Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde by John Roberts

Author:John Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Conceptual Art and the Rehistoricization of the Avant-Garde

To note the arrival of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in conceptual art in the 1970s as a period in which a number of artists (on the left) get to grips with the rehistoricization of the avant-garde is thus also to realize how attenuated the category of the avant-garde feels for this generation by 1974–5, as the experience of the limits of the social in art quickly and brutally reasserts itself. Thus, at the moment of the drive towards a certain intellectual cosmopolitanism in conceptual art in Britain, conceptual art as counterculturalism loses its ‘innocence’, so to speak, as the rehistoricization of the avant-garde becomes subject to the growing forces of post-’68 cultural reaction and political mourning. This is vividly highlighted in 1977 with the publication of Newcastle Exhibition Writings, which brings together the theory and criticism of John Tagg, John Stezaker, Burgin, and Art & Language and others.49 The tone is abrasive and decidedly jaundiced, as each writer in turn is dismissive of the possibility or meaningfulness of the avant-garde. In Tagg, for instance, the avant-garde is reduced to a class faction of the bourgeoisie of ‘detached and disaffected intellectuals’50 and is stretched formally to cover the Russian Revolution and post-war abstract expressionism. This is because for Tagg being in the avant-garde is not the same as being in the vanguard.

A theoretical gulf lies between them [the avant-garde and vanguard] and, insofar as the ideas of the avant-garde do have a political dimension or a political equivalent, they are more likely to tend towards the idealism and individualism of anarchism and syndicalism which Lenin so emphatically rejected.51

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