music). The newly created room for audience participation, for the brining in of outside elements and expanding the field of art (as we have seen in Pop Art) to include other aspects of industrial society and technology, for Sontag this makes up the new sensibility. Her declaration was prophetic.
To conclude this exploration we will look at a figure that exemplifies these trends and once again calls into question of the evolution of the avant-garde versus its traditionally stated purpose, and the tension, or perhaps harmony, between the two. Andy Kaufman ingeniously used the medium of stand-up comedy to exist as an “anti-comic” (we have already witnessed more than a few “anti-artists”). Kaufman stated multiple times that he never told a single joke during his entire career, that he was just a “song and dance man” that he “wanted to entertain.” Yet can we take even this seeming candor at face value? With Kaufman we cannot. Once again, art and life were merged and everything was performance. Andy Kaufman’s refusal to break character, his insistence on the game of roleplaying so that his true identity was subsumed in the identities of his work, this was an avant-garde gesture. One of many, as it turns out. For just one example, one might recall the segment on his ABC special Andy’s Funhouse that included fake television static as part of the gag—something that the executives were unsurprisingly uncomfortable with for fear that viewers might change the channel; this for Kaufman was exactly the joke. Indeed, the very idea of what a joke can be, and at whose expense, Kaufman called into question, and in doing so, perhaps subverted, in a subtle way, the whole apparatus of the mass media.
In his book, Andy Kaufman: Wrestling with the American Dream, Florian Keller posits Kaufman as a deeply transgressive artist in a time where capitalism (and perhaps the Culture Industry, as well) seemed to have made transgression in art obsolete. The logic of capital is eternally transgressive (just as the logic of power in, say, the Soviet Union functioned, or say, in China today, or in any mass society, really), and therefore avant-garde transgression that exists within such a system seems to be incapable of creating genuine subversion: “if capitalism truly produces its own form of transgression, then this entails that the notion of avant-garde as an aesthetics of transgression becomes obsolete, because the very idea of any cultural practice operating beyond existent borderlines will always turn out to be already appropriated by capital.” Even being subversive sells, and what starts as a revolutionary gesture gets subsumed into the all-consuming (pun intended) mass of Mass Culture. The American capitalist system allows critique to exist as a commodity. In this light, it seems that what Kaufman achieved was not so much overt critique as it was covert internal subversion. Perhaps this is the only method in which the avant-garde can have any effect at all. For all the powerful video art that has been made in the second half of the century, these avant-garde reactions to the mainstream cannot exist outside the system that they rail against. After all, every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, although when one looks at the matter in terms of scale, it is really more accurate to say of the avant-garde: every action has an unequal but opposite reaction.
Thus is the revolutionary nature of Kaufman, who used mass laughter as a critique, who created stand up that was intensely reflexive, causing the audience to think about (or not) what they were laughing at. Perhaps, Kaufman was using laughter as a critique of laugher. To return to Adorno and Horkheimer, our beloved German cranks: “Laughter about something is always laughter at it… The collective of those who laugh parodies humanity… In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.” Thus Kaufman’s insistence on the fact that he is not trying to be funny, that he has never made a joke in his entire career. Even in one of his more famous bits, in his six minute “foreign man” appearance on SNL, the crux of the act comes when he chokes out through real tears: “Why are you laughing?? Stop laughing at me!” The audience only starts to laugh harder. What we come to realize in looking at Kaufman’s wrestling career was that perhaps what the audience was really laughing at was the “American Dream.” But again, this is just another projection onto Kaufman who deliberately created a shield of smoke and mirrors, of multiple identities around himself. Regardless of how Kaufman’s work and life are interpreted, it is clear that he made the laughter of a “sick society” more self-reflective.
To conclude, we now know the critiques of thinkers like Adorno and to a much greater extent, Greenberg, to regard Mass Media to be all encompassing (which is true in relation to the avant-garde as we have seen) and therefore one-dimensional. The mass itself is not a mass but holds ambiguities within it—some mass culture is more valuable than other mass culture. McDonald outlines this well in his “Theory of Mass Art,” adding nuance to what had been an overwhelmingly pessimistic intellectual discourse in letters. Prominent writers had refused to look at the mass on its own terms and instead saw in it as homogenous. However, looking at mass culture through the lens of a theorist like Marlon Riggs (whose history of the depiction of Black Americans in television, Color Adjustment, radically shifts the critique of mass culture to content), we find that the mass image was in fact an exclusionary and severely limited one. This leads one to consider whether it is better for oppressed and excluded groups to be represented with “positive images” or whether that simply means one is getting subsumed into a system of subtle but more totally oppressive control. After all, there is, perhaps, a certain freedom in not being represented, the freedom to live. Riggs lays out these concerns in a provocative and thought-provoking manner for us in Color Adjustment. Now, in the specialized and “personalized” (read: depersonalized, for one is now part of an algorithm) age of the Internet: “Something is provided for everybody so that no one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated.” We see here that pesky Adorno was perhaps correct after all. Indeed, such is the power of Adorno/Horkimer’s critique that its influence remains unvarnished and unavoidable, like thunderclouds on the horizon, in our contemporary discussion.
The inception of the World Wide Web was in its own way originally conducive to an avant-garde. Early Internet artists such as Olia Lialina, Seth Price, and Paul Chanwere many years ahead of their contemporaries in that they embraced a new technology, exploring its possibilities at the “vanguard” of society at a time when many were still suspicious of the Internet entirely or thought it a passing fad. This vanguard has since been surpassed, buried, and blotted out by the ever-expanding nebula of the web, full of vertiginous vertices and policed by those glimmering stars of doom known as safari and amazon that have conveniently colonized web space. At the upper limit of our ever-expanding universe is the black of the babylicious void, that pure black that the artists of the avant-garde want so desperately to harness and use as a black-mirror, to transgress the confines of mass culture and reveal its latent malignancy, its blindness. But now, even black holes can be photographed. Within the limiting limitless possibilities of the Internetit follows that nowadays, anyone can create their own avant-garde. By the very same token, there is no longer an avant-garde; for, when somebody is everybody, they are ultimately no one.
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