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...
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....
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...
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...
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,...
Over the last four years, everyone I know in New York started going to poetry readings. Not occasionally, but all the time. People who aren’t even poets started sharing work at poetry readings regularly (myself included). Notably, there is no particular school of poetics to which the trend adheres. People go, sit, and try to pay attention to whatever is read. Attention is important, because these readings can be dreadfully...
As Baudelaire was quick to note, “avant-garde” was originally a military metaphor — an idiom from the battlefield transposed into the discourse of bohemians longing for some sense of urgency. It’s worth noting, too, that although later avant-gardists rushed to claim him for their own, the poet himself stated that only losers (“minds hardly militant, but made for discipline, in other words conformity, domestic minds, Belgian minds, who can only...
One of the least popular credits to my name on Apple Music is a track called “Prelude to ‘The Mystery Cheese-Ball,’” which was composed by the American experimental musician Joseph Byrd. By “composed,” I mean Byrd devised the simple instructions that constitute the piece: an unspecified ensemble blows up balloons, then releases the air from them as slowly as possible, in a chorus of squeaks and whines. The piece concludes...
Four billion years ago, our planet was a restive place, full of geological commotion. At the earth’s center, a molten metal core began to coalesce, while heat and radioactive energy kept large swaths of the surface liquid. Violent volcanic forces made and remade the landscape. Over eons, magma pooled and hardened, forming some of the oldest and most stable parts of the earth’s crust. Heat, pressure, and fluid heavy with...
We begin in a forest. The camera pushes through a clutch of trees to a clearing that reveals a drop into a ravine. “The owner of this watch has taken a hard fall,” Siri says. We’re listening in, apparently, on an automated 911 call on behalf of Bob B., who crashed while mountain biking and went unconscious. She provides “an estimated search radius of 41 meters” in her familiar clipped...