"Counter-Avant-Garde"

"Counter-Avant-Garde"

1971

     The futurists discovered avant-gardeness, but it was left to Duchamp to create […] avant-gardism. In a few short years after 1912 he laid down the precedents for everything that advanced-advanced art has done in the fifty-odd years since. Avant-gardism owes a lot to the futurist vision, but it was Duchamp alone who worked out, as it now looks, every implication of that vision and locked advanced-advanced art into what has amounted to hardly more than elaborations, variations on, and recapitulations of his original ideas.

     With avant-gardism, the shocking, scandalizing, startling, the mystifying and confounding, became embraced as ends in themselves and no longer regretted as initial side effects of artistic newness that would wear off with familiarity. Now these side effects were to build in. The first bewildered reaction to innovative art was to be the sole and appropriate one; the avant-gardism work - or act or gesture - was to hold nothing latent, but deliver itself immediately. And the impact, more often than not, was to be on cultural habits and expectations, social ones too, rather than on taste. At the same time newness, innovation, originality itself was to be standardized as category into which work, an act, a gesture, or an attitude could insert itself by displaying readily recognizable and generally identifiable characteristics or stimuli. And while the conception of the new in art was narrowed on one side to what was obviously, ordinary, or only ostensibly startling, it was expanded on the other to include the startling in general, the startling as sheer phenomenon or sheer occurrence.

[7]

     All along the avant-garde had been accused of seeking originality for its own sake. And all along this had been a meaningless charge. As if genuine originality in art could be envisaged in advance, and could ever be attained by mere dint of willing. As if originality had not always surprised the original artist himself by exceeding his conscious intentions. It's as though Duchamp and avant-gardism set out, however, deliberately to confirm this accusation. Conscious volition, deliberateness, plays a principal part in avant-gardist art: that is, resorting to ingenuity instead of inspiration, contrivance instead of creation, "fancy" instead of "imagination"; in effect, to the known rather than the unknown. The "new" as known beforehand - the general look of the "new" as made recognizable by the avant-garde past - is what is aimed at, and because known and recognizable, it can be willed. Opposites, as we know, have a way of meeting. By being converted into the idea and notion of itself, and established as a fixed category, the avant-garde is turned into its own negation. The exceptional enterprise of artistic innovation, by being converted into an affair of standardized categories, of a set of "looks", is put within reach of uninspired calculation.

[7-8]

     Among the many things that highly original art has always done is convert into art what seems to be nonart. Avant-garde art called attention to this supposed conversion in more obvious and striking ways than any art before it had - at least any urban art. It was as though the line between art and supposed nonart receded faster for the avant-garde, and that at the same time the latter had to push harder and harder against that line. […] to most people at the time, the first full-blown impressionist painting seemed to break with everything previously  considered pictorial art and remain "nonart" objects; the "nonart" reaction, was provoked by every subsequent move of modernist art and, like other such standard reaction to it, was finally adopted by avant-gardism as something to be welcomed.

     […] Duchamp's readymades […] showed that the difference between art and nonart was a conventionalized, not a securely experienced, difference. (As they also showed that the condition of being art was not necessarily an honorific one.) Since then it has become clearer, too, that anything that can be experienced at all can be experienced aesthetically; and that anything that can be experienced aesthetically can also be experienced as art. In short, art and aesthetic don't just overlap, they coincide […]. The notion of art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skilful making (as the ancients defined it), but an act of mental distancing - an act that can be performed even without the help of sense of perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such distancing, and thereby converted into something that takes effect as art. There turns out, accordingly, to be such a thing as art at large, art that is realised or realizable everywhere, even if for the most part inadvertently, momentarily, and solipsistically: art that is private, "raw", and unformalized (which doesn't mean "formless", of which there is no such thing). And because this art can and does feed on anything within the realm of conceivability, it is virtually omnipresent among human begins.

[12-13]