User:Lbattich/Hal Foster - The Return of the Real

Hal Foster. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Chapter I: 'Who is Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?'

"However different aesthetically and politically [the dadaist readymade and the constructivist structure], both practices contest the bourgeois principles of autonomous art and expressive artist, the first through an embrace of every-day objects and a pose of aesthetic indifference, the second through the use of industrial materials and the transformation of the function of the artist (especially in the productivist phase of agitprop campaigns and factory projects)." (4)

[Greenberg (“pure opticality") and Bell (“significant form”)]

"This model was staked on the instrinsic autonomy of modernist painting in particular … discontented artists were drawn to the two movements that sought to exceed this apparent autonomy: to define the institution of art in an epistemological inquiry into its aesthetic categories and/or to destroy it in an anarchistic attack on its formal conventions, as did dada, or to transform it according [4] to the materialist practices of a revolutionary society, as did Russian constructivism – in any case to repostition art in relation not only to mundane space-time but to social practice." (5)

• The complicated relation between pre-war and post-war avant-gardes: "the theoretical question of avant-garde causality, temporality, and narrativity." (5)

• Problems of the avant-garde: "the ideology of progress, the presumption of riginality, the elitist hermeticism, the historical exclusivity, the appropiation by the culture industry, and so on." (5)

• Foster calls for “the need for new genealogies of the avant-garde that complicate its past and support its future.” (5)

• As Foster acknowledges, the central text on the study of the avant-garde remains Theory of the Avant-Garde, by Peter Bürger:

"It still frames intelligent discussions of historical and neo-avant-gardes, and regardless of its date, it is still important to work through his thesis. [H]is very premise – that one theory can comprehend the avant-garde, that all its activities can be subsumed under the project to destroy the false autonomy of bourgeois art – is problematic." (8)

[Bürger’s dismissal of post-war avant-garde as so much repetition in bad faith that cancels the prewar critique of the institution of art.]

"Bürger projects the historical avant-garde as an absolute origin whose aesthetic transformations are fully significant and historically effective in the first instance. (8) The status of Duchamp … is a retroactive effect of countless artistic responses and critical readings, and so it goes across the dialogical space-time of avant-garde practice and institutional reception." (8)

"According to [Bürger’s] premise, our understanding of an art can only be as advanced as the art, and this leads Bürger to his principal argument: the avant-garde critique of bourgeois art depended on the development of this art [and the three stages described by Bürger]." (9)

"Along with a tendency to take the avant-garde rhetoric of rupture at its own word, this residual evolutionism leads Bürger to present history as both punctual and final." (10)

Bürger project onto the historical avant-garde: "not only a magical effectivity but a pristine authenticity." (11)

"First hypothesis: rather than cancel the project of the historical avant-garde, might the neo-avant-garde comprehend it for the first time? Comprehend: “the project of the avant-garde is no more concluded in its neo moment than it is enacted in its historical moment. In art as in psychoanalysis, creative critique is interminable, and that is a good thing (at least in art)." (15)

Bürger takes the romantic rhetoric of the avant-garde, of rupture and revolution, at its own word. (15) For the most acute avant-garde artists such as Duchamp, the aim is neither an abstract negation of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life but a perpetual testing of the conventions of both. Thus rather than false, circular, and otherwise affirmative, avant-garde practice at its best is contradictory, mobile, and otherwise diabolical. (16) [T]he institution of art may enframe aesthetic conventions, but it does not constitute them… If the historical avant-garde focuses on the conventional, the neo-avant-garde concentrates on the institutional. (17)

"This becoming institutional prompts in the second neo-avant-garde a creative analysis of the limitations of both historical and first neo- avant-gardes." (24)

"It prompts in a second neo-avant-garde a critique of this process of acculturation and/or accommodation." (Broodthaers extraordinary tableaux evoke cultural reification only to transform it into a critical poetic.) (24)

"Artists like Broodthaers, Buren, Asher and haacke in the late 1960s, develop a critique of the conventions of the traditional mediums, as performed by dada, constructivism, and other historical avant-gardes, into an investigation of the insitution of art, its perceptual and cognitive, structural and discursive parameter."

Foster advances 3 claims:

• The institution of art is grasped as such not with the historical avant-garde but with the neo-avant-garde;
• the neo-avantgarde at its best addresses this institution with a creative analysis at once specific and deconstructive (not a nihilistic attack at once abstract and anarchistic, as often with the historical avant-garde);
• rather than cancel the historical avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde enacts its project for the first time – a first time that, again, is theoretically endless.

(20)

"Rather than render the avant-garde null and void, these developments have produced new spaces of critical play and prompted new modes of institutional analysis." (a reworking of the avant-garde in terms of aesthetic forms, cultural-political strategies, and social positionings…) (21)