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Foundations for a Mass Media Avant-Garde

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A sense of the future Foundations For a Mass Media Avant-Garde Omer Krieger MA Fine art Report Slade School of Fine art 7 September 2005 Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Historical Avant-garde a. Concepts, characteristics and problems b. Avant-garde and politics 3. Russian avant-garde a. Constructivism b. Agit-prop c. The case of Gustav Klucis and the Propaganda Kiosk ‘Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda’ 4. Contemporary avant-garde: is there such a thing? a. Deferred action b. The new media avant-garde c. TV CHANNEL (2004-) 5. Appendix: Tomorrow’s Television 6. Bibliography 2 1. Introduction This composition stems from a simple question: what does an avant-garde art practice mean today, and is it possible? In this essay I will explore the concept of avant-garde art, specifically its relation to politics and political change, in an attempt to provide foundations for a contemporary mass media avant-garde. First, I will present concepts and characteristics of the avant-garde, along the positions and insights of Renato Poggioli, Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen. This will be followed by a discussion of Poggioli’s pessimist views on the relations between avant-garde and politics. Then I will approach the question of a mass media avant-garde, through the discussion of Russian avant-garde, which will include Constructivism and agit-prop, and the case of Gustav Klucis’ Propaganda kiosk (1922). I will proceed, evaluating possibilities of a contemporary avant-garde: First, Hal Foster’s optimistic writing on neo-avant-garde as creative critique and the model of deferred action. I will then argue with Lev Manovich and his notion of ‘avant- garde as software’, which suggests new digital media as the avant-garde of the 21st century, and conclude in a brief overview of my project ‘TV CHANNEL’ (2004-), as a sounding board for these issues and concerns. 3 2. The Historical Avant-garde a. Concepts, characteristics and problems In the beginning of ‘The Theory of The Avant-Garde’, Renato Poggioli states a main characteristic feature of the phenomenon of modern culture called ‘avant-garde’. This feature regards the relationship of art and politics in the concept of avant-garde. According to Poggioli, the historical phenomena of the avant-garde contained the subordination of ‘the avant-garde image…to the ideals of a radicalism which was not cultural but political’.1 Quoting a 19 th century French scholar, Poggioli stresses and anchors historically the connection that is constituted in this term between art and politics: ‘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 fulfills its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is’.2 Poggioli marks four general aspects, or moments of avant-garde movements. The first is activism. It implies an existence towards a positive result, a concrete end. ‘The ultimate hope is…the affirmation of the avant-garde spirit in all cultural fields’.3 Nevertheless, claims Poggioli, this activistic moment can be manifest in an existence ‘for no other end but its own self, out of the sheer joy of dynamism, a taste for action, 1 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of The Avant-Garde, Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, England, 1968. p. 9. 2 Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant, “De la Mission de l’art et du rôle de artistes’, 1845, in Poggioli, ibid. 3 Poggioli, p. 25. 4 a sportive enthusiasm, and the emotional fascination of adventure’.4 The antagonistic moment is a second aspect: A spirit of hostility and opposition, which is revealed when we see avant gardists agitating people or institutions of cultural power and tradition. Activism and antagonism can be transcended, says Poggioli, by two extreme attitudes that derive from them: nihilism and agonism. The activistic dynamism inherent in every movement can become nihilism when social controls and moral conventions are abandoned. The urge to destroy the status quo and ‘the febrile anxiety to go always further’ can lead to a self-destructive attitude, defined by Poggioli as the agonistic moment. 5 These two sets of attitudes enable us to start looking at the phenomenon of the avant- garde as a site of tension, rather than a coherent movement or a consistent political idea. Much of the theoretical writing that tries to understand and explain 20th century avant-garde art includes pairs of clashing concepts or seemingly contradictory tendencies that characterize this phenomenon. Poggioli, as we’ve seen, argued that while avant-garde art has been articulating itself as an agent of progress and positivity, it also contains seeds of destruction and negation. Andreas Huyssen focuses in the link between culture and anarchy, from which derive a number of contradictions inherent in the phenomenon of avant-garde. 1. the eminently aristocratic nature of avant-gardism and its displays of the plebian spirit 4 Ibid. 5 Poggioli, p.26. 5 2. Alienation as the situation of the artist in modern society and the particular fascination with the Communist experiment, even though it is totalitarian and antilibertarian, hostile to any individual exception or idiosyncracy. 3. The desire to see realized a destructive impulse and the opposite desire for the latter to serve future construction. The extension of antagonistic and nihilistic tendencies into the political field, to be turned against the whole of bourgeois society rather than against culture alone. 4. The activist impulse leads to militate in a party of action and agitation, while the agonistic and Futurist impulses induce to sacrificing one’s own person, movement and mission to the social palingenesis of the future. Avant-garde Communism is the fruit of a simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic state of mind. 5. As a result – a morbid condition of mystical ecstasy, which contradicts self- criticism and self-knowledge, prevents from realizing that the artist would have neither the reason nor the chance to exist in a Communistic society. 6. (Avant-garde) art can only live in pluralism, which only bourgeois democracies provide, but chooses to promote communism, which is inevitably totalitarian. Communist sympathies can favor the avant-garde spirit only within a bourgeois and capitalist society.6 6 Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Hidden Dialectic: The Avant-garde-Technology-Mass Culture’, in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, Kathleen Woodward, Ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Henley. 6 Peter Bürger deduced from the historical avant-garde a logic, according to which we can formulate a problem that is at the core of this essay.7 On the one hand, the ambitions of avant-garde art were intrinsically placed in and targeted towards the public sphere, informed, encouraged and enthralled by new technologies, in the attempt to reach a high level of popularity, and thus become a new mass culture. On the other hand, it is often too new to be understood by its public. If indeed the new cannot be recognized as such (categorically, like Boris Groys argues, following Kierkegaard)8, then maybe innovation is an intrinsic quality of the avant-garde, which explains the failure of the avant-garde’s ambition to be popular. The plot thickens, or the problem develops when we add to this equation [new = - (popular)] another factor – the state. The power of the Bolshevik revolution was exercised in order to enforce (or at least massively propagate) innovation on the population. What happens when avant-garde’s ethos of negation meets the power of the state? In the case of revolutionary Russia, is it transformed by the appropriation of the state to a position of an affirmative agent in culture, and thus dies? Or does it maintain its soul of resistance even as official art of the state?9 There are several possible histories of the rise and dominance of Russian avant-garde after 1917, and of its decline. 7 This is a good point to join Hal Foster’s doubts about the attempt to theorize avant-garde while using so few concrete practices. One cannot go on writing too many general statements about this phenomenon without asking oneself what practices are included under this title, and is such a unified discussion helpful at all, given the differences between the different avant-garde parctices. It seems a new category, or new sub-categoies would be helpful. 8 Boris Groys, ‘On the New’, http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html 9 The latter dynamic can be elicited from TJ Clark‘s ‘Farewell to an Idea’. Maybe it is the case that traces of doubt and difference from Futurism, and especially Suprematism have found their way to agitprop practices. Nevertheless, this kind of reading would be influenced by what we believe agitprop’s value as art is. 7 The question of innovation is indeed central to the notion and artistic legacy of the historical avant-garde. ‘The New’ is a recurring concept in its artworks and art writing. Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915, in Moscow: ‘to create means to live, forever creating newer and newer things’.10 The relation of the idea of artistic innovation and radical politics in the Russian avant-garde is evident in the term ‘Futurism’ which was attributed to and adopted by artists creating new forms and wishing to abandon ‘old’ forms of expression, as part of the creation of a new culture, for a new society. Gradually, with the growing support and participation of avant- garde artists in the Bolshevik party and Revolution, the term ‘Futurist’ became a signifier of a leftist artist, committed to a political and artistic Revolution and to Bolshevism as a progressive political power in Russia and the whole world.
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