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July 11, 2023
Dark Forces at Work
Becca Rothfeld
The iron law of cultural production is that everything is always getting worse. Pick a moment — any moment — and there is sure to be a catastrophist in tow, waving her arms and warning that a crisis is upon us. The death of the novel or the poem is declared with dependable regularity, and criticism has been crumbling since its inception. New Critic John Crowe Ransom bemoaned the state...
July 11, 2023
Uncommon Sights
Melissa Anderson
On a recent Sunday afternoon, I was one of nearly a hundred spectators at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater taking in a program of shorts by the protean Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Less than two hours later, I was downtown at Anthology Film Archives for a sold-out screening that played as part of the third edition of Prismatic Ground, a festival devoted to (mostly) new experimental work of...
July 11, 2023
Senseless Babble
Dean Kissick
So far as I’m aware, nobody in art — and the same goes for the literary scene — is even trying to be avant-garde. Much of the art world is actively and outspokenly opposed to the idea of aesthetic progress or provocation, and has turned backwards, into an arrière-garde. Dead artists, forgotten artists, and traditional mediums and styles are favored exactly because they are implicit rejections of the present and...
July 9, 2023
Bland Bloodsuckers
Jamie Hood
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est mort” (“to be avant-garde is to know that which has died”). And death, too, is...
July 11, 2023
History Is a Merry-Go-Round
Marta Figlerowicz
One cannot think about the avant-garde without committing oneself to a theory of history. The term “avant-garde” was first applied to art in the early nineteenth century amid the euphoria of Europe’s accelerating technological and cultural domination over the rest of the globe. It became particularly associated with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism, when European narratives of historical progress — from both the right and the left — pointed...
July 11, 2023
True Outlaw Music
Alphonse Pierre
In hip-hop, the most powerful voices also tend to be master self-marketers, so when I hear “avant-garde” thrown around in the industry, I get ready to be sold some bullshit. I’ve come to associate the term with a brand: post-Yeezus Kanye West, when white acceptance became his priority, or the Griselda rapper Westside Gunn’s goes-to-a-museum-once music, which equates referencing the “Salvator Mundi” to high art. Even though the avant-garde label...
July 11, 2023
On the One Hand
Eugene Lim
On the one hand, I think now is a fine time to despair. Reality television may have been the first nail in the coffin of conceptual art — a shock-and-cringe military strategy that destroyed the institution of consensus reality. That is, it’s always darkest before it gets really really dark. Even as the nets of social media divide us into impotent sports teams, they herd and defang our wild imagination....
July 10, 2023
New Rules to Break
Liza Batkin
When dancers refer to the avant-garde, they tend, counterintuitively, to mean something old: experimental artists in the 1960s and 1970s in New York, who worked largely out of lofts and Judson Memorial Church. Modern dance, by that point, had moved beyond ballet’s pointe shoes, tilted heads, and sweet violins, but the avant-gardists went further. Yvonne Rainer wrote a manifesto in 1965 that rejected spectacle and virtuosity. Trisha Brown strung unremarkable...
July 11, 2023
Aesthetics in Purgatory
Gabriel Kuri
It is pretty difficult to say something about the necessity and possibility of radicality — the kind that fueled the avant-garde — that doesn’t sound either scripted or pessimistic. But it cannot be understated that the sustained cohesion necessary to build vanguard movements feels increasingly unlikely; today, the menace of instantaneous visibility seems to promptly unravel artistic intent. The period of germination for anything that thrives on ambiguity, contradiction, or...
July 11, 2023
That Moment Barely Survived
Lucy Sante
As soon as I understood the concept of an avant-garde, I wanted to be part of it. That was in the late 1960s, when the border between avant-garde and popular culture was at its most porous. At that point, the term referred less to revolutionary art than to art that flaunted a sense of historical progression. Many if not most of the ideas in play dated back to the 1910s,...
