Niels Werber
My lecture on Avant-garde will
proceed in three steps. At first I am going to single out
current descriptions of Avant-garde as a merely temporal phenomenon, based
on newness, innovation, or radical advancement. These temporal elements of
Avant-garde lay the basis for some more typical programmatic specifications,
such as surprise, chock, or provocation. The argumentation goes like this:
Only what is new and therefore radically different, can produce or cause
a chock or provocation of the audience. However, we will see that these parameters fail
to define the Avant-garde in a precise sense. Consequently a second
step is necessary, i.e. looking at the Avant-garde as a procedure or
modus operandi of arts and literature. Particularly the Russian formalists
at the beginning of the 20th century, dealing with the contemporary
kubo-futurist or suprematist artists in the young Soviet Republics, choose
this way if they try to define certain rules of the avant-garde process.
A work of art belongs to an Avant-garde if it is made in a certain way and
uses certain methods. But even these refined attempts of the Russian Formalists
leave unsolved problems behind; above all the trouble to decide whether the
Avant-garde is an epoch of art history or a procedure used virtually at every
moment of aesthetic evolution, so that one could speak of Avant-garde in
the 19th century or today or even in the renaissance whenever
traditional or “automatic” ways of making art are replaced or revolutionised
by new ones. Therefore, in a third and last step, I am going
to propose a system-theoretical approach looking at the phenomenon as a sociological
and evolutionary problem of the art system in a certain social environment.
What is the Avant-garde? Or what is an Avant-garde?
If one asks these questions the main answer of the experts in charge like
philosophers, art-historians, or aesthetic theorists tends to be that Avant-garde or Avant-gardes are about
negation. Be it a movement of artists, a work of art, a style of producing
works of art, or an epoch in the history of arts and literature, Avant-garde
always seems to negate or oppose to something that is, at a given time, a
well established form of making art, reflecting art, or institutionalizing
art in groups, movements, museums, or galleries.
At first sight it becomes
obvious that a temporal dimension is involved in this approach
of defining Avant-garde as a form of negation. Whatever might be negated
or rejected by any avant-garde work or manifest or even by the whole epoch
of Avant-garde it has to be considered as historical, old, or outdated. The
main stream of theoretical approaches to Avant-garde operates with a temporal scheme or, in other words, with the difference
of before and after. There is a lot of evidence in this temporal scheme
because many prominent representatives of avant-garde movements use it for
their own self-descriptions – I remind of the prominent distinction of futuristi and passatisti. I quote Filippo
Tommaso Marinettis programmatic manifest, declared on the 12th
January 1910 in Trieste, where he asked: “What is meant with the term Futurism?
To make it simple, Futurism means: hate the past. Our aim is it to destroy
the cult of the past.” This self-description is often adopted in art-theory:
Following the German art historian and expert for the surrealistic movement
Katharina Sykora, the avant-garde artist has to be understood as someone
who “creates something new” and who – for this reason –steps into “secession”
with traditional art.[1] Actually, the evolution of Avant-garde movements
as organizations could easily be described as a sequence of secessions, exclusions,
or disassociations; to name just one extreme example: At the end of the history
of the situationistic movement, there has only one person
been left, all the others have been excluded by Guy Debord for remaining
conservative or neo-traditional or performing not radically enough. The Avant-garde
negates current positions and confronts the old with something new. – One
could remark here that these characterizations themselves are old and only
re-phrase slogans used by Friedrich Schlegel as early as in 1795. And one
could add that these artists, struggling for the future and the new, operate
with the history in their rear-view mirror. The storming Avant-garde is in
fact always looking back. This is peculiar enough but here I will just focus
my attention on one problematic methodological implication of these definitions:
In the perspective presented, Avant-garde cannot be an epoch of art history
because the breaking with the classical Avant-garde movements of any given
period of art history itself is avant-garde as it fulfills the demands of
the definition to be new and negating; and if it cannot be an epoch, it must
be something else, a principle, a procedure, a protagonist of aesthetical
evolution, or whatsoever. But unfortunately all these procedures or methods,
which could be named here, have always got a lack of sharpness in their definitions,
matching more than only Avant-garde works or movements.
Within the context of the
New York “Armory Show” from 1913, exhibiting a broad spectrum of latest European
modern art for the first time, for US art critics Avant-garde became a mere
synonym for innovation and newness. In Ernst Gombrich’s monographic book
on the “Story of Art”, works and artists of cubism, expressionism, surrealism,
Italian futurism, Russian kubo-futurism, or the German Bauhaus-movement are
listed under the common main quality of being “experimental”. Gombrich does
not see anything special in the Avant-garde that would make it different from any other style
or epoch as he tells us his “story of art” as an uninterrupted, continuous
chain of building, re-building and transforming traditions.[2] In this perspective, Giotto could be counted as Avant-garde
for his “revolutionary” introduction of the illusion of spatial depth into
the flatness of plain surfaces (S. 202). Taken as a metaphor of innovation,
Avant-garde looses all significance as a term of aesthetic and literary theory.
Avant-garde just means something new or terrific or experimental, and one
could easily describe expensive cars, designer fashion, or furniture as avant-garde.
In order to go back to Avant-garde
in one of its genuinely historical contexts I want to go back to Futurism
and to Marinetti’s manifestos. Whereas Avant-garde in its genuinely military
sense refers to a vanguard operating ahead of the main forces, Marinetti
takes the term out of this merely spatial context of military
operations on the ground and projects it into the dimension of time. Something
very important happens at a specific point in this exchange of dimensions:
in the spatial context of military operations it could always happen that
– during a retreat for example – the Avant-garde of an army becomes its rearguard.
Territory gained by the storming vanguard is lost again by the very same
unit which now covers the retreat and functions as a rearguard. Projected
in the temporal dimension this loss of newly conquered territory could never
happen because time is a linear process. There is no way back for the Avant-garde,
no danger to become an Arrièregarde in Marinetti’s perspective because the futurismo has destroyed the ground left behind so that every
step can only be a step forward. Marinetti appeals to destroy the museums,
to burn the old pictures and books, to bulldozer Venice and to sink its gondolas.
To generalize this point of view, one could say: In the present the past
is out of range. Gone is gone.
In a certain way, the German
systems sociology is in consensus with the avant-garde semantics of time
because every system, be it social or mental, operates only in its own present.
No system can ever gain access to its past or its future. I quote the student
of Talcott Parsons, the founder of systems theory in Germany, Niklas Luhmann:
“To provide us with the basis for discussion
in the face of this degree of disarray in time semantics, we shall contend
that everything that happens happens simultaneously. This also means that
everything that happens does so for the first and last time.”[3] This is quite simple because nobody can have access
to times which have passed or leave some time out and jump into the future.
Whatever happens, it happens now. However, these temporal semantics are anything
else than natural or evident because they are genuinely modern – in the epochs
of pre-modern “old Europe”, alternative ideas of time were dominant: The
two most important forms of temporal organisation during the Middle Ages
were the form of cyclical time and the difference of time and eternity, of
tempus and aeternitas. Following the model
of the seasons, the yearly sequence of spring, summer, harvest, and winter,
the cyclical paradigm of time states that things which have happened in the
past will happen again in the future. For example, the belief in the sequence
of blossom and fading of societies, the translatio imperii
from one fading say Greek or British empire to a blooming Roman or American
one, owes its plausibility to this temporal conception of cyclic time. One
could say with Salomon the Wise that nothing that happens would be new – because
it would always be a repetition somehow.
As a second model, the Christian
distinction between worldly immanence and heavenly transcendence supports
the temporal differentiation of time and eternity. Everything has its time within the immanence of the mortal world,
that means everything is doomed to fade or to die. With the exception of
all that is transcendent and immortal. And whatever might
happen in the hard times of the material world – all spiritual phenomena
take part in the sphere of divine eternity. Aeternitas means
the absolute presence of God in all times, eternity is a sphere in which
the difference of future and past does not matter. Both spheres: time and
eternity sometimes get in contact when the eternity of the gods intervenes
with the times of men, for example in the form of wonders or prophecies or
incarnations. This pre-modern, religious model of time does not know any
future in an emphatic sense, i.e. a future which depends on our own decisions,
because the future of our world lies in the hands of god only. God grants
an eternally unchanging deep structure of things, whereas any change is only
considered as a surface effect. Both forms of temporal organisation of society:
the cyclical form and the distinction
of tempus and aeternitas promote self-descriptions of society and its arts
in terms of repetition or life-circles.[4] The renaissance was in fact described as a re-naissance,
a kind of repetition of antique arts, a re-memorization of eternal rules.
Even in the early 20th century, art and literary historians used
these models to describe contemporary art movements as a return of classic
times or to criticise new styles in art as symptoms of the decay of society.
Natural metaphors such as to flourish, bloom or harvest are very frequently
used in art histories – indicating the temporal model assumed.
It is obvious: The temporal scheme of the Avant-garde leaves these semantics of the Old Europe
behind. One has to expect the unexpected
now – no future work of futurist art should be regarded as a repetition or
reappearance or re-birth nor should it be described as an actual recombination
of eternal laws or meta-historical conventions. Futurism is not a new interpretation
of old rules. The memory of the past itself, Marinetti claims, should be
entirely extinguished in the Italian hour of futurism. The old Venice should
give way for a gigantic airfield. What is left behind will never come into
sight again – because it has been destroyed or because it is not re-memorized.
Futurism, so far, is a form of time- and memory-management. But if this is
the key characteristic of futurism, unfortunately it is not new and is not
distinct at all.
For some fifty years earlier,
in the middle of the 19th century, French poets knew all this
already. “Aujourd’hui, il faut être absolument
moderne”, to quote a well known bon mot. Being absolutely modern, does this mean the same as being
a futurist? The question is only too necessary because a lot of important
monographic books or essay collections on Avant-garde[5] have indisputably
modern authors like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont or Mallarmé on their
list.[6] One could add other innovative or experimental authors
like Joyce, Pound, or Eliot. And if them, why not Stefan George or Bertolt
Brecht, why not other advanced authors like Apollinaire or Gottfried Benn?
But if they are counted as modern or as disciples of aestheticism what is
the difference with regard to Avant-garde?
In his work on “the structure of modern poetry”, Hugo Friedrich confesses
that the scholar’s challenge to recognize modern poetry has only “negative
categories” at hand; to define the modernity of lyrical texts means to reconstruct
the history of poetry as a process of negations, the presently modern form
negating the older ones.[7] If so, what could be the difference between this
process and the temporal scheme of futurism?
The problem here is that
all these categories: modernism, avant-gardism, aestheticism have
something common: i.e. the role of negation in their definitions. Negation
of the past and present seems to be necessary whenever an author is defined
as modern or avant-garde. The new plays an important role both in the “aesthetical
theory” of Adorno and in the “theory of Avant-garde” of Peter Bürger.[8] Only through absolute negation a work of art could
represent the un-represent-able, Adorno states (S. 55); and the Avant-garde
in the arts negates all known procedures and styles of art, Bürger claims.
If both: Modernism and Avant-garde is about negation of traditions or established
proceedings and materials, the problem again is how to distinguish them?
In Peter Bürger’s influential “Theory of Avant-garde” from 1974 Bürger summarizes
Adorno’s position that modern art implies the radical breaking with traditions,
including the infringement of established procedures and institutions.[9] Bürger critizices that Adorno generalizes a single
moment in the history of art – what Adorno declares as a principle of modern
art: negation, newness, breaking with traditions, Bürger regards only as
an element of the historical Avant-garde movements (S. 83f), i.e. as the
signature of an epoch. Bürger doubts that Avant-garde could
be described sufficiently in modes of time schemes and negations (S. 85).
He proposes instead to comprehend Avant-garde as the attack on art as an
institution and on the work of art as an autonomous, organic cosmos. He describes
the art of the avant-garde as the destruction of art itself. Later, I will
try to explore the possibilities and problems of this idea. First we should
have a closer look on the implications of the term “procedure” used by Adorno
as well as by Bürger.
In 1916 the Russian
founder of the formalist school Viktor Schklowski published his legendary
essay on “Art as a Procedure”.[10] Whether a given “thing” is judged as a work of art
or not, Schklowski claims, does not depend on the thing: be it a text or
something else, it depends on the perspective of the recipient. If something
belongs to the field of art it is a result of our “mode of perception” (S.
13). This aesthetical perspective is a viewpoint which does not observe the
content of something but the way how something is made. It observes the procedures.
The aesthetical perspective, which transforms things into works of art, is
concerned with the “how” not with the “what” (S. 18). “Through art”, Schklowski
writes, “we experience the making of things, the result, that one could recognize,
is unimportant.” (S. 18) It is not important to identify things and persons
on avant-garde paintings but to observe how the pictures are produced. The
main hypothesis of Schklowski’s is that the procedure behind the work of
art is linked to our mode of perception: that the mode of production has
the effect to free automatic, petrified ways of perception from their ties.
This so-called de-automation of perception is the goal of the procedures
of art (S. 30).
This approach of the Formal
School was immediately applied to the contemporary Russian Avant-garde, primarily
to Viktor Chlebnikow and the Russian school of futurism. In his article on
“Latest Russian Poetry”[11] from 1921, Roman Jakobson placed the term “procedure”
in the centre of his reflections (S. 179, 186). Chlebnikow is counted as
a futurist and compared with Marinetti’s manifestos. The Russian futurism
is described as an art using new forms, new combinations, new creations of
parole, and these new forms spot a new light on everything
(S. 183). The “suprematist” paintings and models of Kasimir Malewitsch could
easily be described in these terms. Avant-garde, this means in the formalist
paradigm the production of new ways of perceiving the world. The petrified
and canonized modes of production and reception are smashed into pieces (S.
178) which are then newly arranged in the futuristic works and can thus be
easily described in Schklowski’s terms of de-automation. Jakobson understands
the whole history of art as an endless chain of forms: Fresh material is
arranged by a new form, this form petrifies into a stereotype, then it dies
eventually – and a fresh flow of new materials and fresh forms revitalizes
the art until it declines, too. We heard about this form of art history earlier.
No wonder that the problems are similar. Neither Jakobson nor Tynjanow in
his essay on “Chlebnikow” (1928) deliver a theory of Avant-garde which could
distinguish for example aestheticism from futurism. Jakobson even quotes
Mallarmé whose rearrangements of words in astonishing and surprising combinations
(S. 206) are compared with the procedures of Chlebnikow’s futurism. And it
is Bürger’s opinion that Adorno’s approach shares this very dilemma of distinction.
However, the listing of
typical procedures and characteristic materials is still a common attempt
of the academic discourse on Avant-garde. For instance, one names the collage-
or montage-techniques used by Kurt Schwitters in his “merz”-art or by the
French Surrealists; or in André Breton’s novel “Nadja” which consists of
autobiographic fragments, descriptions of images and events, enclosed pictures,
contingent concurrencies, dialogues and epilogues – and, no wonder, this
work has been described as a “Collage-Montage”-novel.[12] If the formalist hypothesis of the de-automation
was too wide perhaps collage and montage are the procedures which could define
Avant-garde. One could sharpen the definition
with a list of the “advanced materials” used in those collages or montages,
for instance every day life’s materials such as advertisements, newspaper
articles, packing or wrapping of goods and articles, junk or accidentally
found objects like the famous “objet trouvé”. Tristan Tzara, for example,
read contingent newspaper cuttings in a Dadaist performance as if they were
a poem. Kurt Schwitters baptized his works by quoting the randomly implemented
fragments of advertisements or headlines. And Marcel Duchamp signed a fabric-made
“pissoir”, named it “fountain”, and, voilà, the “ready-made” was
born: a work of art simply made of given, contingent materials. One could
refer to Chlebnikow, too, in this context, in so far as Jakobson has described
his surprising use of daily, common vocabulary in his poems instead of the
high style, the stylus gravis of older poetry. This use of
given materials and the open deployment (???) of chance and contingency motivated
Peter Bürger to define Avant-garde in terms of integrating the “Lebenswelt”
into art or – vice versa – crossing the borders of autonomous art and re-integrating
art into its environment under the flag of “Lebenskunst”, a term that indicates a fusion of art and life. The genre of performance, often used by the Dadaists,
Futurists, and Surrealists as well, can be named, too, in this context because
the limits between the works of art and their frames are violated here and
the differences between the audience and the artists is surmounted. This
promising approach to distinct modern art from (???) the Avant-garde can
be followed back at least to the German sociologist Georg Simmel.
In a roman à clef called “Graue Magie”,[13] grey magic, published
in the year 1922 under the name of Mynona, a palindrome of the term anonym(ous),
one could learn something about the contemporary reflection on arts and Avant-garde.
The protagonist Richard Bosemann visits a soirée of an artist called Settegal;
another member of the party is Dr. Lemmis which is again a palindrome of
the name Simmel if one reads it the other way round. Georg Simmel was an
important contemporary author of sociological and aesthetical essays and
books.
In our context the interesting
thing about the painter Settegal, who has invited Dr. Lemmis, is his endeavor
to suspend the frame of his works. The frame of the painting, which has functioned
for hundreds of years as an integral part and border of the work of art,
is now regarded as an obstacle for painting which the artist has to overcome.
Settegal, in fact, attacks the frames of his works forcefully. He, I quote and translate, „split the work, crashed
the frames, and showed the fragments of the work at different places and
in different rooms.“ (S. 171) He considers the frame of the work of art as
„too adjusted“ (S. 171f), therefore he shatters it. His art shall not be
limited by frames. In this sense, he is a typical artist of the avant-garde.
(Pictures )
What has Dr. Lemmis alias
Dr. Simmel got to do with frames and their
destruction? In 1902, he wrote an important essay on the function of frames
in fine arts.[14] His main thesis is that the frame plays an eminent
role in the concept of the autonomous work. The frame, I quote and give a
translation, “the frame excludes the environment of the work and therefore
the observer as well and helps for this reason to keep the work in the distance
that alone allows us an aesthetical reception.” (S. 111) The reception of
the work of art has to be, to use Immanuel Kant’s definition, without interest
but with “un-interested delight”. One is supposed to appreciate the forms
of beauty and to ignore the contents: for example the picture of a nude could
be regarded as beautiful according to the forms used by the painter but the
nude him- or herself should not be desired nor should anybody wish the content
to exist. Kant’s influential aesthetics have been adopted by Simmel and applied
to concrete observations of works of art in which Simmel has discovered a
kind of material barrier in the frame between the aesthetic object, which
one admires without interest, and the object represented, which could raise
our interest somehow. Along the frame, Simmel claims, “the view of the beholder
slides inwards”, the work can now only be regarded as an integral whole which
“needs no relation to the outside at all” because it guides any fiber of
the work back into its center inside the frame. (S. 112) The corresponding
attitude of the beholder is contemplative, disengaged, apolitical, and introspective;
the beholder of the framed work, shown in a Museum, is unsociable, solitary,
and alienated, Walter Benjamin would say. On the reception side, the meditation
of the bourgeois in front of a splendid work and its aura, observed by Benjamin,[15] corresponds exactly with the framed painting of Simmel’s
essay. But this attitude belongs to the past as the framed work is outdated
by the Avant-garde because in the age of its technical reproduction, the
work of art is no longer regarded without interest nor is it any longer comprehended
as an autonomous monade. To the contrary, art intervenes in its environment,
it sends impulses and causes external effects regarded as “choc” or “enervations”
by the audience, as one might put it in Benjamin’s terms. If we follow Simmel’s
opinion that the frame functions as the visible guarantee of the autonomous,
self-sufficient work of art we can conclude that Settegal’s attack on the
frames of his paintings means nothing else than an assault against autonomous
art and its contemplative reception. His work, if it is possible to speak
of a work at all, leaves the old frames behind and emerges into its environment,
the rooms and furniture of Settegal’s flat, becoming a part of his party.
One could describe this dissolution of a formerly distinct phenomenon with
sharp borders between inside and outside as a kind of de-differentiation. The autonomous work of art has once
been the product of differentiation, for example the product of Kant’s distinction
of non-interested delight and interested
desire, of Simmel’s difference between the framed work and its environment,
or of Benjamin’s subdivision of contemplative, meditative reception on the
one side and involvement, immersion, choc, or enervation on the other side.
These differentiations are now de-differentiated by the Avant-garde. To use
Settegal’s example for the last time: art and life are very difficult to
separate if one attacks the frames. In other words: art dissolves into life,
and, vice versa, life becomes an aesthetic phenomenon. The “difference of
art and society is left behind” here, and this movement could be called Avant-garde.[16]
On the way to sharpen
the definition of Avant-garde we have seen already that the difference between
Marinetti and Mallarmé cannot be found in the temporal dimension
of art history only nor in negation as the principal or motor of art nor
in certain procedures or modi operandi. If we follow instead
the self-descriptions in arts and literature in the 1920s and their contemporary
observations by scholars and critics like Simmel one might guess that Avant-garde
could be defined as a specific way of dealing with the social
dimension of communication and semantics. Modern society is characterized
by functional differentiation of social systems or, to use the terms of the
early 20th century sociology, the modern society is characterized
by its division of labor, La
division de la travail sociale, as
Emile Durkheim calls it. It has been organised in a completely different
way since the epochal step from pre-modern, feudal Europe to modernity. In
the old Europe the main social difference had been the distinction of the
strata or sections where people were born into. In every social area it had
been the most important thing to know about these innate differences and
to respect stratification. In arts and literature one can observe this stratification
in the hierarchy of the classes and their certain styles. Princes die in
tragedies, using the grand and sublime stilus grande; in
comedies one can laugh about common citizens, speaking in a middle style.
The eminent rules of decorum and aptum in
pre-modern poetics follow the differentiation of strata. – However, modern
society tends to ignore these differences in favour of specific codes or
proceedings which one has to take into consideration if one wants to participate
in economical, political, scientific, legal, or aesthetic communications.
The stratum that one has been born into is ignored if one claims truth for
a thesis in the system of science, if one files a lawsuit, if one votes for
a political mandate, or if one judges on a work of art. Different codes are
used in different types of social systems which are specified to solve certain
social problems or, to use Durkheim’s terms again, to do specific work for
the functioning of society. Seen from the perspective of the individual this
modern differentiation of society causes enormous effects.
It is Friedrich Schiller
who gave in his Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen published
in 1795 an outstanding description of the end of the corporate state and
the transition into modern modes of differentiating and coding communication.
Starting point of his considerations is the observation that the identity
of a human being: hitherto completely determined by the affiliation to a
state, a guild, a house, a family, an age or a gender, is at stake now. The
human being, who has always been considered as indivisible, is now torn into
“fragments” whose re-integration into an intact unit becomes a motive of
aesthetic utopias. Sociologically speaking, one could diagnose a division
into system-specific service- and client-roles whose handling alone decides
on the question of inclusion of persons into system-communication. Not birth,
state, or inherited privileges, but only specific knowledge and acquired
qualities are now decisive for the promotion of persons in society. The reason
is, as Schiller has noted as sensitively as irritated, that “state and church,
laws and customs, leisure and work”, in short: all social areas formerly
integrated into corporations, status, guilds and households
are now “separated into pieces”. The modern human being is reduced to a mere
“Formular”, a “form” that is filled out according to the “business” included.
“Indifferent against character”, Schiller states that politics, economy, justice,
science and religion are only interested in “fragmentary parts” of the human
being as concerning its roles as voters, customers, attorneys, subjects, culprits,
patients, taxpayers or churchgoers. The “individual skills”, necessary for
the adequate performance in the communication process of the functional systems,
are developed, cared for, and intensified by the systems themselves while,
on the other hand, all non-included “remaining talents” are neglected.[17] Specialisation is one effect of this process, alienation
the other.
To give a trite example
for these observations: if one wants money from a cash machine only a card
and a number are necessary. This is very effective but one is reduced to
numbers. Or if one gives his or her vote in political elections the ballot
reduces one’s individual, complex opinions and motivations to a cross for
the one candidate or the other. We face here the reduction of complexity and
improvements of efficiency but the individual human being is not included
as a whole into these highly specified communications – in contrary – the
human being is divided into a plurality of social roles that one has to play
in different social contexts, orientated according to the procedures of the
different social systems of society.
It is this division or fragmentation
which is attacked by the Avant-garde because Avant-garde ignores or confuses the differences between the social
systems as Avant-garde works on de-differentiation
of established modern differentiation. The Avant-garde, Niklas Luhmann writes
in his monograph on “the art of the society”,[18] experiments with the social range (???) of art claiming
universal responsibility for all social fields. If modern art respects and
cultivates the difference of the system and its environment, of art and non-art,
the Avant-garde simply ignores this constitutional difference of a social
system and its environment. David Roberts, in his book “Art and Enlightenment”,[19] names this attempt to overcome functional differentiation
the “boundary question”.
But wasn’t that Peter Bürger’s
approach? He connected his observations of procedures with his thesis on
the avant-garde attack against the institutions of autonomous art which both
become visible in the “avant-garde’s project of canceling the split between
art and life” on the one hand, demonstrating at the same moment the “total
disposability over materials and forms of all traditions”[20] on the other hand. David Roberts wrote on Bürger
that in his view Avant-garde represents the “critique of art in bourgeois
society” (S. 134), that means that Avant-garde criticizes “the loss of all
social function” in modern art as typified in aestheticism and its position
of l’art pour l’art as it could paradigmatically be found in Stéphane
Mallarmé’s work (S. 136). This kind of autonomous isolation of art, this
loss of contact between art and society, is surmounted when avant-garde performances,
ready-mades, or events emerge into the environment of art canceling the division
of art and non-art.
David Roberts marks two
eminent problems of this theory of Bürger’s: First, Bürger is “confusing
and conflating aestheticism’s doctrine of art for art’s sake
with the social reality of the differentiation of art (literature) as an
autonomous sphere.” (S. 136) I have tried to sketch what differentiation
of art means in the framework of systems theory. The art system evolves as
a social system with a functional priority of its own within the context
of modern society which consists of a plurality of autonomous systems such
as science, economy, politics, and so on and, correspondingly, different roles
such as artist, voter, consumer, lover, scientist, or student. Luhmann has
often pointed out that art is always a part of society, not her opposition.
L’art pour l’art – this is in fact a program of the art system but
not the modus operandi of the system itself which is embedded in its social
environment like a fish in its pond; in order to produce works of art the
art system follows its own codes and rules but it cannot do without economic
funding, legal support – I only hint at copyright questions –, it cannot
do without political protection – in Germany, for instance, the freedom of
art and literature is part of the constitution –, and it leans on institutions
of the educational system such as academies as well as on the system of media:
without catalogues, reviews, feuilletons, books, and even TV-shows about
art, art would not exist at all because from a sociological point of view
art is merely a phenomenon of communication. The art system
is a system with a specific form of communication, and this communication
uses a typical code dividing the world into binary distinctions such as beautiful
versus ugly or interesting versus boring or matching versus non-matching,
whereas other systems use other codes such as profitable versus non-profitable,
true versus false, or right versus wrong. With the help of these codes the
art system distinguishes itself from its environment which consists of other
systems and their codes. But as our fish in the pond cannot do without water
and an environment from which it imports material that it can transform into
nutrients fitting in with its own life system, the art system can observe
its environment and transform specific elements into forms of art. Even Mallarmé’s
famous coup de dés imports elements from the environment and transforms
them, for example the concepts of the dice and contingency. And his poem
fulfils many functions because it causes many types of communication. Even
aestheticism reproduces the possibilities of communicative connections and
– for this reason – takes part in the self-production
or auto-poiesis of society as the meta-system of inter-connected communication.
Art is not isolated from society, art is a part of it.
The second problem of Bürger’s
theory is the fact that “cancelling the split between art and life” is a
very imprecise definition of Avant-garde.[21] The Italian Futurism attacks the differences of art,
advanced technology, and Fascism; the German conservative revolution with
avant-garde authors like Ernst Jünger attacks the differences of art and
politics, of the private and the public, of the body and the mind; the Russian
Avant-garde organized in the LEF, the
left front of arts, tries to cancel the
differences of art, labour, and the political system, too, and to turn artists
and authors into cultural engineers working for the Soviet society in one
line with all the other workers, political officers, or engineers; and the
surrealistic movement in France searched for contact with the communist party,
understanding Surrealism as a project of cultural revolution exploring the
resources of the unconsciousness for the overcoming of capitalistic society.[22] What Bürger calls “bourgeois society” is a complex
multilateral network of systems; and if Bürger defines Avant-garde as the
“self-critique of art in the bourgeois society”,[23] I would like to answer that Avant-garde cannot be understood as a problem of art in the bourgeois society just because society
is so much more complex than Bürger takes into consideration.
Avant-garde is a program
of art, meant to overcome functional differentiation
of social systems. Marinetti’s program of transforming Italy into a super-modern,
well equipped, techno-organic body of overwhelming power, could not be understood
as a mere canceling of the division of art and life; Futurism must be described
as a program of art which imports technical and political communication in
order to organize the whole society as a work of futurism. This project of
social de-differentiation in the medium of futuristic art fails – because
the social systems keep their own peculiar codes and modi operandi
even under the command of Mussolini –, but the works of futurism can be described
as a form of aesthetic communication structured by observations of phenomena
and events in the environment of the art system, especially of technology
and fascism. The difference between a manifest or a poem by Marinetti and
an airplane or a fascist policy is never cancelled in social reality – and
the overcoming of borders is just a doctrine of art or a program and should
not be confused with the terms of social differentiation of society.
Avant-garde books and catalogues
are printed and sold, paintings, photography, and montages are exhibited
in museums and galleries, films shown in cinemas, and Dadaist or futuristic
performances and readings are carefully reconstructed by scholars. The Avant-garde
has never escaped the art system and has never destroyed its institutions.
Whenever the Avant-garde seemed to overcome the difference of art and life,
whenever it seemed to escape the frames of the work of art and to emerge
into its environment, as the painter Settegal tried in Mynona’s novel and
some Surrealist painters tried, too, exactly these attempts were regarded
as works of art which could be sold or exhibited. Doors and walls painted
by Max Ernst and meant as integral parts of a Gesamtkunstwerk
were singled out and shown in a museum. The avant-garde work was re-framed.
What the theory of the Avant-garde has described have been avant-garde programs
of the art system. They all have been extremely successful within the art
system, stimulating a lot of reactions and producing a fruitful range of communicative
connections. But the attempt to overcome the borders of the art system has
failed. From a sociological point of view, Avant-garde is just another program
of the autonomous art system. But this program can only be understood with
regard to the functional differentiation of modern society – because this
differentiation is exactly the context which avant-garde artists observe
and try to de-differentiate.
[1] Ringvorlesung Avantgarden der Kunst und Literatur: Surrealismus, Kunstkörper, Fotografie, Bochum, 1.12.1999, cf. www.homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/niels.werber/Avantgarde.htm.
[2] Ernst H. Gombrich, Die Geschichte der Kunst, 16. Auflage, Frankfurt/Main 1996, S.595.
[3] Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A sociological Theory, Berlin,
New York 1993, S. 34.
[4] Adorno claims in his theory of aesthetics that aesthetic
time is indifferent to empirical time which it neutralises. (Ästhetische
Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1973, S. 163) It would be worth examining whether
this form of aesthetic time cites the old difference of time and eternity.
[5] Symbole und Signale. Frühe Dokumente der Avant-garde, Birsfelden o.J.
[6] Cf. Gerhard Plumpe, Epochen moderner Literatur, Opladen 1995, S. 177.
[7] Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (1956), Reinbeck 1992, S. 19f.
[8] Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1973. Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avant-garde, Frankfurt am Main 1974.
[9] Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avant-garde, Frankfurt am Main 1974, S. 82f.
[10] Kunst als Verfahren, zitiert nach: Die Erweckung des Wortes. Essays der russischen Formalen Schule, hrsg. von Fritz Mierau, S. 11-32.
[11] Neueste russische Poesie, zitiert nach: Die Erweckung des Wortes. Essays der russischen Formalen Schule, hrsg. von Fritz Mierau, S. 177-210.
[12] Franz-Josef Albersmeier: Collage und Montage im surrealistischen Roman, Zu Aragons ‘Le Paysan de Paris’ und Bretons ‘Nadja’. In: LiLi, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, Hrsg. Helmut Kreuzer, Jahrgang 12/1982, Heft 46, Montage, Göttingen 1982, S. 61
[13] Mynona, Graue Magie, Berlin 1989. The author was Salomon Friedlaender.
[14] Georg Simmel, Der Bildrahmen. Ein ästhetischer Versuch [1902], in: Soziologische Ästhetik, hrsg. von Klaus Lichtblau, Darmstadt 1998, S. 11-117.
[15] Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie, Frankfurt/Main 1984, S. 9-44.
[16] Or post-modern: Cf. Christa Bürger, Das Verschwinden der Kunst, in: Postmoderne: Alltag, Allegorie und Avantgarde, hrsg. von Christa und Peter Bürger, Frankfurt/Main 1987, S. 34-55, S. 35.
[17] Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [1795], Stuttgart 1986, S. 20f.
[18] Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main 1995, S. 471.
[19] University of Nebraska Press 1991, S. 196.
[20] David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment, 1991, S. 137,
138.
[21] Roberts, Art and Enlightenment, S. 137.
[22] Cf. Ingo Stöckmann, Die Politik der Literatur, in: Gerhard Plumpe und Niels Werber (Hrsg.), Beobachtungen der Literatur. Aspekte einer polykontexturalen Literaturwissenschaft, Opladen 1995, S. 101-134.
[23] Roberts, Art and Enlightenment, S. 134.