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November 08, 2007
Sven Lutticken in Secrecy and Publicity: Reactivating the Avant-Garde in New Left Review returns to interpretations of the avant garde and to Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). Bürger’s book is the theoretical consummation of the late-sixties’ break with a depoliticized conception of the avant-garde. Lutticken says that:
Clement Greenberg had used the term as a synonym for his idea of modernism, to mean ‘purified’ arts locked up within their own ‘area of competence’, their own history. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, both the Greenbergian and the Bürgerian conception of the avant-garde can be seen as responses to Schiller’s contention that art and aesthetic play, as the essence of man, would bear ‘the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’.
As Rancière has shown, the crucial ‘and’ within ‘art and life’ has been variously interpreted. Like others before him, Greenberg went on to link art and life by conceiving of an independent ‘life of art’, from Manet to Morris Louis. On the other hand, Bürger focused on the way movements such as Dada and Surrealism, whose importance had been minimized by the ‘modernist’ conception of the avant-garde, had attempted to use art to transform life. Modern art’s autonomous and specialist status was treated as a hindrance to be overcome; art should not be limited to its own small sphere, it should revolutionize society.
The ultimate aim of Dada, Surrealism and the ‘historical avant-garde’ in general had been to integrate art into the Lebenswelt, into society and everyday life. For 25 years Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde has shaped the understanding of the avant-garde. A quarter of a century on there is a need to take the discussion further.
Bürger's theory, instead of opening up a debate on the neo-avant-garde, closes it down. He argued that the avant-garde "failed to sublating art into the practice of life" and that, in consequence, the neo-avant-garde was "inauthentic". The avant-garde was crushed in its existence in 1933/34 by the political forces of Fascism in Europe and Stalinist cultural politics, regaining momentum only in the 1960s. It is commonly interpreted as repeating things thast were done thirty years ago’.
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