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The Idea of the Avant Garde The Idea of the Avant Garde And What It Means Today Edited by Marc James Léger Manchester University Press Manchester and New York Left Curve Oakland, CA distributed exclusively in the US by Palgrave Macmillan Copyright © Manchester University Press 2014 While copyright i...

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The Idea of the Avant Garde

The Idea of the Avant Garde And What It Means Today

Edited by Marc James Léger

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York Left Curve Oakland, CA distributed exclusively in the US by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2014 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk with Left Curve Publications www.leftcurve.org 

Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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978 07190 96914 hardback

First published 2014

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Designed by Csaba Polony Typeset by Left Curve Publications and Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

This book is dedicated to Amiri Baraka, Chris Marker and Lebbeus Woods

• “Innovation enters art by revolution. Reality reveals itself in art in much the same way as gravity reveals itself when a ceiling collapses on its owner’s head. New art searches for the new word, the new expression. The poet suffers in attempts to break down the barrier between the word and reality. We can already feel the new word on his lips, but tradition puts forward the old concept.” – Viktor Shklovsky • “This means that in the psychology and ideology of avant-garde art, historically considered (from the viewpoint of what Hegelians and Marxists would call the historic dialectic), the futurist manifestation represents, so to speak, a prophetic and utopian phase, the arena of agitation and preparation for the announced revolution, if not the revolution itself.” – Renato Poggioli • “Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the constituencies that might support them, constituencies that are always limited by the entirety of social conditions. People from these tendencies who have been noticed are generally admitted on an individual basis, at the price of a vital repudiation; the fundamental point of debate is always the renunciation of comprehensive demands and the acceptance of a fragmented work, open to multiple readings. This is what makes the very term avant-garde, which when all is said and done is wielded by the bourgeoisie, somewhat suspicious and ridiculous.” – Guy Debord • “In so far as the historical avant-garde movements respond to the developmental stage of autonomous art epitomized by aestheticism, they are part of modernism; in so far as they call the institution of art into question, they constitute a break with modernism. The history of the avant-gardes, each with its own special historical conditions, arises out of this contradiction.” – Peter Bürger • “The dream of reconciling political vanguardism and avant-gardism in matters of art and the art of living in a sort of summation of all revolutions – social, sexual, artistic – is undoubtedly a constant of literary and artistic avant-gardes.” – Pierre Bourdieu • “To write a history of the avant-garde is already to contain it: obviously within a narrative structure and thus inevitably within a certain ideological regime, a certain formation of (pre)judgments. Every history is to some extent an attempt to determine (to comprehend and to control) the avant-garde’s currency, its demise, or its survival today.” – Paul Mann • “Avantgarde art has become the official art of our time. It occupies this place because, like any official art, it is ideologically useful. But to be so used, its meaning must be constantly and carefully mediated.” – Carol Duncan • “The ‘time’ of the cultural avant-garde is not the same as that of the vanguard party. These artists’ practices interrupted the continuity of perceptions and estranged the familiar, severing historical tradition through the force of their fantasy.” – Susan Buck-Morss • “The encounter between Leninist politics and modernist art (exemplified in the fantasy of Lenin meeting Dadaists in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich) cannot structurally take place; more radically, revolutionary politics and revolutionary art move in different temporalities – although they are linked, they are two sides of the same phenomenon which, precisely as two sides, can never meet.” – Slavoj Žižek •

Marc James Léger This Is Not an Introduction Adrian Piper Political Art and the Paradigm of Innovation Andrea Fraser From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique David Tomas Dead End, Sophisticated Endgame Strategy, or a Third Way? Institutional Critique’s Academic Paradoxes and Their Consequences for the Development of Post-Avant-Garde Practices Catherine Lescarbeau Factures Hal Foster Precarious Laura Mulvey Mary Kelly: An Aesthetic of Temporality Bruce LaBruce Don’t Get Your Rosaries in a Bunch Santiago Sierra 300 PEOPLE Derek Horton Richard Kostelanetz and Michael Butterworth in Conversation Christine Wertheim The Poetics of Late Capital: Or, How Might ‘Avantgarde’ Poetry Be Thought of Today? Lyn Hejinian Avant Garde in Progress: An Allegory Marjorie Perloff The Madness of the Unexpected Wu Ming 2 How to Tell a Revolution from Everything Else Nikolaus Müller-Schöll Poverty of Experience: Performance Practices After the Fall Rabih Mroué Spread Your Legs Judith Malina Political Theatre, Theatrical Politics: Epic Theatre in the 21st Century Moe Angelos The Avant Garde is Present Bill Brown It Was Only Just a Stage The Errorist International Errorist Kabaret Jonas Mekas My Definition of Avant Garde Thomas Elsaesser The Politics and Poetics of Obsolescence Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt Closer to the Concrete Situations Travis Wilkerson Creative Agitation Evan Mauro The Death and Life of the Avant Garde: Or, Modernism and Biopolitics Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen The Self-Destruction of the Avant Garde Gene Ray Towards a Critical Art Theory John Roberts Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant Garde Zanny Begg and Dmitry Vilensky On the Possibility of Avant-Garde Compositions in Contemporary Art Owen Hatherley A HighPerformance Contemporary Life Process: Parametricism as a Neoliberal Avant Garde Michael Webb Le Devant Garde Mitchell Joachim Hackerspace in Synthetic Biological Design: Education and the Integration of Informal Collaborative Spaces Magazines: Small Utopia Boris Groys The for Makers Beatriz Colomina Little Magazines, Russian Avant Garde Revisited Vitaly Komar Avant Garde, Sots-Art and Conceptual Eclecticism Victor Tupitsyn Factography of Resistance Gregory Sholette and Krzysztof Wodiczko Liberate the Avant Garde? Marc James Léger Refining Our Doublethink: An Interview with Critical Art Ensemble BAVO Why Contemporary Artists Are Not Fascist Enough Alexei Monroe Sponsored by Self-Management? Re-Constructing the Context and Consequences of Laibach’s Monumental RetroAvant-Garde Jean-Hervé Péron Art Is an Error Chris Cutler Thoughts on Music and the Avant Garde: Considerations on a Term and Its Public Use Charles Gaines Manifestos Jason Robinson Playing Regular: The Jazz Avant Garde Sara Marcus Notes on Future Perfect Cosey Fanni Tutti The Avant Garde Subsumed in a Tangled Web Thanos Chrysakis Asunder Ray Kim Cascone The Avant Garde as Aeromancy Marc Couroux Towards Indisposition Thérèse Mastroiacovo Art Now (2005 to present) Chrysi Papaioannou In a Critical Condition Bill Dane Acheter. révolutionnaires d’avant-garde babioles plus vite possible.

This Is Not an Introduction Marc James Léger

The Idea of the Avant Garde is premised on the assumption that the concept of the avant garde has a particular purchase on our thinking in these times of global political crisis. The idea for the book emerged as a displacement of a previous wish I had, which was to organize a cultural festival dedicated to avant-garde cultural expression and politics. The city of Montreal where I live hosts countless cultural festivals and has a regular roster of challenging artistic presentations. On the whole, however, the spectacular nature of cultural events makes of art production a keystone to tourism and populist entertainment. As global capitalism and post-welfare state governments work to administer and/or censor the various forms of radical cultural practice, critical thinking, autonomous production and progressive ideologization are typically earmarked for budget cuts or some other kind of rightist pressure. In this context, cultural production depends on and facilitates the extension of neoliberal control. When I started this project, it seemed to me that in this era of disaster capitalism it is all the more vital to address the interest, pleasure and radical potential of the avant garde. Rather than accept the postmodern attitude that considers all talk of avant-gardism as so much canonical boilerplate, or as business marketing, I thought to conceive a project that would facilitate a cross-generational transmission of ideas that have little to do with creative innovation, nor with any artist’s or art movement’s apotheosis, but that instead thinks critically about what we do as artists and theorists. In The Rules of Art, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that struggles over what is important in and culture cultureisare determined by sanctions outside the art and determined by sanctions outside the field ield ofoften art, often related to the struggle rewards, some of art, related to the struggle for for rewards, some of 1 this 1 In of them political. In this sense value of art is considthem political. sense thethe value of art is considered ered in terms its internal structure than in terms of less inless terms of its of internal structure than in terms of what what it does inworld. the world. Avant-garde work, I would argue, it does in the Avant-garde work, I would argue, is is work thatis isconcerned concernedfirst irstand andforemost foremost with with how art work that interacts with the world around it, how it contributes to society and how its own immanent unfolding is designed to interact with outside forces. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that ideologically construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. In this context, the radical ambition of avant-garde work is substituted for various forms of networked practice that make cultural production a matter of participation and life styling. Those who make compro-

mises with the external forms of biopower contribute to the ageing of the avant garde. In this process, there is a contradictory double movement in which the classification of older work brings it into the orbit of younger people who rediscover those products once they are out of fashion and access its rarity, renewing potentially with its heretical strategies. The new avant garde, Bourdieu says, will access that position by invoking a return to its purity, obscurity and even the poverty of its beginnings, against orthodoxy. In conceiving this project my goal was to create a forum in which contemporary views on the avant garde idea could mix and mingle, clash, conspire and inspire. For this to happen I didn’t think it would be necessary for me to put forward my own version of the conditions of possibility for avant-garde praxis.2 It seemed to me, rather, that a collection of writings and works by some of the most respected practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde would create its own horizon of meanings. In the process of preparing the manuscript, however, I did select one or two ideas that I thought could serve as a preamble. These are derived from one of the first prominent books on the subject, Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant Garde.3 The first historical reference that Poggioli gives for the idea of the avant garde comes from De la mission de l’art et du rôle des artistes by Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant. Writing before the 1848 Revolution, the French Fourierist argued that art has a mission of social reform and that it can agitate for change through the production of revolutionary propaganda. Writing in 1960s U.S.A., in the context of the Cold War, Poggioli attempted to bring the anti-traditional tradition of the avant garde up to date by considering how it manages to live and work in the present, how it can reconcile itself to the culture of the times by collaborating with parts of the public.4 Political changes in society lead to a corresponding change in the kinds of publics that exist. Poggioli distinguished in this regard an art that is made for an intelligentsia and an art that creates a public for itself—an art for an intellectual elite. Poggioli argues that the concept of the intelligentsia comes from nineteenth-century Russia. Such intellectuals tended to have lower-class backgrounds. The of the “intellechave lower-class backgrounds. The aimaim of the “intellectual tual proletariat,” or intelligentsia, says,was wasto to modernize modernise proletariat,” or intelligentsia, hehe says, and radicalize a society of workers and peasants. While the “historical” avant gardes may have identified with the goals 1

of the proletarian intelligentsia, they were for the most part linked to the bourgeoisie.5 The anti-bourgeois stance of the avant garde, he argues, is not a mere pose, but part of the dialectic of alienation that projects its particular crisis in universal terms. The work of the postwar “neo-avant garde,” then, according to Poggioli, is made for a public that forms itself outside of class distinctions. Intellectuals, he argues, do not form a new class. Unlike the intelligentsia, intellectuals accept the relative autonomy of art and respond positively to changes in taste and fashion. The intelligentsia, in contrast, derides aesthetic speculation and looks for ideological adhesion in works that are focused on the correct content. According to Poggioli, the bureaucratic intelligentsia of postwar America had detached itself from the revolutionary attitude and had dedicated itself instead to serving state ideology. Against this, the only possibility for a truly progressive association of political and aesthetic avant gardes would come from the intellectual elite, constituted as it is through elective affinity rather than class interests. 6 In the current context, after the pluralist 70s, the postmodern 80s, and the thanatophilic 90s, and now that the Fukuyaman proclamation of the “end of history” has lost all plausibility, the politics of anarchism and communism, and more generally, of anti-capitalism, have allowed for a rethinking of the role of the intelligentsia in this age of socalled post-Fordist, post-political multitudes. The Idea of the Avant Garde mediates the stakes of a contemporary intelligentsia that is not only cognizant of the different temporalities of radical art and politics, but that tempers revolutionary negativity with a measure of distance from even the avant garde.7 My goal here has been to draw on those cultural strands that bridge the aesthetic, the intellectual and the radical and to see what is even imaginable at this present time. All of the contributors to this volume are distinct and challenging voices. Rather that attempting a synoptic summary of these, the reader of the present volume is invited to make their own way through this compendium of ideas, propositions, and provocations. Anything new having to do with the avant garde is already inscribed within an artistic genealogy that dates back to the previous two centuries. Whatever ruptures and continuities one finds here, their inscription within an avant garde configuration makes it such that the cultural practices and artworks in question represent a finitude that displays its own organizing principles within a truth that is infinitely multiple. This truth corresponds to the event of the avant garde.8 I wish to thank all of the contributors for their commitment to what they do and for generously sharing their thoughts on the idea of the avant garde. Thanks to the artists who either contributed an entry to the book or who contributed the visuals that illuminate the texts. Thanks also to all of those who for some reason or other could not participate 2

in the book but who nevertheless responded with interest. Special thanks go to the editor of Left Curve Publications, Csaba Polony, who believed in this project from the start. Finally, thanks to those sources that have allowed reprints of essays and who are acknowledged here: Adrian Piper’s “Political Art and the Paradigm of Innovation” was first published in Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon, eds. The Life and Times of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) 11933; Andrea Fraser’s “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” was published in Artforum (September 2005) 278-83; David Tomas’ “Dead End, Sophisticated Endgame Strategy, or a Third Way?” is modified from a version that was published in Etc (Spring 2012) 23-7; Hal Foster’s “Precarious” was published in Artforum (December 2009) 207-9; Laura Mulvey’s essay on Mary Kelly was published in Dominique Heyes-Moore and Maria Bashaw, eds. Mary Kelly: Projects, 1973-2010 (Manchester: The Whitworth Art Gallery and University of Manchester, 2011); Bruce LaBruce’s piece was first published in two parts as “Wondering... Don’t Get Your Rosaries in a Bunch, Madrid,” in Vice magazine online (February 2012)—it is reprinted here courtesy of Vice magazine; “Richard Kostelanetz and Michael Butterworth in Conversation” was edited by Derek Horton and first published in Soanyway online magazine Issue #13, “Before or Since,” available at: http:www.soanyway.org.uk/beforeorsince.htm; Wu Ming 2’s “How to Tell a Revolution from Everything Else” was first presented as a lecture at the University of North Carolina, April 5, 2011, it is a Creative Commons text available online at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/WM2_UNC_talk_on_revolution.pdf; Nikolaus Müller-Schöll’s “Poverty of Experience: Performance Practices After the Fall” was first published in Danish as “Erfaringsfattigdom. Om visse sceniske praksisser “efter faldet,” Peripeti. Tidsskrift for dramaturgiske studier #14 (2010) 7-16; Judith Malina’s essay was published as an afterword in Judith Malina, The Piscator Notebook (New York: Routledge, 2012); the original text-script by Etcetera/Errorist International for The Errorist Kabaret (2009) was first presented at the 11th Istanbul Biennial and made available by Federiko Zukerfeld; Travis Wilkerson’s “Creative Agitation” manifesto was first published in Cineaste 37:1 (Winter 2011); the conversation between Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt is excerpted from the Kluge film News from Ideological Antiquity. Marx— Eisenstein—Das Kapital / Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike. Marx—Eisenstein—Das Kapital (Alexander Kluge, Germany, 2008); Evan Mauro’s “The Death and Life of the Avant Garde” was first published in Mediations 26:1-2 (Fall 2012-Spring 2013) 119-42; Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen’s essay is a first-time translation of the first chapter of his book Avantgardens selvmord (Copenhagen: 28/6, 2009) 739; Gene Ray’s “Towards a Critical Art Theory” was first published in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, eds. Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional

Critique (London: MayFly Books, 2009) 79-91; John Roberts’ “Revolutionary Pathos, N...