Avant-garde (French pronunciation: [avɑ̃ɡaʁd]) means "advance guard" or "vanguard".^[1] The adjective form is used in English, to refer to people or works that are experimental Experiment is the step in the scientific method that arbitrates between competing models or hypotheses. Experimentation is also used to test existing theories or new hypotheses in order to support them or disprove them. An experiment or test can be carried out using the scientific method to answer a question or investigate a problem. First an or innovative, particularly with respect to art Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, culture Culture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:, and politics Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in other group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. It consists of "social relations involving authority or power" and refers to.

Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm Social norms are the behavioral expectations and cues within a society or group. This sociological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit. Failure to follow the rules can result in severe punishments, including or the status quo Status quo, a commonly used form of the original Latin "statu quo" - literally "the state in which" - is a Latin term meaning the current or existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are. The related phrase status quo ante, literally "the state in which before",, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term, as distinct from postmodernism Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through the Situationists The Situationist International was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France to postmodern artists such as the Language poets The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In developing their poetics, members of the Language school took as their starting point the emphasis on method evident in the modernist tradition, particularly as represented by Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky around 1981.^[2]

Working definition

The term was originally used to describe the foremost part of an army advancing into battle (also called the vanguard or literally the advance guard) and now applied to any group, particularly of artists, that considers itself innovative and ahead of the majority.^[3]

The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled soldiers A soldier is a member of the land component of national armed forces; whereas a soldier hired for service in a foreign army would be termed a mercenary. In most languages, "soldier" includes commissioned and non-commissioned officers in national land forces, explores the terrain Terrain, or land relief, is the vertical dimension of land surface. When relief is described underwater, the term bathymetry is used. Topography has recently become an additional synonym, though in many parts of the world it retains its original more general meaning of description of place ahead of a large advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow. This concept is applied to the work done by small collectives of intellectuals An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity and artists An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only. The term is often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for society to follow.

The origin of the application of this French French is a Romance language spoken as a first language by about 136 million people worldwide. Around 190 million people speak French as a second language, and an additional 200 million speak it as an acquired foreign language. French speaking communities are present in 57 countries and territories. Most native speakers of the language live in term to art is still debated.

The term also refers to the promotion of radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel," (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”, 1825) which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now-customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde," insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political, and economic reform.^[4] Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with "art for art's sake "Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, ''l'art pour l'art'', and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function. Such works are sometimes described as "autotelic",", focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical experience, rather than with wider social reform.

Theorizing the avant-garde

Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity with limited success. One of the most useful and respected analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon remains the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli Renato Poggioli was an Italian literary critic and specialist in Russian literature. He is known for his book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia of 1962, translated into English as The Theory of the Avant-garde. In it he argued for the strict connection of the avant garde with the legacy of Romanticism's 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry and music to show that vanguardists may be seen as sharing certain ideals or values which are manifested in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopted, vanguard culture being shown to be a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism The term bohemian, of French origin, was first used in the English language in the nineteenth century to describe the non-traditional lifestyles of marginalised and impoverished artists, writers, journalists, musicians, and actors in major European cities. Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social.^[5]

Other authors have attempted to both clarify and extend Poggioli's study. The German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work."^[6]

Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art historians such as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, while older critics like Bürger continue to view the postwar neo-avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century, others like Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg was an influential American art critic closely associated with Modern art in the United States. In particular, he promoted the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.^[7]

Avant-garde and mainstream society

The concept of avant-garde refers exclusively to marginalised artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is not only opposed to mainstream commercial values, but often has an abrasive social or political edge. Many writers, critics and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch Avant-Garde and Kitsch is the title of a 1939 essay by Clement Greenberg, first published in the Partisan Review, in which he claimed that avant-garde and modernist art was a means to resist the 'dumbing down' of culture caused by consumerism. Greenberg termed this 'kitsch', a word that his essay popularized by New York art critic Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg was an influential American art critic closely associated with Modern art in the United States. In particular, he promoted the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock, published in Partisan Review The journal was founded by William Phillips, Philip Rahv, and Sender Garlin. It grew out of the John Reed Club as an alternative to New Masses, the publication of the American Communist Party, but became staunchly anti-Communist after Joseph Stalin secured his place at the head of the Soviet Union. Many of its early authors were the children of in 1939.^[8] As the essay’s title suggests, Greenberg conclusively showed not only that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to "high" or "mainstream" culture, but that it also has rejected the artificially synthesized mass culture Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, specifically Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily that has been produced by industrialization. Each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism—they are all now substantial industries—and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal. Kitsch also refers to the types of: phony, faked or mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from vanguard culture. For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. It was a matter of style without substance. In this sense Greenberg was at pains to distance true avant-garde creativity from the market-driven fashion change and superficial stylistic innovation that are sometimes used to claim privileged status for these manufactured forms of the new consumer culture Consumerism is the idea that personal happiness can be obtained through consumption, the purchase of goods and services. One of the phrases supporting consumerism is "Money can buy happiness". The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen or, more recently by a movement[citation needed] called.

A similar view was likewise argued by assorted members of the Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually, including Theodor Adorno Theodor W. Adorno was a German-born international sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist. He was a member of the Frankfurt School of social theory along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project from 1937 to 1941, in the U.S and Max Horkheimer Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason (1947) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception Dialectic of Enlightenment , is the core text of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered the failure of the Enlightenment. It has had a major effect on 20th century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, inspiring especially the New Left of the 1960s (1944), and also Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was influenced by his friend Bertolt Brecht, who had developed his own critical aesthetics, which asked for the emotional in his highly influential "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is a 1935 essay by German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, which has been influential in the fields of cultural studies and media theory. It was produced, Benjamin wrote, in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be "useful for the formulation of revolutionary" (1936).^[9] Where Greenberg used the German German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers word kitsch Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal. Kitsch also refers to the types of to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture, members of the Frankfurt School coined the term mass culture Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, specifically Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily to indicate that this bogus culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged Culture industry Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who argued in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods - through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy (comprising commercial publishing houses, the movie industry, the record industry, the electronic media). They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it was a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled.

Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, "avant-garde" has been appropriated and misapplied by various sectors of the culture industry since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema. It is now common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, the very word having been stripped of its proper meaning. Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new post-modern Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus age, when the former modernist Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.

Nevertheless the most incisive critique of the vanguardism against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg Harold Rosenberg was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. The term was first employed in Rosenberg's essay "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews. The essay was reprinted in in the late 1960s.^[10] Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Since then it has been flanked by what he called "avant-garde ghosts" to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees. This has seen culture become, in his words, "a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it."

Examples

Art and literature

Some of the earliest examples of avant-garde art and visual poetry Visual poetry is poetry or art in which the visual arrangement of text, images and symbols is important in conveying the intended effect of the work. It is sometimes referred to as concrete poetry, a term that predates visual poetry, and at one time was synonymous with it seen in the U.S. were published in the magazine 291 in 1915-16.^{[citation needed]}

Music

Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner,^[11] or to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether.^[12]

Avant-garde art movements

See also

• Anti-art
• Experimental film
• Experimental literature
• Experimental music
• Experimental theatre
• List of avant-garde artists
• Russian avant-garde

References

1. ^ "Avant-garde definitions". Dictionary.com. Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=avant-garde. Retrieved 2007-03-14.
2. ^ UBU Web List of artists from Dada to the present day aligning themselves with the avant-garde
3. ^ Encyclopedia.com
4. ^ Calinescu, Matei (1987). The Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Duke University Press.
5. ^ Poggioli, Renato (1981). The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-88216-4. , translated from the Italian by Gerald Fitzgerald, 2nd ed.^{[page needed]}
6. ^ Bürger, Peter (1974). Theorie der Avantgarde. Suhrkamp Verlag. English translation (University of Minnesota Press) 1984: 90.
7. ^ Buchloh, Benjamin (2001). Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. MIT Press. ISBN 0262024543.
8. ^ Avant-Garde and Kitsch
9. ^ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
10. ^ Rosenberg, Harold (1983). The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks. Chicago University Press. ISBN 0-226-72673-8. ^{[citation needed]}. Originally published: New York: Horizon Press, 1972; reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1973.
11. ^ David Nicholls (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Music (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 122–24. ISBN 0521454298 ISBN 9780521545549
12. ^ Jim Samson, "Avant garde", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001).

Further reading

• Barron, Stephanie, and Maurice Tuchman. 1980. The Avant-garde in Russia, 1910–1930: New Perspectives: Los Angeles County Museum of Art [and] Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ISBN 0875870953 (pbk.); Cambridge, MA: Distributed by the MIT Press ISBN 0262200406 (pbk.)
• Bazin, Germain. 1969. The Avant-garde in Painting. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 067120422X
• Berg, Hubert van den, and Walter Fähnders (eds.). 2009. Metzler Lexikon Avantgarde. Stuttgart: Metzler. ISBN 3-476-01866-0 (German)
• Crane, Diana. 1987. The Transformation of the Avant-garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226117898
• Kostelanetz, Richard, and H. R. Brittain. 2000. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, second edition. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0028653793. Paperback edition 2001, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415937647 (pbk.)
• Kramer, Hilton. 1973. The Age of the Avant-garde; An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0374102384
• Maerhofer, John W. 2009. Rethinking the Vanguard: Aesthetic and Political Positions in the Modernist Debate, 1917-1962. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. ISBN 1443811351
• Pronko, Leonard Cbell. 1962. Avant-garde: The Experimental Theater in France. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Shishanov, V. A. 2007. Vitebskii muzei sovremennogo iskusstva: istoriia sozdaniia i kollektsii (1918–1941). Minsk: Medisont. ISBN 9789856530688 Online edition (Russian)

Categories: French words and phrases | Social philosophy | Modern art | Modernism | Concepts in aesthetics

See Also:

What Links Here:

Recently Viewed Pages:

• Home
• Domain Details
• Lok Virsa Museum
• Blogs
• Folk Art: Answers
• Folk Art: News
• Arts: Art History: Periods and Movements: Directory
• Arts: Visual Arts: Thematic: Folk Art: Artists: Directory
• Fine Art: Encyclopedia
• Arts: Visual Arts: Thematic: Folk Art: Galleries: Directory

Most Popular Pages:

• Encyclopedia: Euphony
• Encyclopedia: International Phonetic Alphabet
• Chalkware: Blogs
• Avant-garde: Web Search
• Venice Deener: Blogs
• Aretes
• Lok Virsa Museum
• Referrers
• Naïve Art: Encyclopedia
• Gabrielle Klonek

Related 'Avant-garde' Searches: