What makes avant-garde avant-garde?

[Tim Strzechowski]

Just pulled this from the bookshelf, in response to the questions posed by Vincent Maeder.  I'll look further to find more relevant material, but in the meantime:


from Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde From Rimbaud Through Postmodernism. Oxford U Press: New York, 1985.

[...] "Common to all writers and artists who make up the avant-garde movement are four basic assumptions about their times, their culture, their work, and their aesthetic imagination:  (1) the avant-garde perceives itself to be a part of a self-consciously modern culture subject to constant socio-historic change; (2) the avant-garde adopts an explicitly critical attitude toward, and asserts its distance from, the dominant values of that culture; (3) each avant-garde movement reflects the writers' and artists' desire that art and the artist may find or create a new role within society and may ally themselves with other existing progressive or revolutionary forces to transform society; (4) but most essentially, the avant-garde explores through aesthetic disruption and innovation the possibilities of creating new art forms and languages which will bring forth new modes of perceiving, expressing, and acting -- which will, in effect, proclaim the avant-garde writers as poets, prophets, and revolutionaries."

[...] "The avant-garde writer attempts to break free of the self-imposed restrictions of the largely reactive and defensive postures of modernist writing.  Avant-garde extremism and militancy are directed toward changing the institution of art and the social conditions that place literature and art in such a problematic position.  The avant-garde wants to be more than a merely modernist art, one that reflects its contemporary society; rather, it intends to be a vanguard art, in advance of, and the cause of, significant social change."


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