1. The avant
garde is
dead

2. At the vanguard
“Art, the expression of society,
manifests, in its highest soaring,
the most advanced social
tendencies; it is the forerunner and
the revealer. Therefore to know
whether art worthily fulfils its
proper mission as initiator, whether
the artist is truly avant garde, one
must know where Humanity is
going, know what the destiny of
the human race is…”
Laverdant “De la mission de l’art et du role
des artistes” 1845
Quoted in Linda Nochlin The Invention of
the Avant Garde in “The Politics of Vision”
pg. 2

3. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
• Avant Garde art should be
above, beyond, distinct from the
academy and market. The
symbolic embodiment of arts
freedom. An alternative and
antidote to the commercial,
managerial ‘spirit’ of capitalism.
• SHOCK AND TRANSGRESSION
• The power of the ‘new’.
Permanent revolution.
Overthrowing the tyranny of
tradition.

4. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
Transgression and Critique
• Socially, morally, sexually
transgressive
• (Politically) critical of the
status quo
• Avant gardist work
expresses a sense of
alienation from the norms
of society - explicitly and
implicitly advocating a
social, political revolution
as well as an artistic one.
• The avant gardist is
viewed as an outsider, a
rebel, a martyr

5. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
• Questions what is
permissible as art
• Focuses on subject
matter and material
previously ignored as
ignoble, base, vulgar or
banal
• Asserts that this trash
or kitsch possesses
aesthetic and
intellectual value

6. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
The paradox of avant gardism..new forms for new audiences?
• “The approval of
the public is to be
avoided like the
plague”
Andre Breton

7. Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde
• Opposition and
absorption.
• The radical is
domesticated.

8. Changes to the Avant Garde
The Loss of the ‘Enemy’
The death of the bourgeois - post 45
• The Sociologist Max Weber
defined the bourgeois as a
social class with its own sense
of collective identity,
characteristic moral codes and a
set cultural habitus. Their
culture was premised on a
sense of propriety and morality.
• The wide ranging social
changes that occurred post
Second World War radical
altered the power and position
of this class.

9. Changes to the Avant Garde
The birth of the culture industry - the start of a cultural cold war
• The old enemies and
old certainties of avant
gardist work were
threatened by the rapid
growth of popular
culture post 45.
• For many self professed
avant gardists popular,
mass or kitsch was the
new enemy

10. The cultural apocalypse
“Our culture, on its lower
and popular levels, has
plumbed abysses of
vulgarity and falsehood
unknown in the discoverable
past; not in Rome, not in the
Far east or anywhere has
daily life undergone such
rapid and radical change as
it has in the West in the last
century and half”
“Pop was slowing to a
halt..suffice to say that it goes
Clement Greenberg ‘ down like candy...it’s not bad art,
The Plight of Culture’ but art on a low level, and fun on
a low level too.”
Clement Greenberg quoted in
Brandon Taylor ‘Art of Today’

11. Advance?
or Retreat?

12. Avant Gardism and Political Radicalism

13. Avant garde practice “no merchant trades in my soul”
• Performance
• Video
• Installation
• Feminist
• Conceptual
• Political
• Anti Aesthetic

14. Martha Rosler
“The Bowery: In Two Inadequate
Descriptive Systems (detail) 1974-75

15. POSTMODERN AVANT GARDISM IN THE 1980’S
“A zeitgeist of cynicism” David Hopkins

16. Death of the avant garde?
All art was reduced to the level of a
commodity. There was no
distance or alternative space for
the kind of critical, oppositional
‘alternative’ position modernist
avant gardists had adopted.
From resistance to complicity.
Haim Steinbach
Untitled (3 drinking containers), 1992
plastic, laminated wood shelf with objects
21 x 23 x 7 cm

17. From resistance to complicity -the neo avant garde
Haim Steinbach
pink accent 2, 1987.
Two “schizoid” rubber masks, two chrome
trash receptacles, and four “Alessi” tea kettles
on chrome, aluminum and wood shelf.
Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds
from Marianne and Sheldon B. Lubar, Vicki and
Allan McCollum Allen Samson, and Dr. and Mrs. James Stadler.

18. Jeff Koons
Ashley Bickerton
‘Le Art’ 1987

19. The Anti Avant Gardist? - Reasons to be Cheerful Part 1
Bravo Bravo - baiting the art world
An ex wall street broker
Koons actively sought to
provoke a kind of moral
queasiness and repulsion
amongst the art world
intelligentsia. In his personae, his
unapologetic embrace of self
promotion, his relaxed attitude to
openly discussing money (the
elephant in the room for the liberal,
politically correct component of the
art world) and his dedication to
opening up the Pandora’s box of
taste and class, he ‘succeeded’ in
provoking the kind of shock,
irritation and disgust typical of the
‘modernist’ avant gardist.

23. The Anti Avant Gardist?
Reasons to be Cheerful part 2
No Irony (?)
• While the majority of his
contemporaries used or
appropriated objects from
consumer culture in an
ironic, critical reflection of
the soullessness of
consumer culture, Koons
openly stated he chose
figures like Popples
because he had a deep
affection for them -
because he responded to
them -because he ‘loved
them’.

24. "I like the things that I like, I like
colour, and I like materialism and I
like seductiveness. And to me
these things are absolutely
beautiful. And if I didn't think these
things were beautiful and they
weren't spiritual to me I wouldn't
work with them".
Jeff Koons

25. Reasons to be cheerful part 3- Collapsing Critical Distance

26. “The regimentation of human movement, activity and perception accompanies
the geometric division of space/ It is governed by the use of time-keeping
devices, the application of standards of normalcy, and the police apparatus. In
the factory, human movement is made to conform to rigorous spatial and
temporal geometries.”
Peter Halley

27. I find art's ability to guide,
direct, and manipulate to be
exciting. The only direction I
see for art is as a tool for
manipulating it public on
every level - a political tool. I
don't know if this places art
above, below or parallel with
advertising. [...] The
techniques are the same.
The audience is the same. I
can never tell the difference
between them and us. We
are them. I am mass as
much as I am I.
Jeff Koons

28. Reasons to be Cheerful Part 4
Crafty anti modernism
“my god it actually looks like he loves these…things!”
• In 1986/7 the material
execution of Koons work
radically changed. While
artists such as Haim
Steinbach continued to use
ready mades, Koons went to
extraordinary lengths and
costs to have everyday toys
and trinkets remade and
enlarged by American and
Northern European
craftsmen .
• For the art world this was
disturbing - he appeared to
be taking this stuff seriously.

32. The unacceptability of being a Fan
Up until this point the choice
had seemed straightforward
enough for an artist
appropriating popular culture:
either you brought suspicion
on yourself or you brought
suspicion on popular culture.
In all appropriationist work
suspicion fell squarely on the
culture outside art. Despite
the talk of postmodern art
existing in a transformed
position in the culture, there
was still the old prejudice that
art was a superior form of
culture, and therefore the only
cultural form in a privileged
enough position to criticise.

34. Reasons to be cheerful part 5
Talking pleasure in learning to love

35. • For Koons his love of popular forms
was a form of submission, for sure,
but a submission that casts him/you
neither as victim nor victimiser, but
in some way both. To think of
Koons' relationship to popular
culture, as a form of love is to have
him entangled in the operations of
power, exploitation and seduction to
which he is not blind but submits
nonetheless. This is the case,
anyway, so long as it isn't assumed
that love is always sweet, never
critical, and can stomach no
tension. Koons' love for Popples, in
this view, needn't mean that he was
utterly naive, nor that consumer
culture is innocent, presents no
danger, or has no unctuous effects.
Rather, Koons 'falls for' popular
culture despite himself, and despite
its subjection of him.

36. Made in Heaven
Disappearing of the Map

42. 42

43. 43

44. 44

46. • Koons reimagined or rethought some central ideas about what it
might mean to be an avant garde artist in the 1980’s.
• He thoroughly dispensed with the idea that artists could or
should operate outside the entertainment or culture industry. For
Koons arts absorption into entertainment was inevitable and
they might as well seize the opportunities that would arise for
making art more popular, accessible and visible.
• While, as with many classic avant gardists he rejected what he
saw as outmoded ideas about how art should be made (i.e
solely by the artist) his use of other craftsmen to fabricate his
work created art works were the technical and material quality of
the finished work was central.
• His aesthetic and moral ‘transgressions’, his ‘shocks’ weren’t
always typically avant gardist in tone or content. The shocks that
accompanied his work arose from his assertion of loving popular
culture and loving his wife....

47. Post Koons
Sylvie Fleury

48. “In placing her favourite classics
from the realms of fashion and
design on a pedestal and elevating
them to the status of tradition
shaping museum exhibits, Sylvie
Fleury emphasises the interaction
and interchangeability of art, design,
and fashion in terms of social value
and significance in an attitude of
unquestioning acceptance that goes
beyond Jeff Koons still deliberately
provocative gesture of translating a
trivial object into the material of high
art”
Renate Wiehager

54. “The world of luxury, beauty and
fashion is a world of utopias, longings
hopes and promises, a world that
suggests the possibility of creating a
whole new life, a freely chosen self
designed and self determined
existence. Sylvie Fleury gives shape
and substance to a realm of our
collective fantasy that was for many
centuries reserved to art and to
religious allegorical art in particular.
She presents images of this symbolic
exchange to us without the intent to
accuse or defame, simply taking note,
leaving it to us to comprehend her
visually and appealing ensembles as
enlightening contributions as well.”
Peter Wiebel

55. Takashi Murakami

56. "While in the United
States cultural
insurgency is associated
with an anti capitalist,
Marxist attitude, in Japan
to have success within
the mass culture as an
independent producer of
works that hail from the
subculture of anime
fandom may be an
equally valid form of
resistance"
Amanda Cruz