Neo avant-garde
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"By the mid-1990s, Hal Foster had come to believe that the dialectic within the avant-garde between historical engagement and contemporary critique had broken down. In his view, the latter came to be preferred over the former as interest was elevated over quality. In The Return of the Real (1996), taking as his model Karl Marx's reaction against G. W. F. Hegel, he sought to rebut Peter Bürger's assertion – which he made in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) – that the neo avant-garde largely represented a repetition of the projects and achievements of the historical avant-garde, and therefore it was a failure. Foster's model was based on a notion of "deferred action" inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud. He conceded the failure of the initial avant-garde wave (which included such figures as Marcel Duchamp) but argued that future waves could redeem earlier ones by incorporating through historical reference those aspects that had not been comprehended the first time around. Gordon Hughes compares this theory with Jean-François Lyotard's."--Sholem Stein |
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Neo avant-garde is an art historical term coined in the 1960s, in a period that corresponds with Late Modernism or early postmodern art. The term refers to a supposed second wave of avant-garde art such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Nouveau réalisme, Neo-Dada and Fluxus. The first wave was Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.
The German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work." While the title of Bürger's essay is an explicit reference to Renato Poggioli's, he makes several useful additions to the latter's groundbreaking study, such as the distinction between "historical" (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism) and "neo" avant-garde (Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, etc.).
Peter Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art historians such as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: while older critics like Bürger (or the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri) view the postwar neo avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century, others like Clement Greenberg view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the collection of essays "Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry" critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.
See also
- Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) by Benjamin Heinz-Dieter Buchloh
