In general one might say that Bürger’s claims were deemed too theoretical (i.e. Avant-garde techniques and contents that used to be shocking are turned into easily assimilated gimmicks, empty procedures that can be reproduced and grasped by all.īenjamin Buchloh (1984), Hal Foster (1996), and Dietrich Scheunemann (2005) have criticized Bürger both for his overly positive ideas about the avant-garde and for his bleakly pessimistic conceptualization of the neo-avant-garde. The neo-avant-garde thus may seem a perfectly tuned re-enactment, but it is basically an empty rehearsal (1984: 61).
The original revolutionary ethos, with its refusal of autonomous and institutionalized art, is defeated by what Bürger perceives as the necessary “institutionaliz the avant-garde as art” (Bürger 1984: 57). After the Second World War, neo-artists used the historical avant-garde and its techniques to legitimize their art, banking on and enhancing the fashionable and institutionalized status of the avant-garde. Bürger’s historical avant-garde reacted against the modernist reification and autonomization of art it attacked the institution of art (not via a nihilistic destruction but via a Hegelian Aufhebung or sublation) and it tried to reconnect art with life. Moreover, the term is sometimes used without any precise definition hence the need for a theoretically and historically informed study of the history of the term and its creative instantiations over the last few decades.Īs is well known, Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984, originally published in German in 1974) offered a fairly utopian view of the avant-garde and a rather dystopian picture of the neo- or post-avant-garde. Though the term ‘neo-avant-garde’ and its concomitant reference to the historical avant-garde have become ubiquitous in art history, neither the label nor the historical linkage have yet made it into the canon of literary historiography. This introduction written by the editors of the OELN is an abbreviated version of the introduction to the volume Neo-Avant-Gardes: Post-War Literary Experiments Across Borders (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
Introduction: Neo-Avant-Garde, Why Bother?
0 kommentar(er)
