Avant-Garde

Theories and historiographies of the avant-garde have tended to emphasize one of the three dimensions of this basic ideological metaphor—political, formal, and temporal-historical—while downplaying or even excluding the others.

Examples of important formally-based theories and histories include the work of the art critic Clement Greenberg, who conceived of avant-gardism as the intensified focus of artworks on the essential properties of their media and attacked prominent avant-garde multimedial experimentation (such as minimalist sculpture) as leading to a bad theatricality akin to kitsch; Umberto Eco, who in his study The Open Work discussed the avant-garde's construction of works that require participatory completion by performers and audience; Julia Kristeva, who in Revolution in Poetic Language, sought to show how avant-garde poets such as Rimbaud and Mallarmé disrupted the grammatical means by which language functions as a vehicle of normal communication and ideology; and Marjorie Perloff, who traced out in a series of books the landmarks of a "poetics of indeterminacy," a futurist legacy, and a Wittgensteinian poetics.

Theorists of particular importance for the illumination of the political dimension of the avant-garde include Peter Bürger, whose Theory of the Avant-Garde focuses on the institutional status of art as autonomous from social life and the avant-garde's attempt to break down that autonomy and return art to its effective place in society; the urban historian Manfredo Tafuri, who considers the unanticipated role that avant-garde radicalism played in subordinating modern architecture and urbanism to big business, socialist planning, or the capitalist state; Fredric Jameson, who views the avant-garde as an intense site in which the contradictions of late capitalism were given aesthetic and experiential form; and the poststructuralist philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, who interpret avant-garde art as postconceptual models of embodied thinking in which mind, body, and technology merge in novel, free ways.

Theories focused on the temporal and historiographic dimension of the avant-garde are rarer than the other two, more dominant orientations, but these include the writings of the Frankfurt school philosopher Theodor Adorno, especially in his studies of modern music; the poet Octavio Paz's Harvard lectures, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde; Peter Osborne's The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde; and Fredric Jameson's A Singular Modernity.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a theory that accounts holistically for the interactions of all three dimensions of the avant-garde's basic metaphor—its constitutive identification of the formal with the political and the temporal-historical—had yet to appear.