THE AVANT-GARDE IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE AVANT-GARDE!

MARTIN PUCHNER

I.

Theories of the death of the avant-garde are not difficult to come by these days.1 Frequently, they are grounded in the alleged demise of the manifesto, a genre that epitomises the utopian progressivism of the early twentieth century and thus everything that the postmodern present is not. The reported death of the manifesto thus becomes the symptom and proof of the death of the avant-garde more generally. Peter Bürger (1974) is one proponent of this historiography, whose underlying assumptions, however, are surprisingly widespread. They can also be found in Perry Anderson’s influential The Origins of Postmodernity (1998):

Since the seventies, the very idea of an avant-garde, or of individual genius, has fallen under suspicion. Combative, collective movements of innovation have become steadily fewer, and the badge of a novel, self-conscious ‘ism’ ever rarer. For the universe of the postmodern is not one of delimitation, but intermixture – celebrating the cross-over, the hybrid, the pot-pourri. In this climate, the manifesto becomes outdated, a relic of an assertive purism at variance with the spirit of the age. (Anderson 1998: 93)

There is a gulf between manifesto modernism and a post-manifesto postmodernism that turns the manifesto into an “outdated” “relic” incapable of capturing the “spirit of the age”. While historians of decadence and demise have decided that the time of the manifesto is over, various political, social, and artistic groups and individuals have continued writing them with impunity. What are we to make of these facts on the ground, the repeated resurgences of manifesto writing since the end of avant-gardes of the early twentieth century? Given the close affinity between the idea of 352 Martin Puchner the avant-garde and the genre of the manifesto, such resurgences are good occasions for raising the question of the relation between what is often called the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde. In the following pages I will use the repeated waves of manifesto writing, as well as the types of manifestos produced, to track the changing attitudes toward the avant-garde in the sixties and beyond. Scattered texts had been called manifestos for centuries, but it was Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto that gathered these texts into a distinct genre. The Communist Manifesto is a text forged in accordance with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers should not only interpret the world, but also change it. Divided between doing away with the past and ushering in the future, the Communist Manifesto seeks to produce the arrival of the modern revolution through an act of self-foundation and self-creation: we, standing here and now, must act! Manifestos tend to present themselves as mere means to an end, demanding to be judged not by their rhetorical or literary merits – their poetry – but rather by their ability to change the world. But Marx also emphasised their form, which articulates most succinctly the desires and hopes, manoeuvres and strategies of modernity: to create points of no return; to make history; to fashion the future. Some time in the second half of the nineteenth century, an art manifesto split off from the political manifesto, so that now different types of manifestos found themselves in a fierce competition with one another, at times seeking to build on their common ancestry and at others trying to establish their independence from one another. André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art (1938), can be seen as one of many attempts to bring the political manifesto and the art manifesto together again. The theme of this widely circulated text, how art should relate to politics, was also a question of authorship, how avant-gardists such as Breton should collaborate with professional revolutionaries such as Trotsky, and of form, how the art manifesto should relate to the political manifesto. Towards a Free Revolutionary Art (1938) expresses the troubled relations among political and artistic avant-gardes in the thirties; it also marks the end of an era characterised by the twin concepts of revolution and manifesto. During the forties and fifties, marred by WWII and reconstruction, avant-garde art and manifesto politics receded into the background, at least in the West, even though they never went entirely away.