'The Originality Of The Avant-Garde' - Rosalind KRAUSS

THE ORIGINALITY OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Rosalind KRAUSS

1981

[1032]

     […] The avant-garde artist has worn many guises over the first hundred years of his existence: revolutionary, dandy, anarchist, aesthete, technologist, mystic. He has also preached a variety of creeds. One thing only seems to hold fairly constant in the vanguardist discourse and that is the theme of originality. By originality […] I mean more than just the kind of revolt against tradition […]. More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth. […] For originality becomes an organicist metaphor referring not so much to formal invention as to source of life. The self as origin is safe from contamination by tradition because it possesses a kind of originally naiveté. 

'When we are no longer children, we are already dead.'

[…] The self as origin has the potential for continual acts of regeneration, a perpetuation of self-birth.

'Only he is alive who rejects his convictions of yesterday.'

The self as origin is the way an absolute distinction can be made between a present experienced de novo and a tradition-laden past. The claims of avant-garde are precisely these claims to originality.

[1033]

     […] If the very notion of the avant-garde can be seen as a function of the discourse of originality, the actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that 'originality' is a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence. One figure, drawn from avant-garde practice in the visual arts, provides an example. This figure is the grid.

     […] The grid possesses several structural properties which make it inherently susceptible to vanguard appropriation. One of these is the grid's imperviousness to language. […] The self-imposed code of the avant-garde artist. The grid promotes […] silence, expressing it moreover as a refusal of speech. The absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but - more importantly - its hostility to narrative. This structure, impervious both to time and to incident, will not permit the projection of language into the domain of the visual, and the result is silence.

     This silence is not due simply to the extreme effectiveness of the grid as a barricade against speech, but to the protectiveness of its mesh against all intrusions from outside. No echoes of footsteps in empty rooms, no scream of birds across open skies, no rush of distant water - for the grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of a purely cultural object. With its proscription of nature as well as of speech, the result is still more silence. And in this new-found quiet, what many artists thought they could hear was the beginning, the origins of Art.

[1033-1034]