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One of the most helpful discussions of the historical Avant-Garde
is Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. Bürger
sees the Avant-Garde as a critical development out of and reaction to
Aestheticism, especially in terms of the notion of the autonomy of art.
Bürger distinguishes between modernism and the avant-garde.
Both, he claims, are the children of Aestheticism, but whereas Modernism
accepts its autonomous status and revels in its distinction from bourgeois
society, the avant-garde, on the other hand, challenges this very autonomy and
distinction. The avant-garde does this by challenging the institution of art itself, the conventional means and modes of the contextualization and reception
of art in society.
For my purposes here, I will simply list the elements he
attributes to any avant-garde practice:
1. advance on modernist aestheticism assumptions of autonomy and
laying bare of the medium
2. nonorganic work of art
3. montage
4. the new
5. chance
6. shock
7. attack on the institution of art itself
8. attempt to reintegrate art into social praxis
These elements could be stitched together into a sentence: The
avant-garde work, in its attempt to distance itself from Modernist defeatism,
highlights the contextualizing and normalizing functions of the institution of
art itself by decontextualizing and repositioning its elements into a montage
that, in its very novelty and apparent aleatoric assemblage, shocks the
reader/viewer/participant into a new anticipatory social praxis in which the
work of art leads the way towards social reconstitution.
In Bürger’s words, “The recipient’s
attention no longer turns to a meaning of the work that might be grasped by a
reading of its consituent elements, but to the principle of construction”
(Theory of the Avant-Garde 81).