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Signals and Noise: Art, Literature and the Avant-Garde

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Signals and Noise: Art, Literature and the Avant-Garde Signals and Noise: Art, Literature and the Avant-garde Lisa Otty PhD English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2008 Thesis Abstract One of the most consistent features of the diverse artistic movements that have flourished throughout the twentieth century has been their willingness to experiment in diverse genres and across alternative art forms. Avant-gardes such as Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Fluxus and Pop were composed not only of painters but also dramatists, musicians, actors, singers, dancers, sculptors, poets and architects. Their works represent a dramatic process of cross- fertilization between the arts, resulting in an array of hybrid forms that defy conventional categorisation. This thesis investigates implications of this cross-disciplinary impulse and aims by doing so to open out a site in which to reassess both the manner in which the avant-gardes have been theorised and the impact their theorisation has had on contemporary aesthetics. In the first part of this study, I revisit the work of the most influential theorists of the avant-garde in order to ask what the term “avant-garde” has come to signify. I look at how different theories of the avant-garde and of modernism relate to one another as well as asking what effect these theories have had on attempts to evaluate the legacies of the avant-gardes. The work of Theodor Adorno provides a connective tissue throughout the thesis. In Chapter One, I use it to complicate Peter Bürger’s notion of the avant-garde as “anti-art” and to argue that the most pressing challenge that the avant-gardes announce is to think through the cross-disciplinarity that marks their work. In Chapter Two, I trace how painting has come to be considered as the paradigmatic modernist art form and how, as a result, the avant-garde has been read as a secondary, “literary” phenomenon to be grasped through its relation to painting. I argue that this constitutes a systematic devaluation of literature and has resulted in an “art historical” model of the avant-gardes which represses both their real radicality and implications of their work for these kinds of disciplinary structures. In the second part of this thesis, I explore works which examine and question the aesthetic hierarchies and notions of aesthetic autonomy that the theories of modernism and the avant-garde explored in the first part set up. In Chapter Three, I approach by way of two cross-disciplinary works which employ literature and visual art: Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) and Andy Warhol’s a; a novel (1968). Works such as these, which slip through the gaps between literary and art history, have, I argue, important implications for literary and visual aesthetics but are often overlooked in disciplinary histories. In my final chapter, I return to the theory of the avant-garde as it emerges in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. I examine how his work reconfigures Adorno’s aesthetics by performing the cross-disciplinary movement that it argues is characteristic of avant-garde art works. Tracing his “post-aesthetic” response to Duchamp and Warhol, I explore how Lyotard articulates a mode of practice that moves beyond the dichotomy of “art” and “anti- art” and opens out a site in which the importance of the twentieth century avant-gardes is made visible. I conclude by briefly considering the implications of the avant-garde, as I have presented it in this thesis, for contemporary debates on the twenty-first century “digital avant-gardes” and recent writing on aesthetics. I verify that I composed this thesis which consists of my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree or qualification. Lisa Otty, MA, MSc Acknowledgements I would not have begun this thesis were it not for the enthusiasm and generosity of the late Dietrich Scheuneman. The project benefited enormously along the way from the help of Simon Malpas, a scholar both brilliant and kind, and also from discussion with my peers in the Graduate School, notably Joe Hughes, whose enthusiasm is always contagious, and Hanna Sommerseth, whose friendly challenges encouraged me to clarify and defend my ideas. The greatest debt of thanks of course goes to those who were with me each step of the way; my parents, whose love, patience and support make possible everything I do, and my siblings, who remind me there is more to life than books. Finally and most importantly, my thanks, along with my love and admiration, go to J-F, whose name is unmentioned in this thesis but whose presence underwrites every word. List of Illustrations 1.1 Stieglitz, Alfred. Photograph of Duchamp’s Fountain. 1917. 15 1.2 Warhol, Andy. 32 Soup Cans. 1961-62. 24 1.3 Duchamp, Marcel. Wanted: $2,000 Reward. 1923. 51 1.4 Duchamp, Marcel. Genre Allegory (Allégorie de Genre). 1943. 52 1.5 Duchamp, Marcel. Written Wrotten (Morceaux Moisis). 1919. 56 1.6 Duchamp, Marcel. Dust jacket for “Marcel Duchamp: Ready-mades, etc. 61 (1913-1964)” by Arturo Schwarz. 1964. 2.1 Duchamp, Marcel. Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. 1912. 65 2.2 Duchamp, Marcel. Dulcinea. 1911. 87 2.3 Warhol, Andy. Blue Electric Chair. 1963. 95 2.4 Warhol, Andy. Orange Disaster (Electric Chair). 1963. 96 3.1 Duchamp, Marcel. Green Box (exterior). 1934. 129 3.2 Duchamp, Marcel. Green Box (interior). 1934. 129 3.3 Duchamp, Marcel. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 131 (Large Glass). 1915-1923. 3.4 Duchamp, Marcel. 3 Standard Stoppages. 1913-1914. 133 3.5 Warhol, Andy. a; a novel. page 265. 1968. 148 3.6 Warhol, Andy. a; a novel. page 39. 1968. 155 3.7 Duchamp, Marcel. The. 1915. 166 3.8 Duchamp, Marcel. Rendezvous of Sunday 6th of February 1916. 1916. 166 4.1 Baquié, Richard. Untitled: Reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s 181 Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. 1991. Contents Introduction 1 1. “Art” and the Erosion of the Arts 14 1. Anti-Art and the Death of the Avant-Garde 17 2. “Art” and Media 28 3. Adorno: Art, Force and the Collective Undercurrent 34 4. Fountain and Lits et Ratures 47 2. Modernisms and Media: Painting, Literature and Language 64 1. The Studio and the Library 64 2. “Literature,” Painting and Poetry: Greenberg’s Avant-Garde 70 3. Avant-gardism and Medium Scrambling 84 4. From Dada to Pop and Back Again: Avant-Garde and Trauma 92 5. Painting, Theory and Pictorial Nominalism 103 6. Fugitive Experience and the Conventions of Art 112 3. The Matter of Words: Literature and Books 122 1. “Illumanistic Scribism”: Duchamp, Mallarmé and the Book 132 2. The Mechanical Scribe: Automatism, Realism and a; a novel 144 3. Calligraful Writing: Nonsense and the Generative Potential 156 of Word Play 4. The Figuration of a Possible: Rewriting the Critical Relation 169 1. Paraesthetics and Post-aesthetics 172 2. The Magical Square 179 3. The Hinge 189 4. A Mechanical Asceticism: Automatism and the Bachelor Machines 196 5. I’ll be Your Mirror: Dissimulating the Critical Relation 202 6. The Sublime as Material Moment 208 7. The Post-Aesthetic Avant-Garde: Freedom, Invention and Obligation 217 Conclusion: Interfering with the Avant-garde 228 Appendix: Diagram of the Large Glass 233 Bibliography 234 Introduction “There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words,” remarked the artist Marcel Duchamp in a 1968 interview, “they have a value greater than their meaning in the dictionary” (Cabanne Dialogues 16). One word of which this is certainly true, and a word heavily associated with Duchamp himself, is “avant-garde”. The term has a long history that encompasses political, military and aesthetic discourses and has been used to describe cultural developments since at least the early nineteenth century.1 Yet, in the course of the last few decades, since the year in which Duchamp made his remarks in fact, the expression “avant-garde” seems to have become increasingly freighted with meaning, associated with a specific set of twentieth-century artistic movements and intimately linked with the hopes and disappointments of late modernity. In this thesis, I examine this process, analysing how the avant-garde was theorised in the last decades of the twentieth century and exploring the debates that these theorisations have provoked. My primary aim is to interrogate how the theorisation of the avant-garde has impacted both upon our understanding of specific types of art work and upon aesthetics more broadly. The development of the term “avant-garde” and the debates over the its usage are to a great extent the result of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-garde, which was published in 1974 but is nevertheless very much infused with the disappointment that followed the events of May 1968. Clearly delimiting the concept for the first time,2 Bürger’s text used the term to describe the various radical artistic movements of early twentieth-century Europe. These “historical avant-gardes”, he argued, sought to restore a 1 It is well known that the term has military origins and that its application to artistic production dates back to at least 1825, when it was used by Henri Saint-Simon. However, as this thesis is an examination of how the term has been used in the late twentieth century and what it has come to mean since the 1970s, I will not rehearse the full history of the term here. For a comprehensive history of the word and its usage before the period I am discussing see Calinescu 95-148. For a discussion of how the term is used in different countries, something this thesis will touch on in Chapter Two, see Bäckström.
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