The avant-garde consists of those who feel sufficiently at ease with the past not to have to compete with it or duplicate it.
Dick Higgins, “Does Avant-Garde Mean Anything?” (1970)
The avant-garde cannot easily become an academy, because avant-garde artists usually sustain the quality which made them avant-garde artists in the first place. The styles they develop will become academic in other hands.
Darby Bannard, “Sensibility of the Sixties” (1967)
The term “avant-garde” refers to those out front forging a path previously unknown, a route that others will take. Initially coined to characterize the shock troops of an army, the epithet passed over into art. Used precisely, avant-garde should refer, first, to rare work that on its first appearance satisfies three discriminatory criteria:
It transcends current esthetic conventions in crucial respects, establishing discernible distance between itself and the mass of recent practices; it will necessarily take considerable time to find its maximum audience; and it will probably inspire future, comparably advanced endeavors.
Only a small minority working within any art can ever be avant-garde; for once the majority has caught up to something new, whether as creators or as an audience, those doing something genuinely innovative will, by definition, have established a beachhead someplace beyond. Problems notwithstanding, avant-garde remains a critically useful category.
As a temporal term, avant-garde characterizes art that is “ahead of its time” – that is, beginning something – while “decadent” art, by contrast, stands at the end of a prosperous development. “Academic” refers to art that is conceived according to rules that are learned in a classroom; it is temporally post-decadent. Whereas decadent art is created in expectation of an immediate sale, academic artists expect approval from their social superiors, whether they be teachers or higher-ranking colleagues. Both academic art and decadent art are essentially opportunistic, created to realize immediate success, even at the cost of surely disappearing from that corpus of art that survives merely by being remembered. Both decadent art and academic art realize their maximal audience upon initial publication.
One secondary characteristic of avant-garde art is that, in the course of entering new terrain, it violates entrenched rules – it seems to descend from “false premises” or “heretical assumptions”; it makes current “esthetics” seem irrelevant. For instance, Suzanne Langer’s theory of symbolism, so prominent in the 1940s and even the 1950s, hardly explains the new art of the past four decades. Relevant though Langer’s esthetics were to the arts of Aaron Copland and Martha Graham, among their contemporaries, theories of artful symbolism offered little insight into, say, the music of John Cage or Milton Babbitt, the choreography of Merce Cunningham, or the poetry of John Ashbery, where what you see or hear is generally most, if not all, of what there is. This sense of irrelevance is less a criticism of Langer’s theories, which seventy years ago seemed so persuasively encompassing, than a measure of drastic artistic difference between work prominent then and what followed.
One reason why avant-garde works should be initially hard to comprehend is not that they are intrinsically inscrutable or hermetic but that they defy, or challenge as they defy, the perceptual procedures of artistically educated people. They forbid easy access or easy acceptance, as an audience perceives them as inexplicably different, if not forbiddingly revolutionary. In order to begin to comprehend such art, people must work and think in unfamiliar ways. Nonetheless, if an audience learns to accept innovative work, this will stretch its perceptual capabilities, affording kinds of esthetic experience previously unknown. Edgard Varèse’s revolutionary lonisation (1931), for instance, taught a generation of listeners about the possible coherence and beauty in what they had previously perceived as noise.
It follows that avant-garde art usually offends people, especially serious artists, before it persuades, and offends them not in terms of content, but as Art. They assert that Varèse’s noise (or Cage’s, or Babbitt’s) is unacceptable as music. That explains why avant-garde art strikes most of us as esthetically “wrong” before we acknowledge it as possibly “right”; it “fails” before we recognize that it works. (Art that offends by its content challenges only as journalism or gossip, rather than as Art, and is thus likely to disappear as quickly as other journalism or gossip.)
Those most antagonized by the avant-garde are not the general populace, which does not care, but the guardians of culture, who do, whether they be cultural bureaucrats, established artists, or their epigones, because they feel, as they sometimes admit, “threatened.”
Though vanguard activity may dominate discussion among sophisticated professionals, it never dominates the general making of art. Most work created in any time, in every art, honors long-passed models. Even today, in the United States, most of the fiction written and published and reviewed has, in form, scarcely progressed beyond mid-20th-century standards; most poetry today is similarly decadent.
The “past” that the avant-garde aims to surpass is not the tradition of art but the currently decadent fashions, for in Harold Rosenberg’s words, “Avant-garde art is haunted by fashion.” Because avant-gardes in art are customarily portrayed as succeeding one another, the art world is equated with the world of fashion, in which styles also succeed one another. However, in both origins and function, the two are quite different. Fashion relates to the sociology of lucrative taste; avant-garde, to the history of art. In practice, avant-garde activity has a dialectical relationship with fashion, for the emerging remunerative fashions can usually be characterized as a synthesis of advanced art (whose purposes are antithetical to those of fashion) with more familiar stuff. Whenever fashion appears to echo advanced art, a closer look reveals the governing model as art from a period recently past.
The term “avant-garde” can also refer to individuals creating such path-forging art; but even by this criterion, the work itself, rather than the artist’s intentions, is the ultimate measure of the epithet’s applicability to an individual. Thus, an artist or writer is avant-garde only at certain crucial points in his or her creative career, and only those few works that were innovative at their debut comprise the history of modern avant-garde art. The term “avant-garde” may also refer to artistic groups, if and only if most of their members are (or were) crucially contributing to authentically exploratory activity.
The term is sometimes equated with cultural antagonism, for it is assumed that the “avant-garde” leads artists in their perennial war against the Philistines. However, this Philistine antagonism is a secondary characteristic, as artists’ social position and attitudes descend from the fate of their creative efforts, rather than the reverse. Any artist who sets out just to mock the Philistines is wearing an old hat and thus not likely to do anything original.
Esthetic conservatives are forever asserting that “the avant-garde no longer exists,” because, as they see it, either academia or the general public laps up all new art. However, it is critically both false and ignorant to use a secondary characteristic in lieu of a primary definition. Avant-garde is an art-historical term, not a sociological category. The conservative charge is factually wrong as well, as nearly all avant-gardes in art are ignored by the public (and its agents in the culture industries), precisely because innovative work is commonly perceived as “peculiar,” if not “unacceptable,” not only by the masses but by those who make a business of disseminating culture in large quantities. Indeed, the pervasiveness of those perceptions of oddity is, of course, a patent measure of a work’s being art-historically ahead of its time. Those who deny the persistence of the avant-garde are comparable to those who deny the existence of poverty, each by its fakery implicitly rationalizing retrograde attitudes and perhaps the retention of tenuous privileges.
Because the avant-garde claims to be prophetic, the ultimate judge of current claims can only be a future cultural public. For now, future-sensitive critics should proceed under the assumption that in their enthusiasms they might, just might, be askew.