THE IDEA OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Apollinaire, spring of 1913 Les Peintres cubistesH
June 1913, Manifeste synthèse. L'Anti-tradition futuriste, used avant-garde as synonym for esprit nouveau
By second decade of century, avant-garde, comprehensive enough to include all the new schools rejecting the past and following cult of the new.
Bakunin: "To destroy is to create."
Avant-garde thus is terminological instrument, which becomes historicized, but has almost uncontrollable diversity.
In English speaking countries became a historical category grouping the most extreme movements in first half of century [118]
American criticsm uses avant-garde as synonum for modernism, as opposed to previous movements of romanticism and naturalism.
In Italy, historicization seen in contrast between old avanguardia and neo-avanguardia or sperimentalismo.
1925International character of avant-gardism H
Logically every style should have its avant-garde, but actually not used that way: avant-garde is a tyle, or better an antistyle
Ionesco: I prefer to define the avant-garde in terms of opposition and rupture... The revolutionary playwright feels he is running counter to his time... The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system. [119]
Appearance of avant-guard historically connected with moment when socially alienated artists felt the need to disrupt and completely overthrow the whole bourgeois system of values.
Therefore, it is the spearhead of aesthetic modernity at large.
Avant-gardeis means for artist to resolve specific historical contradiction with a violent protest turned against itself.
Death of the avant-garde (1964 article), because it was recognized as artistically significant by the same class whose values it so drastically rejected. - becomes theme of sixties H R

Post-World War II period: inner contradictions became focal point of broader intellectual debate
Unexpectedly large public success of avant-garde art
term became advertising catchword - became one of major cultural myths of fifties and sixties H R H R
Term no longer offensive or insulting, now merely amusing
Apocalytic outcires became comfortable and innocuous clichés
Leslie Fiedler, "Death of Avant-Garde Literature" (1964) - avant-garde became a widespread fashion
1960s: avant-garde absorbed into the surrounding culture P
But avant-garde needed to conceive of self as in advance or time and that a bitter struggle needed to be fought.
Leonard Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas (1967)
Contemporary art is fundamentally "anti- teleological" S
characterized by stasis, a "fluctuating steady- state"
"The concept of an avant-garde implies goal-directed motion... If the Renaissance is over, the avant-garde is ended."
Nevertheless he uses the term to distinguish between extreme antitradtional contemporary and more traditional
Loss of a contemporary cultural enemy
Official culture has simply vanished, being replaced by the intellectual relativism of modernity.
With almost boundless permissiveness, there is no enemy to fight.
Comparison between historical avant-garde and experimentalism
Experimentalism is a highly specialized rearguard.
Soldier is replaced by the specialist.
General tolerance = objective lack of criteria
Avant-garde did not collapse because of inner contradiction and its identity as a culture of crisis [124]
Avant-garde tires to discover or invent new forms, aspects, or possibilities of crisis
Art is supposed to become an experience of failure and crisis.
Dada's nihilism is archetypal trait of the avant-garde


THE IDEA OF THE AVANT-GARDE

From Modernity to the Avant-Garde
The "Avant-Garde" Metaphor in the Renaissance: A Rhetorical Figure
The Romantic "Avante-Garde": From Politics to the Politics of Culture
Some Mid-Ninettenth-Century Writers and the Avant-Garde
Two Avant-Gardes: Attractions and Repulsions
Avant Garde and Aesthetic Extremism
The Crisis of Avant-Garde's Concept in the 1960s
Avant-Garde, Dehumanization and the End of Ideology
Avant-Garde and Postmodernism
Intellectualism, Anarchism, and Stasis
Links and Abbreviations (links are abbreviated by using the initials)

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