The avant-garde art in the XX century

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Odessa National University

The avantgarde art in the XX century

A. Titimets, I. Mechnikov

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the avant-garde art that appeared in the early XX th century and its main categories such as `individualization' and `iconophobia'.

Keywords: the avant-garde art, kitsch, crisis of representation, individualization, iconophobia.

Робота присвячена аналізу авангардного мистецтва, яке з'явилося на початку XX століття та його основних категорій, таких як «індивідуалізація» та «іконоборство».

What does `the avant-garde' mean? Literally it means “fore-guard”. The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted in art. Because in the 20^th century the understanding of art changes significantly. Moreover, the definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy [11]. The former stability of the world, which was reflected in culture, was ruined. The main reason for this lies, first of all, in restructuring the structure of society. In this period, the second part of the twentieth century, class division of society is no longer relevant, and the mass that comes from both higher and lower classes comes to the fore. One of the first to postulate this problem was Josй Ortega-y-Gasset, an eminent Spanish philosopher and sociologist, “if before the mass didn't claim anything and knew its role in the healing social dynamics, now the determination of the masses that assume the functions of the minority becomes the core of our time” [10: 21].

So, there are new meanings in art. In the late XIX^th and early XX^th centuries, many critics continued to grapple with the newness of the generation of artists inspired by Impressionism. If early high art duplicated reality, served as a means of representing harmony, now art is an instrument of disharmony, in connection with the changing historical context, namely, acquires a revolutionary character. So the new art, the avant-garde art, becomes a kind of protest, which finds expression in the rejection of visual forms. But it should be understood that this rejection of objective representation is a forced step, considering those destructive phenomena, first of all, wars that have overwhelmed the world.

So how we could possibly define such an extraordinary kind of art as avantgarde? Definitions of this kind of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of facts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, and it also, arguably, has trans-historical, trans-cultural characteristics that point in the direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core [11]. Thus, by the middle of the XX^th century, two cultural phenomena are forming - the avant-garde, which becomes a new high art, and, its antipode, kitsch. In particular, this issue is considered by Clement Greenberg, one of the biggest critics and theorists of the American neoavant-garde of the 30s-60s in his work “Avant-garde and Kitsch”.

In the essays collected in “Art and Culture”, Greenberg argued that what mattered most in a work was its articulation of the medium, more particularly, its finessing of the terms of the material medium, and the progressive elimination of those elements that were beside its point. “Aesthetic unity” was what mattered most to Greenberg, and aesthetic unity at its most subtle and refined collapsed the material terms into as concentrated and self-sufficient a form as possible, making the work seem autonomous and hermetic. For Greenberg, a consummately formal, purely material, nonsymbolic work, for example, a painting finessing its flatness in the act of acknowledging it - was an exemplification of positivism, which he saw as the reigning ideology of the modern world. What counted in a Morris Louis painting, for example, was the way the colours stained the canvas, confirming its flatness while seeming to levitate above it. The painting had presumably no other meaning than the sheer matter-of-factness of its colours and their movement on the canvas [1]. He also posited that, after an inaugural period of innovation in Europe, modernist painting became sublime in abstract expressionism, beautiful in the nongestural abstraction of such artists as Louis, and then declined in imitative, all-too-reductionist minimalism. He felt that the decline of minimalism was followed by the death of art in what he called “novelty art”, by which he meant pop art and dadaist-type art in general, continuing Barr's treatment of the “literary” as a mere sidebar to the story of abstraction. Thus, in the understanding of the researcher “kitsch” there is a fake culture that acts as a phenomenon “intended for those who remain indifferent and insensitive to the values of genuine culture”, i.e. oriented, first of all, directly to the masses [8]. The avant-garde emerges, Greenberg says, when artists and writers can no longer count on communication with their audience. Their response, in the past, has been stasic in an academic neo-classicism. In contrast, during the mid-XIX^th century, a new response emerged-artists formed an avant-garde which deliberately isolated itself from society and made its goal that of keeping culture from petrifying. This motion involved a focus on absolute issues of the artistic medium and the avoidance of “external” issues like content. A focus on the absolute leads to abstraction; abstraction is a type of purity and validity in art that is comparable to the validity of nature--what the artist is doing is “imitating” the processes of imitation, since art is imitation in its inception. This action cannot be criticized, but it is an action which the usual supporters of culture do not appreciate. So as a solution to a communication gap of sorts, a deliberate and perhaps larger one is created. In tandem with the creation of an avant-garde, isolated culture, there emerges a rearguard, or a culture which is derived from and appeals to the universal tastes and knowledge of the masses: kitsch [14: 200].

Kitsch is a commodity culture, developed specifically for the purpose of alleviating the boredom of the new proletariat. Kitsch exists in a symbiotic relationship with the other, dominant cultural system--it borrows its tools and transforms them to fit into its own system, and turns them out “mechanically”. Kitsch places technique above value and erases the distinctions that exist between values which can be found in art and those which are found elsewhere. In other words, kitsch merges art and life because it gives the viewer the answers, it gives the conclusion to a story which does not have to be guessed at and no effort has to be expended in order to understand the ending [8].

So, the first thing that distinguishes the avant-garde is its isolation in relation to the cultural environment. If “kitsch” is concentrated in a commercial environment, then the avant-garde, in turn, is distinguished by its cliquishness. This is due to the complexity of reading meanings in the works of avant-garde culture, because it is not clear to the average viewer. Hence it becomes absolutely clear why genuine art a priori is “anti-people”. Clement Greenberg says the following about this thesis: “The best artists [of the avant-garde] are artists for artists, and the best poets are poets for poets” [5: 516].

Since the instrument of the avant-garde is an abstraction that implies a rejection of objectivity, it is necessary to differentiate this concept in the context of its opposition to academic fine art, which was outlined by another German art historian and philosopher Wilhelm Vorringer in his work “Abstraction and Feeling”. He connects the tendency to abstraction with the desire of individualization, which is incomparable, in his opinion, with the role of space in the visual arts, “because just the space connects things with each other, imparts to them their relativity in the world and therefore can not be individualized” [13: 539]. Thus, the most important category of the avant-garde is “individualism”.

Proceeding from the aforesaid, the avant-garde should be understood as a genuine reaction to academicism, i.e. as a protest. In this context, we need to consider the flatness problem in painting. After all, if for old masters one of the main tasks was initially to overcome the flat nature of the canvas, then in the painting of modernists the restrictions become not the obstacles, but the essence of painting [10: 516]. So the category of “formless” comes to the fore in avantgarde culture. Indeed, in the forefront, the dictatorship of form fades into the background, which marks the “crisis of the era of representation”.

Another feature that distinguishes academic painting from the avant-garde is the disappearance of the need for interpretation of a pre-set sense. The habitual division of the subject disappears, which is the artist himself, the author, and, in fact, the viewer, and the object, which is represented by a work of art. In particular, he postulates this problem in the context of the language of Roland Barth in his work “The Death of the Author”. In his opinion, “as for the modern scripter, he [the author] is born simultaneously with the text, he has no being before and outside the letter, he is by no means the subject, in relation to which his book would be a predicate; there remains only one time - the time of the speech act, and every text is always written here and now” [2: 386].

It turns out that art also receives a new heuristic potential. So what was previously a priori passive, namely the object, can now become active. This work is devoted to the work of Georges Didi-Uberman with the talking title “What we see, what looks at us”. In his understanding, the perception of a work of art does not now imply the unconditional domination of the artist or viewer, but the object itself becomes an active participant in this process. Moreover, the object and the subject thus do not merge, but there is a “double distance” that never runs out, and thus the process of “communication” between the viewer and the work appears forever unfinished [7: 134]. It is evident that although the avant-garde is, in a sense, anti-national art, in view of the complexity of interpreting the symbols embedded in the work, it is this phenomenon that reflects the individual's reaction to the global upheavals that stirred up society. Thus, the avant-garde appears, first of all, as a historical phenomenon. And the impossibility of representation reality with the help of visual forms and is expressed in “iconophobia”, i.e. Fear of an iconic sign. After all, if the iconographic nature of art reflects a stable picture of the world, which in the context of post-war realities is not relevant, since there are pent-up landmarks, then iconophobia, in turn, reflects fear of form as something frozen, stable, definitive [12: 537].

Moreover, K. Greenberg notes that, in fact, the emergence of the avant-garde as such became possible thanks to a new critical interpretation of history, and as a result, representatives of the avant-garde “did not hesitate to demonstrate a lack of interest in politics”. As an argument in favor of this thesis one should recall one of the creators of the theory of the information society, Daniel Bell, who, in fact, speaks of the end of ideology in the context of American society in the 1950s, which is characterized by a decrease in interest in political life as a result of the transition of Western society to the post-industrial stage of development [3: 375]. In particular, the art historian Eva Cockcroft, in her article “Abstract Expressionism as a weapon of the Cold War”, also states that if the Renaissance art has been in step with the official authority, after the industrial revolution, the role of the artist in the social structure of society was not so clearly defined. Moreover, “it becomes more likely even a part of the general flow of goods of a market economy” [6: 40]. So the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1929 under the auspices of the Rockefeller family was the consummate sign of the social and economic success of avant-garde art. Under the leadership of Alfred H. Barr, the museum mounted a series of now classic breakthrough exhibitions, although Cubism was singled out as the particularly seminal movement. The point was clearly made in Barr's diagram of the development of avant-garde art through 1935 - “Cubism,” in the largest letters, has pride of place. According to the diagram, Cubism derives from Cйzanne, Neo-Impressionism, and Henri Rousseau and leads directly to Suprematism and Constructivism finally leading to abstract art. This became the orthodox formal high line. German Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism are shunted to the side, falsifying their influence and significance. Today Barr's diagram looks academic and prejudiced, showing the limitations of a one-dimensional reading of avant-garde art privileging the formal. Again, the power of an institution to dictate and legislate art history is clear: Barr was in effect a modern Le Brun, and the Museum of Modern Art became the avant-garde academy, seeming to have more authority than the art itself [1]. This thesis can also be confirmed by the words of the French philosopher-postmodernist Jean-Franзois Lyotard: “The social environment no longer recognizes itself in works of art, it ignores them, rejects them as incomprehensible, and after a while allows the intellectual avantgarde to keep them in museums as traces of attempts, bearing testimony of the power of the spirit and its poverty” [9: 226].

At the same time, in post-war realities, although we do not find the artist's visual reflection of certain political phenomena, one should understand here the a priori impossibility of the same historical paintings that took place, for example, in the 19^th century. After all, society is, in a certain sense, in a state of horror, even numbness before those radical changes in society - that's why the very artlessness of art is an immediate reaction. Realizing this, the absolutization of expression becomes an instrument for expressing such a reaction. It should be remembered the leading representative of abstract expressionism, Mark Rothko. In his own words, Rothko does not want to “maim” a human face, he makes ethical choices in contemporary socio-cultural realities and focuses on the “scale of human emotions”, choosing for them a different - a color, abstract - “way of expression”. So the modern French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion concludes that “Rothko was faced with the inevitable choice - either to kill the face, enclosing it in the flat frame of the picture”, or mutilate “himself as an artist, refusing to transfer the face directly. He chose the latter”. This is the new critical interpretation of history by the avant-garde. Moreover, all colour-field painters were experimenting with the use of flat areas or fields of colour to induce contemplation in the viewer - even to a pitch of mystic intensity. Rothko and

Newman, among others, described their desire to achieve the “sublime” rather than the “beautiful”. A type of highly coloured minimalism, their style aimed to liberate the artist from “all constraints of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting” [13: 539]..

Rothko's own soft-edged rectangular shapes of glowing colour sought to envelop the viewer and trigger a semi-religious emotional experience, to the point of tears. Like Pollock and the action-painters, colour field paintings were executed on a monumental scale for optimum impact - not to invoke heroic grandeur but rather to influence and create an intimate relationship with the individual spectator. Rothko said, “I paint big to be intimate” [11].

Next, it should be noted that the very craving for avant-garde towards individualization is linked to technical progress. Another E. Junger in the work “Worker. Domination and gestalt” which was published in 1932, also states that the impossibility of developing the former elite art in the realities of the culture of the twentieth century, which, in his opinion, is the result of the loss of individuality and the development of technology, in this context, rather, photographs. Because, really, it's not the picture that becomes interesting, but the photograph; not an individuality, but a type - “rather, we find that life begins to show fragments that are specifically for the lens and are not at all designed for a pencil” [9: 200]. This issue also applies to the well-known cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, who believes that “the dawn of reproductive technology replaces the unique manifestation of a reproduced object with mass” [4: 22].

To sum up, it should be said that the avant-garde culture reflects the reaction to the shocks in society that took place in the XX^th century, in particular, found the most vivid expression in the postwar period, namely, in the 50's. This reaction is expressed in the rejection of visual forms, which leads to a craving for abstraction. And in connection with the complexity of reading characters, understanding the images in the product of avant-garde, the culture is individualized, although the disappearance of the usual division into subject and object is vividly evident. So art receives a new heuristic potential, which is expressed in the incompleteness of avant-garde works, in the effort to fix the moment, shifting the emphasis directly to the process of creating a work for a more accurate transfer of inner experience as a reaction. Thus, the avant-garde is, first of all, a historical phenomenon.

References

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