Avant Garde and Modernism
IntroductionFor a period of approximately 100 years, France, and, in particular, Paris, represented the centre of modern art and the home of the world's most innovative artists. From the final quarter of the nineteenth century until the fall of France in June 1940 and subsequent Nazi Occupation, Paris was the meeting point of a cosmopolitan artistic milieu which debated the nature and function of art. The period between the war witnessed an proliferation of movements and innovations and an intensification of debates about art and its function.
In this class, we will attempt to define 'avant garde' and modernism and consider in detail work from an exemplary 'avant garde' artist, Marcel Duchamp, and an exemplary modernist poet, Guillaume Apollinaire. We will discuss Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. and La Fontaine and two poems (Chantre and Fête) from Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes respectively. Both artist and poet were aware of one another's work and Duchamp produced a hommage to Apollinaire (Apolinère Enameled). A selection of Apollinaire's Calligrammes is available at www.ubu.com.
Modernism: Notes Towards A Definition
i) A period in Western culture: The term modernism may be used to refer to a particular historical period, although critics disagree on the dates. Bradbury and McFarlane define the period as 1890-1930 (1976), although it is not uncommon for critics to claim that it starts earlier (e.g. with Baudelaire in the 1850s) and ends later (e.g. the French nouveau roman or writings of Beckett in the 1950s have been described as late modernist). For the purposes of this module, it may be more convient to think of modernism as an early C20th phenomenon with figures like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Manet as anticipating the concerns and innovations of modernism proper.
ii) Representing the modern: central to modernism is a recognition of the newness and constantly changing nature of the world. The dislocations in social relations that result from the chronically mutating nature of the modern world might be said to be one major concern of modernist writers and artists. Hence the importance of the metropolis to modernist art, and its exploitation of the perceptual shocks of the modern city, its bursts of 'information' and sensation, and bizarre juxtapositions and contrasts.
iii) Tradition - v- Modernity: mainstream modernists (Eliot, Apollinaire etc.) sought to find new forms to express their understanding and vision of modernity. However, this did not led to a wholescale rejection of tradition, but, rather, an attempt to find a new perspective on tradition, to reformulate the relationship between tradition and the modern artist.
iv) The autonomy of the art object: mainstream modernists (Eliot, Apollinaire etc.) sought to find new forms to express their understanding and vision of modernity. However, this did not led to a wholescale rejection of tradition, but, rather, an attempt to find a new perspective on tradition, to reformulate the relationship between tradition and the modern artist.
The Avant-Garde: Notes Towards A Definition
i) Rupture with Tradition: The work of the 'avant-garde' was characterized by an impulse to "make it new" (Pound) and by an anti-traditionalism: "Les chefs-d'oeuvres du passé sont pour le passé: ils ne sont pas bons pour nous" (Artaud). Formally at the cutting edge, 'avant-garde' artists sought a total rupture with tradition and attacked the institutions of Art and Literature within bourgeois society. There was a rejection of all absolute aesthetic conventions, criteria and considerations of taste. 'Avant garde' art is characterized by intellectual playfulness, iconoclasm, a cult of unseriousness, and mystification
ii) Formal Subversion: Culture and its norms were viewed as an artificial arrangement to be subverted, parodied and transgressed. Shock tactics and various anti-art gestures (Marcel Duchamp's 'ready-mades' such as La Fontaine - a urinal signed R. Mutt - is a good example) were used to shake public out of its torpid acceptance of outmoded values. 'Avant-garde' art decomposed old frames of reference and broke the implicit correspondence between 'good taste' and 'good art'. The 'avant-garde' aesthetic was characterized by a defamiliarization of the accepted cultural order; it valued fragments, curious collections and unexpected juxtapositions - erotic, exotic, incongruous and unconscious. The interaction of random findings, the spontaneous, the (so-called) primitive, the irrational were prized. Many Surrealists for example frequented the 'marchés aux puces' in Paris for old and neglected cultural artefacts, which they later scrambled, rearranged and converted into art works. Influences? Rimbaud's systematic sensual derangements and Lautréamont's shock imagery: "beau... comme la recontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie". The breaking down of the barrier between conscious and unconscious and the liberation of the imagination (central to the Surrealist aesthetic and implicit in other `avant-garde' art) brought about new aesthetic possibilities and in turn, new perceptions and new social relations. Moreover, the notion of art as representation was subverted: the novel by Breton, and Aragon; poetry by Breton, Aragon and Soupault; drama by Jarry; painting by Dali and Magritte; sculpture by Duchamp; photography by Man Ray and Heartfield and cinema by Dali and Buñuel. Much `avant-garde' art attacks lucidity and clarity and deliberately pursues obscurity.
iii) Crisis of Language: The traumatic experience of the First World War and of Europe's collapse into barbarism provides the context of much 'avant-garde' art. A fissure was created between official discourse (the rhetoric of war, victory, diplomacy etc.) and the language of the creative artist. Language was considered redundant or deficient, a stifling convention in the way of our apprehension of reality. There was a new stress on finding a new language - "trouver une langue" (Rimbaud) - to gatecrash a new and more authentic vision of reality. A predilection for childish or scatological language, language-games, 'écriture automatique', nonsense and a-syntactical poetry, 'calligrammes' (for an example click here), 'newspaper poems' (composed of sentences cut out of newspapers arbitrarily rearranged) and 'images de choc' were all features of 'avant-garde' writing.
iv) Thematic Nihilism: There was a general loss of faith in absolutes: God, Man, Reason, Truth, Beauty, Honour, Authority etc. Reason, logic, language and accepted social values were all rejected. They defined themselves in opposition to the dominant conservative and reactionary forces within society often seeing themselves as aesthetic terrorists antagonistic to accepted social ideals and values. Anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism, gratuitousness, anarchy, and nihilism are clearly implied in the dadaist doctrine of 'antiart for antiart's sake' (the formula of Tristan Tzara). The pervasive elements of negation however, went side by side with a Utopian impulse. There was an affinity with the radical political movements of the day such as Anarchism and Communism and, as in the case of the Italian Futurists, Fascism. 'Avant-garde' artists saw themselves as the harbingers of new forms of social relationships to be built upon the ruins of the old order: "`Transformer le monde', a dit Marx; `changer la vie', a dit Rimbaud: ces deux mots d'ordre ne font qu'un." (Breton).
A Brief Chronology
1907: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1908: Braque and Picasso's first Cubist experiments
1909: Marinetti's Manifesto del Futurismo
1912: Russian Futurist Manifesto, Futurist exhibition in Paris
1913: Apollinaire's Alcools and Les Peintres cubistes, Duchamp's first `ready-mades'
1916: Dada launched in Zürich with Cabaret Voltaire, Hans Arp's first `dessins automatiques'
1917: Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias
1918: Apollinaire's Calligrammes (click here for an example)
1919: First Dada evenings in Berlin, Breton and Soupault's experiment with 'écriture automatique'
1920: Ernst's first collages, Hausmann's first photomontages
1921: Breton and Soupault's Les Champs magnétiques
1922: Publication of Eliot's The Wasteland and Joyce's Ulysses
1924: Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme, publication of the journal La Révolution surréaliste
1926: Aragon's Paysan de Paris, the beginnings of Belgian Surrealism
1928: Breton's Nadja, Dali/Buñuel's Un Chien andalou
1929: Breton's Second manifeste du surréalisme
1930: Publication of Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, Buñuel's L'Age d'or
1931: Breton's Le Surréalisme et le devenir révolutionnaire
1934: Breton's Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme
1937: Picasso's Guernica
Selected Quotations
1) What I understand by 'avant-garde' are thus the trends and tendencies that possess a definite aesthetical, philosophical, in many cases political program. They usually crystallize in creative communities and appear in the first years of our century, starting with Italian Futurism, French Cubism both in art and literature, and German Expressionism in literature and painting. Their first culminating point comes in the first decade of the 20th century, a new wave follows at the beginning of the 1920s (Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism), and their aspect and effect markedly change around 1935-38. We can thus put the first great period of the avant-garde roughly between 1905 and 1938.
M. Szabolcsi, 'Avant-garde, Neo-Avant-garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions' in New Literary History Vol.3, 1971 p.532) We can distinguish three main phases, which had been developing rapidly during the late nineteenth century. Initially, there were innovative groups, which sought to protect their practices within the growing dominance of the art market and against the indifference of the formal academies. These developed into alternative, more radically innovative groupings, seeking to provide their own facilities of production, distribution and publicity; and finally into fully oppositional formations, determined not only to promote their own work but to attack its enemies in the cultural establishments and, beyond these, the whole social order in which these enemies had gained and now exercised and reproduced their power. Thus the defence of a particular kind of art became first the self-management of a new kind of art and then, crucially, an attack in the name of this art on a whole social and cultural order.
It is not easy to make simple distinctions between 'modernism' and the 'avant-garde', especially as many uses of these labels are retrospective. But it can be taken as a working hypothesis that modernism can be said to begin with the second type of group - the alternative, radically innovative experimental artists and writers - while the avant-garde begins with groups of the third, fully oppositional type. The old military metaphor of the vanguard, which had been used in politics and in social thought from at latest the 1830s - and which had implied a position within a general human progress - was now directly applicable to these newly militant movements, even when they had renounced the received elements of progressivism. Modernism had proposed a new kind of art for a new kind of social and perceptual world. The avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as the breakthrough to the future: its members were not the bearers of a progress already repetitiously defined, but the militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity.
Raymond Williams, `The Politics of the Avant-Garde' in Edward Timms and Peter Collier (eds), Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) pp.2-33) The concept of the historical avant-garde movements ... applies primarily to Dadaism and early Surrealism but also and equally to the Russian avant-garde after the October revolution. Partly significant differences between them notwithstanding, a common feature of all these movements is that they do not reject individual artistic techniques and procedures of earlier art but reject that art in its entirety, thus bringing about a radical break with tradition. In their most extreme manifestations, their primary target is art as an institution such as it has developed in bourgeois society. With certain limitations that would have to be determined through concrete analyses, this is also true of Italian Futurism and German Expressionism.
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1984) p.1094) Je préfère définir l'avant-garde en termes d'opposition et de rupture. Tandis que la plupart des écrivains, artistes, penseurs s'imaginent être de leur temps, l'auteur rebelle a conscience d'être contre son temps. En réalité, les penseurs, artistes, ou personnalités de tous ordres n'épousent plus, à partir d'un certain moment, que des formes sclérosées; ils ont l'impression de s'installer de plus en plus solidement dans un ordre idéologique, artistisque, social quelconque, - qui leur semble actuel mais qui déjà s'ébranle, a des fissures qu'ils ne soupçonnent pas. En effet, par la force même des choses, dès qu'un régime est installé, il est déjà dépassé. Dès qu'une forme d'expression est connue elle est déjà périmée. Une chose dite est déjà morte, la réalité est au delà d'elle. Elle est une pensée figée. Une façon de parler - donc une façon d'être - imposée ou simplement admise est déjà inadmissible. L'homme d'avant-garde est comme un ennemi à l'intérieur même de la cité qu'il s'acharne à disloquer, contre laquelle il s'insurge, car, tout comme un régime, une forme d'expression établie est aussi une forme d'oppression. L'homme d'avant-garde est l'opposant vis-à-vis d'un système actuel. Il est un critique de ce qui est, le critique du présent - non pas son apologiste.
Eugène Ionesco, Notes et contre-notes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) pp.26-75) Modernism signals the writers' and artists' heightened sensation of the new and constantly changing social and aesthetic visions of their societies. Thus, I believe that modernism can be used as a comprehensive period term though I use it most frequently to refer to individual writers or groups of writers deeply concerned with the most problematic aspects of their time's modernity, individuals who have been, not incidentally, among the most significant writers of the past century. I believe the term avant-garde can be profitably used to distinguish writers and artists who believe not only that the world they inhabit is essentially modern and that they need to find an aesthetic language to express this newness, but also that they are in some manner in advance of a future state of art and society which their innovative works will help to bring into existence.
Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p.viii6) The adoption of this military-political term is an expression of the writers' self-conscious extremism, an extremism meant to accelerate the disruption of aesthetic and social traditions in order to thrust art and society further and faster into the future.
ibid p.viii-ix7) During the last one hundred years, there have been numerous avant-garde movements and many writers and artists who have called themselves, or have been called avant-garde. Their works and aesthetic programs might appear to have little in common, their historical contexts differ, and the degree of their artistic accomplishment and reception varies. But common to all writers and artists who make up the avant-garde movement are four basic assumptions about their times, their culture, their work, and the aesthetic imagination: (1) the avant-garde perceives itself to be part of a self-consciously modern culture subject to constant socio-historical change; (2) the avant-garde adopts an explicitly critical attitude toward, and asserts its distance from, the dominant values of that culture; (3) each avant-garde movement reflects the writers' and artists' desire that art and the artist may find or create a new role within society and may ally themselves with other existing progressive or revolutionary forces to transform society; (4) but most essentially, the avant-garde explores through aesthetic disruption and innovation the possibilities of creating new art forms and languages which will bring forth new modes of perceiving, expressing, and acting - which will, in effect, proclaim the avant-garde writers as poets, prophets and revolutionaries.
ibid p.48) The avant-garde wants to be more than a merely modernist art, one that reflects its contemporary society; rather, it intends to be a vanguard art, in advance of, and the cause of, significant social change.
ibid p.169) The hallmark of these [avant-garde] movements was a collective project (more or less explicitly defined and often shifting over time) that linked artistic experimentation and a critique of outmoded artistic practices with an ideological critique of bourgeois thought and a desire for social change, so that the activity of writing could be also seen as a genuine intervention in the social, cultural and political arena.
Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990) p.1210) ... 'the death of the avant-garde' [...] cannot be confined to any one moment in this century - such as before or after the last World War - simply because the avant-garde has been dying all along, consciously and voluntarily. If we admit that Dada's nihilism expresses an `archetypal' trait of the avant-garde, we can say that any true avant-garde movement (older or newer) has a profound built-in tendency ultimately to negate itself. When, symbolically, there is nothing left to destroy, the avant-garde is compelled by its own sense of consistency to commit suicide. This aesthetic thanatophilia does not contradict other features usually associated with the spirit of the avant-garde: intellectual playfulness, iconoclasm, a cult of unseriousness, mystification, disgraceful practical jokes, deliberately stupid humor. After all, these and other similar features are perfectly in keeping with the death-of-art aesthetics it has been practising all along.
M. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987) pp.124-5
Further Reading
M. Bradbury & J. McFarlane (eds), Modernism:1890-1930 (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1976)
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1984)
C. Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
M. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987)
A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
P. Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995)
M. Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986)
R. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Mass., University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
C. Russell, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985)
R. Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968)
Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990)
M. Szabolcsi, `Avant-garde, Neo-Avant-garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions' in New Literary History Vol.3 (1971) pp.49-70
Edward Timms and Peter Collier (eds), Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)
J. Weightman, The Concept of the Avant-garde: Explorations in Modernism (London: Alcave Press, 1973)
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Text & concept: Tony McNeill
The University of Sunderland
Last updated: 26.04.2001