Modern and Avant-garde art - Essay Example

The term modern in respect of avant-garde practice in art and performance in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century During the 19th and 20th century, many things have undergone significant transformations, most of which are changes from the conservative values of realism into modernization. These changes have mainly resulted from movements that advocated for changes in various aspects of life for example, art and performance as well as religion, lifestyles, architecture, social and political situations. These movements or actions become important forces behind modernization. Modernization can simply be described as practices or thoughts that result to a shift from the traditional way of doing things or thinking into those witnessed in the western society. The end result of the process of modernization is a change in the lifestyles, architecture and religious, socio-political aspects of societies. This means that the main motive of modernism is to do away with tradition and finally, its reprise, rewriting, revision, incorporation and parody in new forms. The existence of this term, avant-garde is believed to be the hallmark/distinguishing trait or characteristic of modernism. The term avant-garde is refers to vanguard or advance guard, meaning works that are innovative or experimental or innovative with respect to politics, art and culture. Avant-garde involves going beyond the boundaries of what is generally accepted as a norm in a society or the status quo mainly in the cultural realm (Matei 1987). Since the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, performance and art have undergone significant transformations as a result of the avant-garde practice. The term modern in respect to the avant-garde practice in art and performance around these times denotes the activities, and visible and transformational results of people who felt that traditional forms of art and performance were becoming outdated. In the 1980s, there was an assertion that it was relevant to entirely reject previous norms. The society was supposed to desist from revisiting the past knowledge by relating them to current techniques. Like other aspects of like physics, art and performance also witnessed growing movement in line with this ideology. The result of this is that in the first fifteen years of the 20th century, many artists, thinkers and, writers managed to break with the traditional ways of organizing painting, music, literature and painting. Crane (1987) states that Avant-garde writers who saw themselves as being modernized abandoned bourgeois values and begun bothering their readers with new styles and forms that were difficult and complex in nature. Modernization also led to a change in the continuity of the chronological development that was generally accepted and a development of new ways that can be used to. People like William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad among others introduced the Stream-of- Consciousness, a style used to trace the flow of thoughts of a character. Critical examination of the purpose of the avant-garde In the mainstream society, avant-garde exclusively refers to marginalized artists, composers, writers and composers whose works are against the mainstream commercial works and often has an abrasive political and/or social edge. The essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” suggests that in the history of its culture, avant-garde has not only been against high or mainstream but also, it has been opposed to the mass culture that has been artificially synthesised by the process of industrialisation. This essay was written in 1939 by Clement Greenburg, a art critic from New York (Murphy 1999). According to Greenburg, each of the media developed is a direct product of capitalism hence they are not driven by the ideals of true art, instead, they are driven by a profit-fixated motive just as other sectors of manufacturing. For Greenburg, these forms were therefore Kitsch, meaning they were of mechanical culture of faked, and phony. They often presented themselves to be more than they were by utilising formal devices illegally obtained from the vanguard culture. In this context, it is clear that the purpose of Avant-garde is to preserve the ideals of art. Avant-garde produces innovative products whose motives are separated from superficial stylistic innovation and market-driven fashion change. Avant-garde protects the artistic merit deserved by an artist as a result of their artistic excellence. It is opposed to the mass culture, the bogus culture that is continuously being manufactured by Culture industry. The new industry comprises the movie industry, commercial publishing houses, the electronic media and the record industry. Supporters of avant-garde have pointed out that the emergence of culture as an industry has led to the displacement of the artistic excellence by sales figures. Sales figures, today, are mainly used as the measure of worth and justification of effort and expenditure. For example, the worth a particular musical composition is only judged by its position in ratings charts whereas that of a novel is solely judged by whether it emerges as the best-seller or not (Richard 1999). In the above mentioned way, the autonomous artistic merit that is highly valued by vanguardist is abandoned. In this case, avant-garde opposes the customer culture that rules in the culture industry. According to Cardullo and Knoff (2001), avant-garde drives reforms for example, avant-garde music works within the traditional structure and at the same time, it breaches its boundaries in some manner. Avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Charles Ives, Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, Henry Cowell among others. Avant-garde can be said to have led to social, economic and political reformations. One strong advocator of avant-garde is Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues. In his essay entitled “Lartiste, le savant et lindustriel,” which means “The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”, Rodrigues evoked the definition if avant-garde as the promotion of social reforms that are radical in nature. This essay was written in 1825. According to him, avant-garde is an important tool for the achievement of social, economic and political reforms in the society. Holding to this view, he calls on artists to become the people’s avant-garde because power of the arts is the fastest and most immediate way of achieving such reformations (Matei 1987). The improvement in aesthetic appearance of art and performance is attributed to avant-garde. As time went on, avant-garde became associated with movements that were primarily concerned with “art for arts sake”. “Art for arts sake” was not concerned with the wider social reform. Instead, it mainly focused on extending the frontiers of aesthetic experience of art. Self-consciousness is the salient characteristic of modernism. Crane (1987) states that in avant-garde, the application of self-consciousness has led to the experiments with form and work. These experiments draw attention to the various processes and materials used in the production of a form of art. In 1950s and 1960s, many artists who had a wide range of interests begun to move beyond the boundaries of contemporary art and this led to the introduction of performance-based arts. Under avant-garde, groups like Judith Malina and Julian Beck and The Living Theatre collaborated with painters and sculptures in creating new environments. These environments greatly changed the relationship between the performer and the audience. This was very evident in the work Paradise Now (Crane 1987). During the same period of 1950s and 1960s, Avant-garde led to the staging of new performances that were meant to be works of new art form. The performances combined dance, sound, sculpture or music and often, the audience were allowed to become active participants of these performances. These performances were also marked by spontaneous expressivity and improvisation of abstract expressionism, and reductive philosophies of minimalism. At this time also, Happenings were created by various avant-garde artists. In art and performance, Happenings referred to unscripted gatherings that were mysterious and often spontaneous. These gatherings were those of the artists themselves, their relatives and friends in various specified locations. Often, gatherings incorporated exercises in absurdity, spontaneous nudity, costuming, physicality and various acts that were random or seemingly disconnected. Notable creators of Happenings include Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Red grooms, Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow. During the 1950 and 1960 period, radical avant-garde circles introduced many new directions for example, various forms of geometric abstraction. A notable example is the hard-edge painting. Apart from radical avant-garde circles, these directions also appeared in many other artist studios. Geometric abstractions like hard-edge paintings were developed as a reaction to the subjectivism of abstract expressionism. An advancement of avant-garde revolutionary ideas also led to other revolutionary concepts and art movements by the late 1960s. Process art enabled artists to experiment with and utilise a diverse encyclopaedia of material, content, sense of time, style, placement and real and plastic space. The function of avant-garde can further be analysed by examining various avant-garde art movements for example constructivism, impressionism, minimalism surrealism, abstract expression and conceptual art. Avant-garde ensures that every art developed carries some important idea hence art is not developed just for the sake of it. An example of an avant-garde movement that supports this view is conceptual art. Alberro and Stimson (1999) state that in conceptual art, the concept or the idea is the most crucial aspect of the work. This means that an artist has to ensure that all the decisions and planning are made beforehand. It also ensures that the execution process remains a perfunctory affair. Through Conceptual art, avant-garde is able to question the nature of art and hence, the artistic skill. By using this concept, avant-garde advocates that every art should examine its own nature. This view formed the guideline of the work of Clement Greenberg, the influential art critic. It is therefore true to say that Conceptual art recognises the authorial presence manifested by the artist’s formal invention and their manner of handling of materials (Alberro and Stimson 1999). Avant-garde minimises unnecessary features of art and capitalises in its important elements. Minimalism is an avant-garde movement that describes the trend in architecture and design where the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. The movement capitalises on the notion that less is more. An example of a person who successfully applied minimalism is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, an architect. Rohe described how he managed to create an impression of extreme simplicity by applying this aesthetic tactic of arranging many components of a building. He enlisted very detail and element to serve multiple functional and visual purposes. Minimalism in architecture therefore helps architectures to bring out a complex structure in a simple way while allowing them to focus on engineering and technology rather than aesthetics. Minimalism also allows architectures to give special focus on the connection between elegant lighting, perfect planes, and thorough consideration of the void spaces that are created by the removal of three-dimensional shapes from the design. Avant-garde shifted the focus from the painterly to sculptural concerns in visual art. This is seen in minimalism where the illusionistic, pictorial and fictive aspects of an art are reduced. Literary minimalism involves economical use of words and maintaining a focus on the work’s surface descriptions. Avant-garde enables art to be timely in responding to the needs of the wider society as seen in its Constructivism movement. Constructivism originated in Russia as from 1919. This movement emerged as a rejection of the concept of autonomous art in favour of the concept of art as a social purposes. George (1995) explains that in architecture, constructivism pays attention to the new industrial tasks and new social demands required by the society. The type of constructivism that featured in Realist Manifesto by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner focused on space and rhythm. Productivity have insisted on the idea that art that is purely socially-oriented will easily be absorbed in industrial production hence artists should develop art along socially utilitarian lines. Impressionism as an avant-garde movement has enabled painters to develop works that are of higher quality and finer details. The main features of Impressionist paintings include ordinary subject matter, the use of brush strokes that are thin but visible, emphasis on the correct depiction of light in its various qualities, unusual visual angles and inclusion of movement as an important element of human experience and perception. This technology facilitated the painting of realistic scenes of modern lifestyles, and outdoor painting of portraits and still lifes. Impressionism led to extensive use of outdoor painting because artists realised that they could capture the transient and momentary effects of sunlight by painting in the open air. In order to realise the effects of strong colour vibration, impressionists portrayed a painting’s overall visual effects instead of bringing put its details. This was achieved by the use of brush strokes that are short, broken and are of mixed and pure colour. Through its salient features, impressionism managed to capture an original and fresh vision. A piece of art has to impress its audience. Impressionism achieves this by recreating the sensation in the viewer’s eye instead of delineating the details of the subject. Impressionism created a welter of forms and techniques and in this sense, it became a precursor of many other styles of painting like Cubism, Fauvism, neo-Impressionism and post-Impressionism. Another avant-garde movement is Surrealism. This movement begun in early 1920s and is famously known for the writings and artworks of the group members. Works produced under Surrealism feature the element of surprise, non sequitur and unexpected juxtapositions. According to one of the Surrealists by the name Antonin Artaud, a theatre should be a mystical metaphysical experience. Surrealism led to the theorising of a theatrical form that would be direct and immediate, and it would link the unconscious minds of both the spectators and performers in a ritual-like event. From this view, Artuad came up with the Theatre of Cruelty, performance in which feelings, emotions and the metaphysical were expressed physically and not through language. This created an archetypal, allegorical vision and mythological that closely relates to the world of visions/dreams (Cardullo and Knoff 2001). Avant-garde added creativity to the writing of poems through imaginism, a poetic flow found in Russian avant-garde. By way of styles used, imaginism was an heir to Ego-Futurism. Imaginists developed poetry basing on the sequences of uncommon and arresting images. Most of them were freethinkers and atheists. Conclusion Avant-garde has led to great changes in art and performance. Through various movements under it, avant-garde has led to objective modernisation in art and performance. For example in conceptualism, the idea of a work of work is the main point of focus. This means that changes are not allowed to take place anyhow or in a manner that will make art to loose its value. Unlike other forms of movements or industries that support modernism, for example the Culture industry, the ideas of avant-garde do not arise from financial motives. Culture industry is driven by economic gains of modernisation hence the environment of operation is customer driven. Supporters of avant-garde are against this because it reduces autonomous artistic merit that artists could earn. For example, this culture changes the mode of judging the value of a piece of art into commercial ratings and how much a book sells. On the other hand, avant-garde insists on the merit of excellence that is earned by an artist as a result of their artistic skills. References Alberro Alexander and Stimson Blake. (1999). Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. MIT Press. London. Crane Diana. (1987). The Transformation of the Avant-garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985. University of Chicago Press. Chicago Cardullo Bert and Knoff Robert (2001). Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology. Yale UP. New Haven and London. Matei Calinescu, (1987). The Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Duke University Press. Richard Murphy (199). Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. Rickey George (1995). Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (Revised edition). George Braziller. London. Read More