The place of the avant-garde in the 20th century must be defined by its
relationship to those major streams of modernity, particularly with regard to
the rise of Americanism (with reference to the explanation by Wollen in
Chapter 2). The rise of American technology and "a fascination with movies,
soaring towers, powerful machines and speeding automobiles" (P.36) gave
rise to what Wollen calls Fordism. Essentially, mass production and the machine stood
for modernity and the image became the hallmark of Americanism. Such works as Charlie
Chaplin's In music, a work such as George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique, which
created riots at its 1926 premiere at the Theatre Champs-Elyseé typify
the synthesis of human with the machine. The chaotic and frenetic opening of the three
sections suggest the din of machines with the unpredictability of the division
of time that characterizes the most disturbing aspects of avant-garde music. A
brief comparison with the modernist Ionisation of Varèse with
its highly organized rhythmic layers shows the essential difference within the
modernist aesthetic.
Wollen cites the Walter Benjamin essay from 1935, The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, to address the issues of copy and diversion
in art works that have mass distribution possibilities. The ideas are allied with
those of Brecht in the famous afterword to Mahagonny (In Brecht and the
Theater) which sets up the oppositions of thought vs. feeling and the collective vs. the individual.
There is no money in this Land, which occurs near the end of the opera
paints the nihilistic and grim picture of the failure of technology ( no
telephone), which ultimately cannot save humankind. Other images like the Tiller Girls
and the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall show the transformation of human beings
into robots in precision dance.
Post Fordism gave rise to new industries because of electronics and
new technology for old products, creating a shift from the object as commodity
to information as a commodity (Wollen,P.63). The new movements such as surrealism
and later abstract expressionism, children of the avant-garde of the 30's saw
the cancellation of image and specific transformation of recognizable objects.
In the works of Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Jackson Pollock, the immediate
rejection of the immediately acceptable bourgeois values and a redefinition of
older and more embedded tradition rekindled a new art. For use, the line between
REAL tradition and convenient status quo mores is often difficult to discern; and,
it is possible that the decision of what to reject or embrace is as individual
as each artist. Pollock welcomed the technique and traditionalism of Thomas
Hart Benton but rejected surrealism which had a closer stylistic
association with Benton's neo-realistic work in favor of the more concrete
abstract expressionism. There is a similar mechanism in John Cage's rejection
of the overt formalism of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, in favor of a more direct
and concrete expression which allows for structural flexibiity.
The Soja and Dawtry readings place emphasis on the dynamic aspect of evolving
societies. For Soja, history is geography and the dynamic redefinition of space.
A good explanation of its relation to art can be found in Shorsky's studies of
the modernization of Vienna in which radial expansion of the roads gave rise to artistic expansion.
Another important observation is that the geographic approach confirms the synchronic view
of multiple artistic styles as opposed to the cause-and-effect progression of styles.
Dawtry cautions that "one cannot employ a static set of ideas to look at
the changing form of art" (P.6). Grasping Modernity (which is curiously not
differentiated from the avant-garde in Chapter I) requires two abstract
competences: 1) to recognize new kinds of social relations in modern capitalist
society, and 2) to be aware that objective changes in the nature of society give
rise to new forms of subjective experience. (P.9).
Abstraction and expression are two linked concepts in the 20th century and,
"Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism destabiize normal relations of art in
bourgeois society as part of a programme of changing those societies totally".
Likewise, avant-garde works are essentially disturbing and seek to drive the
social agenda by questioning the status quo. In addition, the basic perceptual
mechanisms of human beings are continually challenged. ALL avant-garde works stretch
out perception in ways unthinkable before the experience. There is, of course, a
social paradox in that all the artists in this category were middle class men (Dawtry P.26).
Rochlitz's Adorno and Modernism (in Rahn) grapples with the apparently
irrational first impression of much modern art: "If modern art is obscure and
refuses itself to immediate comprehension, this is because its apparent irrationality is
the inverse of instrumental reason...The novelty of the modern is at the same time
a mortal parody of itself...the novelty of avant-garde is its incessant transcendence
of negativity" (P.25). On the next page there is Adorno's observation that the
apparent irrationality in the avant-garde [my insertion] is a form of logical reaction
which denounces "false instrumental logic". The dialectic attempts to
establish a relation between the artwork and "historic truth" (our definition
of firmly grounded tradition as the basis for any avant-garde work).
John Cage's Bicentennial Apartment House 1776 makes a strong case for this
definition: The use of traditional folk tunes, spirituals, cantorial materials, etc. in a
flexible and often unpredictable overlapping cascade of events serves as a paradigm. The
sonic image of the American melting pot with its chaotic elements and the apartment
house image conjured up by the title create a perfect synthesis.
Another paradigm is revealed in the work of Marcel Duchamp. André Breton's
Lighthouse of the Bride gives a good account of Duchamp's odyssey to "unlearn
painting and drawing" (P. 126) through the ready-mades after 1914. The Large Glass
with its images of the bride, bachelors, machines, etc. projects a "mechanistic and cynical
interpretation of the phenomenon of love" (P.128). The loss of virginity becomes
transformed in the mechanized reality of this work. Naturally, the bride and the False
Maria of Metropolis occupy the same universe.
An open question regarding the permanent effect of these machine images (ergo,
permanent avant-garde) in this era of post-modernism will have to be deferred until a
convincing explanation of this age appears. These images of the bride, etc., continue to
haunt us, gnawing at the core of our understanding of human nature.