ON DISCOURSES ON THE »FAILURE OF THE A VANT-GARDE«

Abstract

In this paper I attempt to decipher some representative discourses concerning the »failure of the avant-garde« and thereby to illuminate a latent structure of denial/repression/exclusion underlying the origin of Western modern art, that is, a structure developed as the other side of the self-formation of art at the time of the newly gained myth of autonomy. Since modern »arts« fell into a generic category »Art«, this Art seems to have been increasingly marginalized and impoverished, and yet, at the same time, given more privileges (if only symbolic ones) in compensation. In order to establish itself within the sublimated domain of high culture, art might have had to throw away everything that could not comfortably fit in with its self-definition. While the dualism between »high culture« and »low culture« ceased being grounded in reality, a new device, modernism, was invented to secure imaginary boundaries and to forward the process of the autonomization of art. Modernism, in this case, serves as a more advanced and reinforced repressive device. It also includes the rebellious avant-garde as a momentary release of the repressed. The interrelatedness of modernism and the avant-garde, then, will appear as a conflict between an aesthetics of control and an aesthetics of anarchy.