The revolutionary Avant-gardes..

Avant garde- my favorite term in art history. It is a French word with military roots. It refers to the advance guard- that team of soldiers that preceeds the army- they explore the territory and plan out the route that the army will follow. (Check out wikipedia for a nice long definition)

Paul Wood's definition is the most accepted one in art academia. The avant-gardes were revolutionary artists in the 1920s and 1930s. Peter Burger, a German writer, explains that the bourgeois culture of the 1920s had its own art that "co-exists with the status quo" (Wood 227)- art-for-art's sake. The avant-garde is art that defies bourgeois culture and the status quo. Avant-garde art stemmed from World War 1 and the Bolshevik revolution and included Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism.

Dadadadadadada...

This avant-garde movement began in Zurich in 1915. Marcel Duchamp, the daddy (or shall I say Dada-y) of Dada was already making waves in France. Picasso had rocked the art world with his three-dimensional sculptures that did not look like anything the world had seen before. The word "dada" is not supposed to make any sense. It may just be a random word from the dictionary, a term for 'rocking horse' or maybe even a baby's babble. I like the baby definition the best: I like babies that go "dadadadada....dadadada". Very Duchamp-ish.

As an art, dada rejects the treatment of art, specifically bourgeois tastes, like "the concentration on artisitic form, the production of aesthetic effects, the achievement of expression" (Wood 227).

Picasso's sculptures that did not mimic reality and Duchamp's Bottle Rack were pieces that confused the public. The modes of representation had changed- anything could be turned into art. The authority of the artist had changed- anybody could become an artist. The quality and aesthetics of art had changed- there was no standard of aesthetics that art had to adhere to.

This Bottle Rack made people stop and think about art. Art became a thinking game. People were made to think about the work as art, and the very nature of the term "art". Bottle Rack showed that there is no inherent property of art-ness in art works that sets them apart from other products. Art works are art because we, the audience, treat them as art. If Duchamp wants Bottle Rack to be art, it will be art.

In 1914, World War 1 split the artists up, and many moved to Switzerland where they experienced the conflicting forces of European culture. In criticism of Europe's barbarianism, the avant-gardes began the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1915. The Dada Manifesto, a crazy work in itself, was read by Tristan Tzara in 1918. "Dada was born of a need for independence...We have enough cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois?...there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleaniliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits" (quoted in Wood 230). Dada work involved cutting up bourgeois culture and letting itself randomly arrange itself into a Dada work.

From Zurich, Dada travelled to Paris, New York and Berlin. Dada felt that it was German Bolshevism- another type of World War 1 avant garde. The German avant-gardists arranged the Dada Fair to reject German Expressionism (which was too individualistic and subjective). After the World War, with the country in ruins, some avant-gardists became Communists. Subjectivity and Individualism became prominent ideals for the avant-garde.

Constructivism...

Amidst the miserable social conditions post World War 1 in Germany and Russia, the avant-gardes did not sit silent. In Germany, the "revolution from below" was defeated. In Russia, it was successful. The Russian avant-garde aimed to construct a new social order: thus Constructivism. In 1914, Russia was a backward, repressed society hiding under the blanket of modern foreign investment and progress. Bolshevik October was a major breakthrough in a social revolution waiting to happen. As Wood explains: "The combined yet also uneven development of modern capitalism had its most extreme effect in Russia, and ultimately this was the situation that produced the revolution of October 1917" (Wood 237). After the revolution, the avant-gardes became the Soviet avant-garde; international artistic subcultures that occasionally competed with each other. This avant-garde tried to collectively construct a new socialist society by juxtaposing visual analysis with technology to produce/construct designs that will economically benefit the new socialist society. The German Bauhaus supported these principles more than any other group or institution.

<--Bauhaus chairs- form follows function

The Bauhaus educated future avant-gardes. It "sought to rationalize the developments of the avant-garde into a comprehensive approach to modern design. Their slogan was 'form follows function'.." (Wood 239). The constructivists wanted their economical, practical designs to aid in the construction of a new society.

For over a decade after the revolution, the Soviet avant-gardes tried to integrate their practices into the society as a lifestyle, rather than an artisitic style...and failed.

Surrealism...

In the 1920s and 1930s, rhe West was home to media imagery controlling social ideogies through the new media of film and radio in dominant positions. Spectacularization, "urban living, literacy and mass consumption" were the main attitudes of life in the West. Surrealism found a niche to relate art and social life by resisting the newly restabilized bourgeois through an objective social revolution. Surrealism relied on Freud's psychonanalysis, because the Surrealists felt that psychoanalysis was a critique of bourgeois society and personal identity. Modernist critics attempt to reduce Surrealism to "an eccentric 'modern art movement'" (Wood 248) instead of raising it to the status of an avant-garde cultural movement that aspired to use different media to criticize "high art" and civilized canons of taste. Surrealism changed notions of authorship by crediting the psyche with the ability to create without any help from outside, by letting a truth emerge on its own without society's limitations or restrictions. Surrealists tried to remove the consious mind from their work, in order for the unconscious mind to emerge.

Surrealism's most well known artist- Salvador Dali-