Critical Procedures: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde and ProtoConceptualism

Abstract

In the essay the author discusses the status of the neo-avant-garde and of proto-conceptualism in relation to ideas of modernism and historical avant-gardes. By the neo-avant-garde he refers to the excessive, experimental and emancipatory artistic practices that are formed: (1) as reconstructions, recyclings, or revitalisations of the specific practices of historical avant-gardes, especially of Dada and constructivism; (2) as concrete but marginally positioned realisations of great modernist and avantgardist technological, emancipatory, political, and artistic utopias; and (3) as the establishment of authentic critical, excessive, experimental and emancipatory artistic practices in the Cold War era of dominant high modernism. Historical avant-gardes developed from the end of 19th century to the late twenties and early thirties of the 20th century. Historical avant-gardes are, on the one hand, the forerunners or the initial paradigm in the process of establishing modernist culture, and are the critics of the tradition of modernism within the bourgeois moderate and stable modernity, on the other – as well as of the canonized autonomy of art. The neo-avant-gardes, contrariwise, no longer possess the status of forerunners, or of initial paradigms in relation to modernism. Instead, they have the character of corrective, alternative, critical or subversive practice within the dominant high modernism of late post-industrial society. Therefore, paradigms of the neo-avant-garde cannot be easily identified as second hand avant-garde, but have to be interpreted and investigated as the realization of different critical, emancipatory, creative, productive or behavioural possibilities in the art and culture of high hegemonic modernism. Proto-conceptualisms represent different instances or movements in the heterogeneous neo-avant-garde realm. Protoconceptualisms are named those art practices that are critical and subversive towards concepts and phenomena of the narrative verbal, visual, acoustic or behavioural production of the functions and effects of autonomous, highly aestheticized art work.