The Continued Failure of the Avant-Garde

In our lectures regarding video and performance art of the 1970's, I found myself often rolling my eyes or suppressing a giggle. What is it about this radical and innovative art that, in the modern age, makes it seem so cliche?

As the strategies of the avant-garde become commonplace, later generations will no longer recognize the art as shocking or relevant to contemporary issues.
I believe certain institutions and cultural machines are at work here.
Take the Dada movement for example: Dada was meant to destroy art once and for all. Dadaist artists defined themselves as vehemently anti-art. Thus, when galleries and museums sanctioned Dada as an important and successful art, the movement lost it's raison d'etre. Marcel Duchamp, the father of Conceptual art, who intended to upend the institution of the gallery and destroy the authority of the museum, was recently remembered at an exhibition at our very own Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

Similarly, video and performance art from the 70's has been subsumed into the art historical pedagogy and museum-ified. In her discussion of video art, Martha Rosler uses John Cage as an example to speak about the failure of this art in it's attempt to rebel from the Modernist paradigm of acceptable artistic practices, "As Kaprow complained, this idea was so powerful that soon he could observe that "non-art is more art that ART-art". Meaning that this supposedly challenging counterartistic practice, this anti-aesthetic, this noninstitutionalizable form of "perceptual consciousness," was quickly an oppressively institutionalized, gobbled up by the ravenous institutions of official art (Art)."

As the innovative conceptions from the 70's have been OK'd, so to speak, by art critics and historians, we no longer find them shocking. In fact, if one thinks to call my generation apathetic, perhaps it is because all of our counter-cultural forms are subsumed by the mainstream, whether through the institution of the museum in art, or through commercialization in our commodity culture... so little seems outside the realm of acceptability. Nothing shocks us anymore, and the practices of the 1970's artists who were just discovering ways to expose the cultural mechanisms and ideologies that controlled their society seem quaint to us. In 2009, I know we live in a patriarchal culture, that my TV controls me, that a small percent of wealthy people rule the world, and that the institution of art is governed by politics as much as any other business. Somehow, since 1970, the "Down with the Man" mentality has been lost, and the practices of these artists seem outdated.

For these reasons I found the "Return to Painting in the 1980's" lecture very refreshing. Despite the male European artists making a buck in the Reagan economy, there is something to be said for the artists like George Baselitz and Philip Guston who use the creative medium of painting, to critique the institutions of art. I think their strategies resonate more with the modern viewer in the sense that they do bring the pleasure and creativity back into art, as Barbara Rose points out, and they do so while still maintaining a critical point of view and retaining a sense of the history of their craft. Personally, I think Gerhard Richter's paintings make an extremely effective critical point about modes of representation, and I would much rather see an exhibition of his than watch Chris Burden be nailed to a VW or listen to Vito Acconci masturbate beneath the floorboards.

Images from Top to Bottom, 1. Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974 (http://www.hawaii.edu/lruby/art400/ILIKEAM.GIF), 2. Carolee Schneeman, Interior Scroll, 1975 (www.brooklynmuseum.org/.../Interior_Scroll), 3. Georg Baselitz, Akt Elke 2, 1976 (www.albrightknox.org/acquisitions/acq_2001/Baselitz.html), 4. Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 1, 1988 (www.tate.org.uk/images/cms/12518w_emblemearthly_confrontation1.jpg).