It takes approximately twenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstrosity, and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece.
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953)
My principal reason for having done, later redoing, and now redoing again a quarter-century after, a book of this title would be to defend the continuing relevance of the epithet avant-garde, which has frequently appeared in my own critical writing. A second reason is that I enjoy reading cultural dictionaries myself and own a goodly number of them; but as my library has lacked any volume resembling a dictionary of avant-gardes, the first reader for any book emblazoned with that title would be myself. A third reason is that I’ve come to think there is only one art, called Art, and thus that dance, literature, etc., are merely categorical conveniences, designed to make the history and the material of Art more accessible to students and other specialized beginners.
My basic measures of avant-garde work are first esthetic innovation and then initial unacceptability. Add to this my own taste for art that is extreme, unique, distinct, coherent, witty, technological, and esthetically resonant. (An artist’s courage in the choice of subject, such as scatology, say, or child abuse, is not avant-garde if the artist’s esthetic is traditional. Nor is the first painting by a three-handed dwarf avant-garde by virtue of the peculiarities of its author.) It follows that the most consequential artists, in any medium, are those who make genuine discoveries about the possibilities of art. Nonetheless, the best avant-garde art offers, much like the best traditional art, enlightened intelligence and heightened experience.
Though one often hears about “the death of the avant-garde” or “the crisis of the avant-garde,” usually from cultural conservatives or publicists with cemeteries to defend, it is not the purpose of this book to engage in an argument I take to be irrelevant at best. Though most entries here feature modern avant-garde activities, major historical precursors, some of whom worked centuries ago, are acknowledged as well. While the epithet avant-garde is applicable to other cultural domains, this book focuses upon the arts, broadly considered. My first editor, a dance aficionado, proposed including the basketball player Daryl Dawkins for epitomizing “the slam dunk,” which is measurably a monumental choreographic innovation, though not commonly regarded as such. My more recent editor made his unique contribution as well, and I now included the man whose alternative choreography changed competitive high-jumping. One recurring theme is that avant-garde art doesn’t always come pretentiously dressed.
Proclaiming the avant-garde’s death is no more acceptable than the claim, from another corner, of one or another group to represent “the avant-garde” to the exclusion of all others. The plural avant-gardes in the title is appropriate, as this book contains entries on individuals or developments representing opposed positions, if not contrary esthetics, both clearly innovative and initially unacceptable. As I warn in the entry on Pluralism, beware of anyone or any group declaring itself the sole avant-garde, especially if they exclude or ignore people doing work that is roughly similar or closely related. Be even more wary if they try to sell you anything, intellectual as well as physical. Suspect it to be a road map directing all traffic to a dead end.
This book is inevitably critical, not only in judgments but in the intelligence behind my selections, because it is impossible to write selectively about the avant-gardes, with any integrity and excellence, without seeming opinionated. (If you don’t like opinions, well, you’re welcome to read a bus schedule or any country’s tax code.) Given how much information is now commonly available on the Internet, I’ve tried here to offer guidance and secrets, along with insight and wit, not available anywhere else. Given the increasing amount of information available in the 21st century, this new edition wouldn’t be worth anyone’s reading or purchasing otherwise.
One concern of any writer wanting to tell truths is how much truth he or she can tell (or, conversely, fearing how much cannot be told). The best reason for writing a book, rather than, say, magazine articles, is that the critic fortunately need not worry about his publishers’ constraints and biases that are customarily (if not necessarily) hidden. If this book didn’t surprise or offend, I would surmise that a putative reader had barely looked at its pages. Oh, yes, if any reader likes something in this book especially, please consider telling someone else. That’s how books of mine have survived years after their initial publication.
Because this Dictionary was written not just to be consulted but to be read from beginning to end, it eschews abbreviations that interrupt attention and minimizes dependency on cross-references. My literary ambition encourages stylistic variety over uniformity, even risking stylistic affectations here and there. I also cultivate the avant-garde value of SURPRISE, not only in my selections but in my prose. If only because I assume some readers might read only an entry or two, certain choice remarks are repeated in various places, often because they are worth repeating. Some of the stronger circumlocutions are collected in an ON DEMAND book titled Artful Entries (2019).
I would have liked to have produced more entries on avant-garde artists new to the 21st century, who are true heroes at a time when the idea of an esthetic vanguard has been subjected to all sorts of Philistine attack, and apologize now particularly to those individuals, whoever you are, whose names will be featured in, yes, yet future editions. May I discourage any reader from thinking that the length of an individual entry measures importance, supposedly with more words devoted to major artists than to minor. ‘Taint so, as length measures only centimeters.
Just as most of the first edition of this book was written in several months, so it was rewritten in 1999 and then again recently within a comparatively short time. Both then and now I have typically drawn largely upon my capacious memory and sometimes upon my earlier reviews and notes that were generally made when I first experienced something important. In writing critically about art (or in editing anthologies or even, say, in returning to restaurants), I have learned to trust my memory to separate the strongest work from everything else. One reason for my faith in memory is that it does not lie to me, which is to say that no matter my personal feelings toward an artist, no matter what reviewers might have said about his or her work, no matter what other factors might try to influence me, one working principle remains: If I cannot remember an artist’s work distinctly or I cannot from memory alone characterize it, it probably was not strong enough.
It follows that only art already lodged in my head will appear in my critical writing. One of my favorite ways for my testing the true quality of any well-known artist’s work is to ask myself, as well as others, whether any specific work[s] can be identified from memory. (No peeking or cheating allowed.) Thanks mostly to their professional hustling or fortunate transitory publicity, many artists’ names are more familiar than their works. Quite simply, what my memory chose to remember for me became this Dictionary. In the back of my mind was the image of the great ERICH AUERBACH, a German scholar living in Istanbul during World War II, writing his grandly conceived Mimesis (1946) without footnotes, because useful libraries were far away.
[Apollinaire] had an uncanny instinct for detecting genius and for seeing the revolutionary quality of a new idea or work of art…. He was frequently accurate and perceptive to an astounding degree; and in his choice of who or what was significant he seems in retrospect to have been nearly always right.
Edward F. Fry, Cubism (1966)
Another assumption is that what distinguishes major artists from minor is a vision of singular possibilities for their art and/or for themselves as creative people. Trained elaborately in intellectual history, which for me was mostly arts history, I necessarily focus upon the very best – what’s most likely to be selectively remembered. (“Cultural history,” by contrast, focuses upon what’s been popular, sometimes with only a certain group of people.) As an historian, I think I can discern the future from the past and thus identify likely direction in high cultural produce. Because I don’t often read newsprint, I can claim resistance to, if not an ignorance of, transient promotions and fashions of many kinds. I necessarily learned early to respect unique cultural excellence and now think that from the beginning of my critical career, more than fifty years ago, I’ve established a strong record of identifying new excellence that survives. By this measure, the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire has long been my hero, as I respect the fact that he, born Wilhelm Kostrowitzky, was commonly called Kostro, just as I’m called Kosti.
Because I resist doing anything professional, even a dictionary entry, that anyone else can do better, I recruited colleagues to write as many entries as possible. These colleagues’ names appear after their entries (which are otherwise mine); it is not for nothing that their names also accompany mine on the title page. From the late Nicolas Slonimsky, I drew upon texts already published, thanks to our common publisher. Within the entries, small caps identify names and sometimes concepts that receive fuller treatment in an alphabetically placed entry.
My model arts lexicographer, who deserves the dedication of this third edition as well as its predecessors, was the great Slonimsky, who, incidentally, preferred the epithet Lectionary to Dictionary because the former term refers to reading, the second to speaking. (The first edition of this book appeared before his centenary, 28 April 1994.) Another model for the writing of concise remarks is Ambrose Bierce, an American author too opinionated to be “great,” but whose best writing (see the entry on him) is nonetheless remembered. All of us who write dictionaries, whether authoritative or satirical, are, of course, indebted to the British writer Samuel Johnson, who also merits an individual entry.
This Dictionary differs from others in the arts in emphasizing decisive esthetic characterization over, say, a recital of institutional positions held, teachers or students had, prominent influences acknowledged, friendships made, or awards won. My implicit rules for writing entries on individuals were that they should be at least one hundred words long and that each entry should portray a person or concept distinctive from all others. One self-test was whether I could nail a subject in a particular way – not simply frame her or him with common details but uniquely nail them. More than once I discarded a draft, including some about personal friends, because the results would look suspiciously deficient for failing either of these two requirements. (No one is done a favor if made to look less. I considered appending their names here, if only to honor them, but feared that such acknowledgment might have an opposite effect.) Obviously, a book with avant-garde in the title ignores those who have spent their lives trying to be acceptable to one or another orthodoxy (including some earlier avant-garde).
As this book’s publisher contractually limited the number of words it would accept, I necessarily removed some previous entries; but rather than consign them to a dustbin, I decided to collect them into another book tentatively titled, Earlier Entries, available from Archae Editions at Amazon CreateSpace.
I am grateful to Richard Carlin for commissioning the first two editions before reprinting the second in paperback, and now to Ben Piggott for contracting this latest revision for Routledge and Laura Soppelsa for expediting production. May I thank again Douglas Puchowski, now for finding illustrations.
Because this book covers several arts, documentation is meant to be more useful than consistent or pseudo-definitive. For instance, following Slonimsky’s example, Douglas Puchowski and I tried to include complete birth dates and death dates, down to months and days whenever possible, acknowledging that sometimes so much detail was unavailable (particularly about individuals not yet customarily included in such compendia). To preserve an illusion of pristine research, we could have removed entries whose documentation was incomplete – by and large people whose loss would not be noticed – but instead decided that the inclusion of unfamiliar names was more important. Some people alive when this was drafted have no doubt since passed on.
A book with so much detail about contemporary figures will surely contain misspellings and other minor errors of fact, as well as unintentional omissions. If only to prepare for the possibility of a fourth edition, the author welcomes corrections and suggestions, by email, please, if they are to go into a single repository, c/o his eponymous website. No kidding.
Since the author is an American who spent a year studying at King’s College, London, and writing for London media, he freely mixes British orthography with American to a degree that partisans of one style or the other might find disagreeable. Consider, instead, appreciating his transatlantic catholicity. Because this book contains more proper nouns, including names, than can be successfully indexed, it also appears as an ebook whose search mechanism should be able to locate whatever lexical details the reader would like.
—Richard Kostelanetz