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What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?
Author(s): Hal Foster
Source: October, Vol. 70, The Duchamp Effect (Autumn, 1994), pp. 5-32
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779051
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What'sNeo about the
Neo-Avant-Garde?
HAL FOSTER
It is no secret that postwar culture in North America and Western Europe is
swamped by neosand posts.Apartfrom the eclecticism of recent artand architecture,
there are a myriad repetitions in the postwar period: how are we to distinguish
them in kind? How to tell the difference between a return of an archaic form of art
that bolsters conservative tendencies in the present and a return to a lost model
of art made in order to displace customary waysof working? Or, in the register of
history, how to tell the difference between a revisionist account written in support
of the cultural status quo and a genealogical account that seeks to challenge it? In
reality these returns are more complicated, even more compulsive-especially now
at the end of the century as revolutions at its beginning appear to be undone, and
as formations thought to be long dead stir again with uncanny life.
In postwar art the problem of repetition is primarily the problem of the
neo-avant-garde, a loose grouping of North American and Western European
artists of the 1950s and '60s who reprised and revised such avant-garde devices of
the 1910s and '20s as collage and assemblage, the readymade and the grid, monochrome
painting and constructed sculpture.1 No rule governs the return of these
devices: no one instance is strictly contrived, concerted, or compulsive. Here I
want to focus on recapitulations that aspire to criticality, and to do so initially
through a remark of Michel Foucault made in early 1969, i.e., in the heyday of
such returns.
In "What Is an Author?" Foucault writes in passing of Marx and Freud as
"initiators of discursive practices," and he asks why a return is made at particular
moments to the originary texts of Marxism and psychoanalysis, a return in the
1. Peter Burger poses the problem of the neo-avant-garde in Theoryof theAvant-Garde(1974), more
on which below; but it is Benjamin Buchloh who has developed the specific problematic of these paradigm
repetitions in several texts over the last fifteen years, most directly in "The PrimaryColors for the
Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,"October37 (Summer 1986). My text is
written in close dialogue with his fundamental body of criticism, and I will try to clarifymy debts as well as
my differences as I go along. I also want to thank audiences at the CUNYGraduateCenter, the Universite
de Montreal (especially Johanne Lamoureux), and the Center for twentieth-Century Studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee(especially Kathleen Woodward,JaneGallop, and Herbert Blau).
OCTOBER70,Fall 1994, pp. 5-32. ? 1994 Hal Foster.
OCTOBER
form of a rigorous reading.2 The implication is that, if truly radical (in the sense
of radix:to the root), the reading will not be another accretion of the discourse;
on the contrary, it will cut through the layers of paraphrase and pastiche that have
obscured its theoretical core and blunted its political edge. Foucault names no
names, but he likely has in mind the readings of Marx and Freud made by Louis
Althusser and Jacques Lacan respectively. (Again, he writes in early 1969, or four
years after Althusser published ForMarxand ReadingCapital,and three years after
the Ecritsof Lacan appeared-and just months after May 1968, a moment in antihistoricist
constellation with prior revolutionary moments.) In each case the stake
of the return is the structureof the discourse stripped of additions: not so much
what Marxismor psychoanalysismeans as how it acts and signifies-and how it has
transformed our concepts of action and signification. Thus in the early 1960s,
after years of existentialist readings based on the early Marx (made in the wake of
the belated discovery of his 1844 manuscripts in the 1930s), Althusser performs a
structuralist reading based on the mature Marx of Capital. For Althusser, of
course, this is the "scientific"Marx of the epistemological rupture that changed
politics and philosophy forever, not the "ideological"Marx hung up on humanist
problems such as alienation. For his part, in the early 1950s, after years of therapeutic
adaptations of psychoanalysis, Lacan performs a linguistic reading of
Freud. For Lacan, of course, this is the radical Freud who reveals our decentered
relation to the language of our unconscious, not the humanist Freud of the ego
psychologies dominant at the time.
The moves within these two returns are different: Althusser defines a lost
breakwithin Marx,whereas Lacan articulates a latentconnectionbetween Freud and
Ferdinand de Saussure, the contemporaneous founder of structural linguistics, a
connection implicit in Freud (e.g., in his analysisof the dream as a process of condensation
and displacement, a rebus of metaphor and metonymy) but impossible
for him to think as such given the epistemological limits of his own historical
position.3 But the method of these returns is similar: to focus on "the constructive
2. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory,Practice,ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977), pp. 113-38. To my mind "Whatis an Author?"is more useful vis-a-viscritical
art of the 1960s and '70s than its more influential counterpart, "The Death of the Author"by Roland
Barthes, precisely because, like the art, it examines the discursive function of the author rather than
announces its apocalyptic end. In Historyof Sexuality(vol. 1, 1976) Foucault revises his view of the
epistemological rupture represented by Freud.
3. Lacan details this connection in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" (1957), and in
"The Meaning of the Phallus" (1958) he deems it fundamental to his return to Freud: "Itis on the
basis of such a wager-laid down by me as the principle of a commentary of Freud'swork which I have
been pursuing for seven years-that I have been led to certain conclusions: above all, to argue, as
necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena, for the notion of the signifier, in the sense in
which it is opposed to that of the signified in modern linguistic analysis.The latter,born since Freud,
could not be taken into account by him, but it is my contention that Freud's discovery stands out
precisely for having had to anticipate its formulas, even while setting out from a domain in which one
could hardly expect to recognise its sway.Conversely,it is Freud's discovery that gives to the opposition
of signifier to signified the full weight which it should imply: namely, that the signifier has an active
6
What'sNeoabouttheNeo-Avant-Garde?
omission" fundamental to each discourse.4 Similar, too, are the motives: not only
to restore the radical integrity of the discourse but to challenge its status in the
present, the received ideas that deform its structure and restrict its efficacy.This is
not to claim the final truth of such readings (apartfrom the wretched ressentiment
visited on Althusser and Lacan today, it is hard not to have some doubts about
these figures-or, for that matter, the artists I mention below). On the contrary it
is to clarify the contingent strategy of the readings, which is to reconnect with a
lost practice in order to disconnect from a present way of working felt to be outmoded,
misguided, or otherwise oppressive. The first move (re) is a temporal one,
made in order, in a second, spatial move (dis), to open a new site for work.5
Now, amid all the repetitions in postwar art, are there any returns in this
radical sense? Certainly none appear so historically focused and theoretically
rigorous. Some recoveries are fast and furious, and they tend to reify the past
practice, to acculturate it in terms of iconographic thematics; this is often the fate
of the found object in the 1950s and the readymade in the 1960s. Other recoveries
are slow and partial, as in the case of Russian Constructivism in the early 1960s
after decades of active repression and passive misinformation.6 Some old models of
art appear to return independently, as with the various reinventions of monochrome
painting in the 1950s and '60s (Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly,
function in determining the effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark,
becoming through that passion the signified" (in FeminineSexuality,ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline
Rose [New York:W.W.Norton, 1985], p. 78).
A similar strategy of historical connection has begun to transform modernist studies (in a way
that might point to a convergence between old semiotic and social-historical approaches). In a recognition
deferred until our own time some critics have linked Saussurean linguistics to high-modernist
reformulations of the artistic sign: in primitivist Cubism (Yve-Alain Bois, "Kahnweiler's Lesson,"
Representations18 [Spring 1987]); in Cubist collage (Rosalind Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign,"
in Picassoand Braque:A Symposium,ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1992);
in the Duchampian readymade (Benjamin Buchloh in various texts). On another axis T.J. Clark has
juxtaposed the fantasmatic figures of the late Cezanne with the sexual theories of the early Freud; and
in CompulsiveBeautyI connect Surrealism with the contemporaneous theory of the death drive.
4. Foucault: "Ifwe return, it is because of a basic and constructive omission, an omission that is not
the result of accident or incomprehension.... This nonaccidental omission must be regulated by
precise operations that can be situated, analysed, and reduced in a return to the act of initiation. Both
the cause of the barrier and the means for its removal, this omission-also responsible for the
obstacles that prevent returning to the act of initiation-can only be resolved by a return.... It follows
naturallythat this return ... is not a historical supplement that would come to fix itself upon the primary
discursivity and redouble it in the form of an ornament.... Rather, it is an effective and necessary
means of transforming discursive practice" ("Whatis an Author?"p. 135).
5. Of course these practices are not lost and found, nor did they disappear. There was continuous
work on Marx, Freud, and (even more important for theory of the time) Nietzsche, just as there was
on the historical avant-garde; indeed, there is continuity with the neo-avant-garde in the person of
Duchamp alone. Yetin spite of this work, sometimesbecauseofit, important aspects of all these discourses
were misplaced-this is the omission that Foucault remarksand that I attempt to theorize below.
6. See Buchloh, "Constructing (the History of) Sculpture," in ReconstructingModernism,ed. Serge
Guilbaut (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), as well as my "Some Uses and Abuses of Russian
Constructivism," in Art into Life:Russian Constructivism1914-1932, ed. Richard Andrews (New York:
Rizzoli, 1990).
7
OCTOBER
Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, and so
on). Other old models are combined in apparent contradiction, as when in the
early 1960s artists like Dan Flavin and Carl Andre draw on different aspects of
diverse precedents like Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi, Alexander
Rodchenko and Kurt Schwitters, or when Donald Judd contrives an almost
Borgesian array of precursors in his 1965 manifesto "Specific Objects."
Paradoxically, at this crux of the postwar period, ambitious art is marked by an
expansion of allusion as much as by a reduction of form or a withdrawalof incident.
Such art often invokes different, even incommensurate models of practice, but
less to act them out in a hysterical pastiche (as in much art in the 1980s) than to
work them through to a reflexive way of working-to turn the contradictions
inscribed in these models into a critical consciousness of history, artistic and
otherwise. Thus there is a method to the madness of the Judd list of precursors,
especially where it appears most incoherent, as in itsjuxtaposition of the opposed
traditions of Duchamp and New York School Painting. It is a method that seeks
not only to extract a new practice from these traditions but to trump them as it
goes-in this case to move beyond "objectivity" (whether nominalist as in
Duchampian practice or formalist as in New York School Painting) to "specific
objects."7
This particular move raises the two returns in the late 1950s and early
1960s that might qualify as radical in the aforementioned sense: the readymades
of Duchampian Dada and the contingent structures of Russian Constructivism
(i.e., structures, like the counter-reliefs of Tatlin or the hanging constructions of
Rodchenko, that reflect both inwardly on material, form, and structure and outwardly
on space, light, and context). Immediately two kinds of questions arise.
Why do these returns occur then? And what relationship between moments of
appearance and reappearance do they pose? Are the postwar moments passive
repetitions of the prewar moments, or does the neo-avant-garde act on the
historical avant-garde in waysthat we can only now appreciate?
Let me respond to the historical question briefly; then I will focus on the
theoretical question, which has to do with avant-gardetemporality and narrativity.
My account of the return of the Dadaist readymade and the Constructivist
structure will come as no surprise. However different aesthetically and politically,
the two paradigms are alike in this respect: they both contest the bourgeois
7. For a discussion of this trumping, see my "The Crux of Minimalism,"in Individuals,ed. Howard
Singerman (Los Angeles: MOCA, 1986). It is not unique to Judd; his entire generation confronted
what Buchloh calls the "painterly peripety" posed most starkly by Frank Stella ("Formalism and
Historicity: Changing Concepts in American and European Art since 1945,"in Europein theSeventies,
ed. Anne Rorimer [Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1977], p. 101). Neither is the method of contradictory
combination specific to North American art. For example, of the labels made for the 1972
Dusseldorf version of his celebrated exhibition Musee d'Art ModerneMarcel Broodthaers once
remarked: "'Thisis not a work of art' is a formula obtained by the contraction of a concept by Duchamp
and an antithetical concept by Magritte" ("Ten Thousand Franc Reward" [1974], interview with
Irmeline Lebeer, October42 [Fall 1987], p. 47).
8
Alexander Rodchenko. Circa 1924. CarlAndre. 1959.
principles of autonomous art and expressive artist, the first through an embrace
of everyday objects and a pose of aesthetic indifference, the second through the
use of quasi-industrial materials and the transformation of the function of the
artist (especially in the Productivist phase of agit-prop campaigns and factory
projects).8 Thus, for North American and Western European artists in the late
1950s and early 1960s, Dada and Constructivism offered two historical alternatives
to the modernist model dominant at the time, the medium-specific formalism
developed by Roger Fry and Clive Bell for Post-Impressionism and its aftermath,
and refined by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried for the New York School
and its aftermath. Since this model was staked on the intrinsic autonomy of
modernist painting in particular, pledged to the ideals of "significant form" (Bell)
and "pure opticality" (Greenberg), discontented artists were drawn to the two
movements that sought to exceed this apparent autonomy: to define the institution
of art in an epistemological inquiry into its aesthetic knowledges and/or to
destroy it in an anarchistic attack on its formal conventions, as did Dada, or to
transform it according to the materialist practices of a revolutionary society, as did
8. Obviously both formulations require qualification. Not all the readymades are everydayobjects;
and though I disagree with aestheticist readings (e.g., William Camfield, "MarcelDuchamp's Fountain:
Aesthetic Object, Icon, or Anti-Art?"in TheDefinitivelyUnfinishedMarcelDuchamp,ed. Thierry de Duve
[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991]), most are hardly indifferent objects. (For one indication of their overdetermination,
see the recent essaysof MollyNesbit, "ReadymadeOriginals,"October37 [Summer 1986],
and "The Language of Industry,"in TheDefinitivelyUnfinished.)As for Constructivism, its industrial
ambitions were foiled at many levels-materials, training, factoryintegration, cultural policy.
OCTOBER
Constructivism-in any case to reposition art in relation not only to mundane
space-time but to social practice as well. Of course the repression of these practices
within the dominant account only added to the attraction, according to the old
avant-gardistassociation of the critical with the marginal.
For the most part these recoveries were self-aware: often trained in novel
academic programs (the M.F.A.degree was developed at this time), many artists in
the late 1950s and early 1960s studied prewaravant-gardeswith a theoretical rigor
new to this generation; and some began to practice as critics in waysquite distinct
from modernist-oracular precedents (think of the early texts of Robert Morris,
Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, and Dan Graham alone). In the United States this
historical awareness was further complicated by the reception of the avant-garde
through the very institution that it often attacked: not only the museum of art but
the museum of modernart. If artists in the 1950s had mostly recycled avant-garde
devices, artists in the 1960s had to elaborate them critically; the pressure of
historical awarenesspermitted nothing less.9It is this complicated relation between
prewarand postwar avant-gardes,the theoretical question of avant-gardecausality,
temporality, and narrativity,that is crucial to comprehend today.Farfrom a quaint
question, more and more depends on it: our very accounts of innovative Western
art of the century now that we approach its end.10
*
The central text on this question remains Theoryof theAvant-Gardeby the
German critic Peter Burger. Now twenty years old, it still frames intelligent
discussions of historical and neo-avant-gardes (indeed Burger first made these
terms current), so even today it is important to work through his thesis. Some
of his blind spots are now well marked.ll His description is often inexact, and his
definition is overly selective (Burger focuses on the early readymades of
9. On this score the opposition of American "formalism"and European "historicity"that structures
the Buchloh text on "Changing Concepts in American and European Art Since 1945"is too stark.
10. I should clarify the two major presuppositions of this text: the value of the construct of the
avant-garde and the need for new narratives of its genealogy. The problems with the avant-garde
should be familiar, especially to readers of this journal: its ideology of progress, its presumption of
originality, its elitist hermeticism, its historical exclusivity, its appropriation by culture industries, and
so on. And yet this construct remains the crucial co-articulation of cultural and political forms of
thought and action within modernity-an obvious fact that is often dismissed today as a deluded
Leninist hangover. It is this co-articulation that a posthistorical account of the neo-avant-garde, as well
as an eclecticist notion of the postmodern, works to undo. Thus the need for new genealogies of the
avant-garde, ones that both complicate its past and pluralize its present.
11. Theoryof theAvant-Gardeprovoked immediate debate in Germany,and a collection of responses
was published in 1976 (W.M. Lfdke, ed., "TheoriederAvant-garde."Antwortenauf PeterBiirgersBestimmung
von Kunstund biirgerlicherGesellschaft[Frankfurt:Suhrkamp Verlag], to which Birger responded in a
1979 essay that now introduces the English version of his book (trans. Michael Shaw [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984]; all subsequent citations in the text). There are also many reviews
and responses in English, the most pointed of which remains that of Buchloh, "Theorizing the AvantGarde,"Artin
America,vol. 72 (November 1984); it informs some of the points made below.
10
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
Duchamp, the early chance experiments of Andre Breton and Louis Aragon, the
earlyphotomontages ofJohn Heartfield). Moreover,his very premise is problematic
-that one theory can comprehend theavant-garde, that all its activities can be
subsumed under the project to destroy the false autonomy of bourgeois art. And
yet these problems pale next to his dismissal of the postwar avant-garde as merely
neo, as so much repetition in bad faith that cancels the prewar critique of the
institution of art. Here Burger projects the historical avant-garde as an absolute
originwhose aesthetic transformations are fully significant and historically effective
in the first instance. This is tenuous from several points of view. For a
poststructuralist such a claim of self-presence is theological; for a theorist of
reception it is impossible. Did Duchamp appearas "Duchamp"?Of course not, and
yet he is often presented thus, full-blown from his own forehead. Did Les
Demoisellesd'Avignonof Picasso emergeas the crux of modernist painting that it is
now taken to be? Obviously not, and yet it is often treated as immaculate in conception
and reception. The status of Duchamp as well as Les Demoisellesis a
retroactive effect of countless artistic responses and critical readings, and so it
goes across the dialogical space-time of avant-garde practice and institutional
reception.12 This blind spot in Burger concerning the deferred temporality of
artistic signification is especially ironic, for he is often praised for his attention to
the historicity of aesthetic categories, and, to a certain degree, this praise is
earned.13So where (at least according to my lights) does he go astray?
Burger begins with the premise fundamental to Marxist criticism, for it
alone permits one to historicize, the premise of "aconnectionbetween the development
of [an] object and the possibility of [its] cognition" (li).14According to this
premise, our understanding of an art can be only as advanced as the art, and it
leads Burger to his principal argument: that the avant-garde critique of bourgeois
art depended on the development of this art, in particular on three stages within
its history. The first stage occurs when the autonomy of art is proclaimed by the
end of the eighteenth century, that is, in Enlightenment aesthetics. The second
stage occurs when this autonomy is made over into the very subject of art by the
end of the nineteenth century, that is, in art that aspires not so much to abstraction
12. Of course encounters with art and between artists can be punctual, but the effects of these
puncta (to borrow a term from the Barthes of CameraLucida)are not often immediate. Nevertheless, it
is in terms of immediate influence that narrativesof both avant-garde and traditional art are written.
13. "Whatmakes Bfirger so important,"Jochen Schulte-Sasse writes in his foreword to Theoryof the
Avant-Garde,"is that his theory reflects the conditions of its own possibilities" (xxxiv). This is true of
its theoretical preconditions, especially as given by the Frankfurt School, but not of its artistic
preconditions. As Buchloh notes in his review and as I develop below, Bfirger is oblivious to practices
within the neo-avant-garde that do precisely what he saysit cannot do, which is to develop the critique
of the institution of art.
14. On the ramifications of this premise for the formation of art history as a discipline, see M. M.
Bakhtin/P. M. Medvedev, "The Formal Method in European Art Scholarship," in TheFormalMethodin
LiteraryScholarship(1928), trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978), pp. 41-53.
11
OCTOBER
as to aestheticism. And the third stage occurs when this aestheticism comes under
attack by the historical avant-garde at the beginning of this century, for example,
in the explicit Productivist demand that art regain a use-value, or the implicit
Dadaist demand that it at least acknowledge its uselessness-value-i.e., the actual
affirmation of the cultural order concealed in its apparent withdrawal from it.15
Although Burger insists that this development is uneven and contradictory (he
alludes to the notion of the nonsynchronous developed by Ernst Bloch), he still
narrates it as an evolution.Perhaps he could not conceive it otherwise, given his
strict reading of the Marxistpremise about the connection between an object and
its understanding.
Marx advances this premise in a text that Burger cites but does not discuss,
the introduction to Grundrisse(1858), the draft notes preparatory to Capital
(volume 1, 1867). At one point in these extraordinary sketches Marx muses that
his fundamental insights-not only the labor theory of value but the historical
dynamic of class struggle-could not be articulated until his own time, the time of
an advanced bourgeoisie:
Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex
historic organization of production. The categories which express its
relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allows
insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the
vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built
itself up, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance
within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the
ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate
animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher
development is known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key
to the ancient, etc.16
This analogy between socioeconomic evolution and anatomical evolution is
telling. Evoked as an illustration of development as recapitulation, it is neither
accidental nor arbitrary: it is there in his epistemological horizon for Marx to
think; it arises almost naturally in his text. And that is the problem, for to model
historical development after biological development is to naturalize it, despite the
fact that Marxwas the first to define this move as the ideological one parexcellence.
This is not to dispute that our understanding can be only as developed as its
object, but it is to question how we think this development-how we think causality,
temporality, narrativity. Clearly it cannot be thought in terms of historicism
15. A Productivistdemand mayalso be implicit in some readymades,even in the otherwiseanarchistic
formula of the reciprocal readymades:"usea Rembrandt as an ironing board" (Duchamp, "The Green
Box" [1934], in TheEssential Writingsof MarcelDuchamp,ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson
[London: Thames &Hudson, 1975], p. 32).
16. Marx, Grundrisse,trans. Martin Nicolaus (NewYork:Vintage Books, 1973), p. 105.
12
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
(defined most simply as the conflation of beforeand afterwith cause and effect).
Despite many critiques in different disciplines, historicism still pervades art history,
especially modernist studies, as it has from its Hegelian founders to curators and
critics like Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg and beyond.17Above all else it is
this persistent historicism that condemns contemporary art to the status of the
belated, the redundant, the repetitious.
Along with a tendency to take the avant-garde rhetoric of rupture at its own
word, this residual evolutionism leads Burger to present history as both punctual
andfinal. Thus for him a work of art, a shift in aesthetics, happens all at once,
entirely significant in its first moment of appearance, and it happens once and for
all, so that any elaboration is only a rehearsal. This conception of history as punctual
and final underlies his narrative of the historical avant-garde as pure origin
and the neo-avant-garde as riven repetition. This is bad enough, but things get
worse, for to repeat the historical avant-garde, according to Burger, is to cancel its
critique of the institution of autonomous art;more, it is to invert this critique into
an affirmation of autonomous art. Thus, if readymades and collages challenged
the bourgeois principles of expressive artist and organic art work, neo-readymades
and neo-collages reinstate them. So, too, if Dada attacks audience and
market alike, neo-Dada gestures are adapted to them. And so on down the line:
for Burger the repetition of the historical avant-garde by the neo-avant-garde can
only turn the antiaesthetic into the artistic, the transgressiveinto the institutional.
There is truth here of course. The proto-Pop and nouveau-realistereception of
the readymade did tend to render it formal and/or arbitrary, to recoup it as art
and/or commodity. When Johns bronzed and painted his two Ballantine ales
(upon a remark of Willem de Kooning, legend has it, that Leo Castelli could sell
anything as art, even beer cans), he did reduce the Duchampian performative
of the urinal as an ambiguous (non)work of art. So, too, when Arman collected
and composed his assisted readymades, he did invert the Duchampian principle
of aesthetic indifference. More egregiously, with figures like Klein Dadaist
transgression is turned into bourgeois spectacle, "an avant-garde of dissipated
scandals," as Smithson once remarked.18 But this is not the entire story of the
neo-avant-garde, nor does it end there. (One project in the 1960s, I will argue, is
17. If Hegel and Kant preside over the discipline of art history, one cannot escape historicism by a
turn from the former to the latter. Formalism has its historicisms too, as is manifest in the Greenbergian
historicism whereby artistic innovation proceeds through formal self-criticism. In several texts
in the 1970s Rosalind Kraussattacked this particular historicism (e.g., "AView of Modernism," "Sense
and Sensibility,""Notes on the Index," "Sculpture in the Expanded Field"), often from a structuralist
perspective, but today,of course, this historicist/structuralist opposition must also be exceeded.
18. Smithson in response to a question from Irving Sandler concerning the status of the avantgarde
in 1966, in TheWritingsofRobertSmithson,ed. Nancy Holt (New York:New YorkUniversity Press,
1979), p. 216. "Anew generation of Dadaists has emerged today,"Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961,
"but Son of Dada is accepted" ("For the Finest Art, Try Pop," Gazette,1 [1961]). In this text of Pop
"affirmation" Hamilton seems to welcome the shift from the transgression-value of the avant-garde
objectto the spectacle-value of the neo-avant-garde celebrity.
13
OCTOBER
to critiquethe old charlatanry of the bohemian artist as well as the new institutionality
of the avant-garde.)19Yetthe story does end there for Bfirger,mostly because
he fails to recognize the ambitious art of his time-a potentially fatal flaw of any
historian-theorist of art. As a result he can only see the neo-avant-garde in totoas
futile and degenerate in romantic relation to the historical avant-garde, onto
which he thus projects not only a magical effectivity but a pristine authenticity.
Here, despite his grounding in Benjamin, Burger affirmsthe values of authenticity,
originality, and singularity. Critical of the avant-garde in other respects, he
remains within its value system in this respect.
However simple, this structure of heroic past versus failed present is not
stable. Sometimes the successesBurger credits to the historical avant-garde are
difficult to distinguish from thefailures he ascribes to the neo-avant-garde. For
example, he argues that the historical avant-garde reveals artistic "styles"to be
historical conventions and treats historical conventions as practical "means"
(18-19), a double move fundamental to its critique of art as beyond history and
without purpose. But this move from styles to means, this passage from a "historical
succession of techniques" to a posthistorical "simultaneity of the radically
disparate" (63), would seem to push art into the arbitrary.If this is so, how is this
arbitrariness of the historical avant-garde different from the absurdity of the
neo-avant-garde, "a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the
positing of any meaning whatever" (61)?20There is a difference, to be sure, but it
is one of degree not of kind, which points to aflow between the two avant-gardes
that Burger does not otherwise allow.
My purpose is not to pick apart this text twenty years after the fact, and its
important thesis is too influential to dismiss out of hand now. Rather I want to
improve on it if I can, to complicate it through its own ambiguities-in particular
to intimate a temporal exchangebetween historical and neo-avant-gardes, a
complex relation of anticipation and reconstruction. The Burger narrative of
direct cause and effect, of lapsarian before and after, of heroic origin and farcical
repetition, which many of us recite with unconscious condescension toward the
very possibility of contemporary art, this narrativewill no longer do.
At times Burger approaches such complication, but ultimately to resist it.
This is most manifest in his account of the failure of the avant-garde. For Bfirger
the historical avant-gardealsofailed-Duchamp to destroytraditionalartcategories,
Breton and Aragon to reconcile subjective transgression and social revolution, the
Constructivists to make the cultural means of production collective-but it failed
heroically, tragically.Merely to fail again,as the neo-avant-garde does according to
19. On the latter point see Buchloh, "MarcelBroodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde,"Artforum
vol. 18 (May1980), p. 56.
20. This is strangely similar to the charge made by Greenberg, the great enemy of avant-gardism,
against Minimalism in particular.See his "Recentness of Sculpture" (1967), in MinimalArt,ed. Gregory
Battcock (NewYork:Dutton, 1968).
14
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
Burger, is at best pathetic and farcical, at worst cynical and opportunistic. Here
Bfirger echoes the famous remark of Marx in TheEighteenthBrumaireof Louis
Bonaparte(1852), mischievously attributed to Hegel, that all great events of world
history occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. (Marx is
concerned with the "tragedy"of Napoleon, master of the first French Empire,
followed by the "farce"of his nephew Louis Bonaparte, manager of the second
French Empire.) This trope of tragedy followed by farce is seductive-its cynicism
is a protective response to many historical ironies-but it hardly suffices as a theoretical
model, let alone as a historical analysis. And yet in subtle ways it pervades
criticism of contemporary art and culture, where its effect is first to constructthe
contemporary as posthistorical, a simulacral world of failed repetitions and
pathetic pastiches, and then to condemnit as such from a mythical point of critical
escape beyond it all. Ultimately it is this point that is posthistorical, and its perspective
is most mythical where it purports to be most critical.21
For Bfirger, then, the failure of both historical and neo-avant-gardes spills us
all into pluralistic irrelevance, "the positing of any meaning whatever."And he
concludes: "No movement in the arts today can legitimately claim to be historically
more advanced as art than any other" (63). This despair is also seductive-it
has the pathos of all FrankfurtSchool melancholia-but its fixation on the past is
the other face of the cynicism about the present that Burger both scorns and
shares.22And the conclusion is mistaken;it is mistaken historically, politically, and
ethically. First, it neglects the very lesson of the avant-garde that Bfirger teaches
elsewhere: the historicity of art, of all art including the contemporary. It also
neglects that an understanding of this historicity may be onecriterion by which art
21. This rhetorical model of tragedy-and-farce, it is important to note, need not produce posthistorical
effects, nor need it affirm the grandeur of the first term. In Marx the first term is ironized, not
heroicized, by the second term: the moment of farce tunnels back and digs under the moment of
tragedy. In this way the great original-in his case Napoleon, in our case the historical avant-gardemay
be questioned as such. In "'Well Grubbed, Old Mole': Marx, Hamlet, and the (Un)fixing of
Representation," Peter Stallybrass, to whom I am indebted for this point, comments: "Marx thus
pursues a double strategy in the EighteenthBrumaire.Through the first strategy, history is represented
as a catastrophic decline from Napoleon to Louis Bonaparte. But in the second strategy, the effect of
this 'debased' repetition is to unsettle the status of the origin. Napoleon I can now only be read
back through his nephew: his ghost is awakened but as a caricature" (lecture at Cornell University,
March 1994). In this way if the evolutionist analogy in Marx is beyond critical salvage, the rhetorical
model may not be. On repetition in Marx also see Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition:
Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); and on rhetoricity in Marx see
Hayden White, Metahistory:TheHistoricalImaginationin Nineteenth-CenturyEurope(Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973). On the posthistorical see Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire:Has History
Cometo an End? trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1992). In contemporary North American
culture there is a transvaluation of the pathetic and the failed, but that is another story.
22. Both present and past are projections here, but what exactly is this past, this lost object of the
melancholic critic? For Bfirger it is not the historical avant-garde alone, despite the fact that he
castigates it like a melancholic betrayed by his love object. Most critics harbor some such lost ideal
against which (post)modernism is secretly judged, and often, as per the formula of melancholia, this
ideal is unconscious.
15
OCTOBER
can claim to be advanced as art today.23Second, it ignores that, rather than invert
the prewar critique of the institution of art, the neo-avant-garde has worked to
extend it. It also ignores that in doing so the neo-avant-garde has produced new
aesthetic experiences, cognitive connections, and political interventions, and that
these openings may make up anothercriterion by which art can claim to be
advanced today. Burger does not see these openings, again in part because he is
blind to the ambitious art of his time. Here, then, I want to explore such possibilities,
and to do so in the form of a hypothesis: Rather than cancel the project of the
historical avant-garde, might the neo-avant-garde comprehendit for the first time? I say
"comprehend,"not "complete":the project of the avant-gardeis no more concluded
in its neo moment than it is enacted in its historical moment. In art, too, creative
analysis is interminable.24
Immodestly enough, I want to do to Burger what Marxdid to Hegel: to right
his concept of the dialectic. Again, the aim of the avant-garde for Birger is to
destroy the institution of autonomous art in order to reconnect art and life. Like
the structure of heroic past and failed present, however, this formulation only
23. In other words, the recognition of conventionality need not issue in the "simultaneity of the
radicallydisparate";on the contrary it can prompt a historicization of the radicallynecessary.See n. 24.
24. Some comparison of Burger and Buchloh might be useful at this point. Buchloh also regards
avant-garde practice as punctual and final (e.g., in "MichaelAsher and the Conclusion of Modernist
Sculpture" he deems traditional sculpture "definitely abolished by 1913"with the Tatlin constructions
and the Duchamp readymades [in Performance, Text(e)s & Documents, ed. Chantal Pontbriand
(Montreal: Parachute, 1981), p. 56]). Yet he draws an opposite conclusion from Burger: the avantgarde
does not advance arbitrariness but counters it; rather than a relativism of means, it imposes a
necessity of analysis, the slackening of which (as in the various rappelsdl'ordreof the 1920s) threatens
to undo modernism as such (see "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression" [October16 (Spring
1981)]). "The meaning of the break in the history of art that the historical avant-garde movements
provoked," Bfrger writes, "does not consist in the destruction of art as an institution, but in the
destruction of the possibility of positing esthetic norms as valid ones" (87). "The conclusion," Buchloh
responds in his review,"that,because the one practice that set out to dismantle the institution of artin
bourgeois society failed to do so, all practices become equally valid, is not logically compelling at all"
(p. 21). For Buchloh this is "aesthetic passivism,"and it promotes "a vulgarized notion of postmodernism"even
as it condemns it.
Burger and Buchloh also agree on the failure of the avant-garde, but not on its ramifications.
For Buchloh avant-gardepractice addresses social contradictions that it cannot resolve;in this structural
sense it can onlyfail. And yet if the work of art can register such contradictions, its very failure is
recouped. "The failure of that attempt," Buchloh writes of the welded sculpture of Julio Gonzalez,
Picasso, and David Smith, which evokes the contradiction between collective industrial production
and individual preindustrial art, "inasmuch as it becomes evident in the work itself, is then the work's
historicand aestheticauthenticity" ("MichaelAsher,"p. 59). According to this same dialectic of failure,
Buchloh considers the practice of repetition to be the authentic meaning of the neo-avant-garde
("Primary Colors," p. 43). This dialectic is seductive, but it limits the possibilities of the neo-avantgarde
before the fact-a paradox, for me at least, in the work of this most important advocate of its
practices. Even if Buchloh (or any of us) gauges these limits precisely,from what purchase does he (do
we) do so?
16
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
seems simple. For what is "art"here, and what is "life"?Already the opposition
tends to cede to art the autonomy that is in question, and to position life at a
point beyond reach. In its very formulation, then, the avant-garde project is predisposed
to failure, with the sole exception of movements set in the midst of
revolutions (this is another reason why Russian Constructivism is so often privileged
by artists and critics on the left). To make matters more difficult, life is
conceived here paradoxically-not only as remote but also as immediate, as if it
were simply thereto rush in like so much air once the hermetic seal of convention
is broken. This Dadaist ideology of experience, to which Benjamin is also inclined,
leads Bfirger to read the avant-garde as transgression pure and simple.25 More
specifically, it prompts him to see its primary device, the readymade, as a sheer
thing-of-the world, an account that occludes its use not only as an epistemological
provocation in the historical avant-garde but also as an institutional probe in the
neo-avant-garde.
In short, Burger takes the romantic rhetoric of the avant-garde, of rupture
and revolution, at its own word. In so doing, he misses crucial dimensions of its
practice: for example, its mimeticdimension, whereby the avant-garde mimes the
degraded world of capitalist modernity in order not to embrace it but to mock it
(e.g., Cologne Dada), and its utopian dimension, whereby the avant-garde does
not pose what could be so much as what cannotbe-precisely, again, as a critique
of what is (e.g., de Stijl). Now to speak of the avant-garde in terms of rhetoric is
not to dismiss it as merely rhetorical. Rather it is to situate its attacks as both
contextual and performative: contextualin the sense that the cabaret nihilism of
the Zurich branch of Dada is a critical elaboration of the nihilism of WorldWarI,
or that the aesthetic anarchism of the Berlin branch of Dada is a critical
elaboration of the anarchism of a country defeated militarily and torn up politically;
and performativein the sense that both these attacks on art are waged,
necessarily, in relation to it-to its languages, institutions, structures of meaning,
expectation, and reception. It is in this rhetoricalrelation that avant-garde rupture
and revolution are located.
This formulation blunts the sharp critique of the avant-garde project associated
with Jurgen Habermas, one that goes beyond Burger. Not only did the
avant-garde fail, Habermas argues, it was always already false, "a nonsense
experiment." "Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured
form; an emancipatory effect does not follow."26Some respondents to Burger
25. Adorno criticizes Benjamin on a related count in his famous response to "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "Itwould border on anarchism to revoke the reification of a
great work of art in the spirit of immediate use values" (letter of 16 March 1936, in Aestheticsand Politics
[London: New Left Books, 1977], p. 123). For instances of the Dadaist ideology of immediacy, see
almost any relevant text by Tristan Tzara, Richard Hiilsenbeck, etc.
26. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity-An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
PostmodernCulture,ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. 11. A complementary critique argues
that the avant-garde succeeded-but only at the cost of us all; that it penetrated other aspects of social
17
OCTOBER
push this critique further: in its attempt to negate art, it is argued, the avant-garde
preservesit, preserves the category of art-as-such. Thus, rather than break with
the ideology of aesthetic autonomy, it is but "a reversal phenomenon on the
identical ideological level."27This critique is pointed, to be sure, but it is pointed
at the wrong target-that is, if we understand the avant-garde attack as rhetorical
in the immanent sense sketched above.28For the most acute avant-garde artists
such as Duchamp, the aim is neither an abstract negation of art nor a romantic
reconciliation with life but a perpetual testing of the conventions of both. Thus,
rather than false, circular, and otherwise affirmative, avant-garde practice at its
best is contradictory, mobile, and dialectical, even rhizomatic. The same is true
of neo-avant-garde practice at its best, even the early versions of Rauschenberg
or Allan Kaprow. "Painting relates to both art and life," runs a famous
Rauschenberg motto. "Neither is made. (I try to act in that gap between the
two.)"29 Note that he says "gap":the work is to sustain a tension between art
and life, not somehow to reconnect the two. And even Kaprow, the neo-avantgardist
most loyal to the line of reconnection, seeks not to undo the
"traditional identities" of art forms-this is a given for him-but to test the
"frames or formats" of aesthetic experience as defined at a particular time and
place.30And it is this testing of "framesor formats"that drives the neo-avant-garde
in its contemporary phases.31
At this point I need to take my thesis about the avant-garde a step further,
one that may lead to another way (with Burger, beyond Burger) to narrate its
project. What exactly was effected by the signal acts of the historical avant-garde,
as when Rodchenko presented painting as three panels of primary colors in 1921?
"Ireduced painting to its logical conclusion," the great Constructivistremarked in
1939, "and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: this is the
end of painting. These are the primary colors. Everyplane is a discrete plane and
life-but only to desublimate them, to open them up to violent aggressions. For a contemporary version
of this Lukascian critique (which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the neoconservative
condemnation of avant-gardism tout court),see Russell A. Berman, ModernCultureand CriticalTheory
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
27. B. Lindner, "Aufhebung der Kunst in der Lebenspraxis? Uber die Aktualitat der Auseinandersetzung
mit den historischen Avantgardebewegungen,"in Antworten,ed. Lfdke, p. 83.
28. This rhetorical understanding of the historical avant-garde also qualifies criticism of it from
within the ranks of the neo-avant-garde, more on which below.
29. Rauschenberg quoted in John Cage, "On Rauschenberg, Artist and His Work"(1961), in Silence
(Middletown, Conn.: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1969), p. 105.
30. Thus his development as suggested by the title of one of his books: Allan Kaprow,Assemblages,
Environmentsand Happenings(NewYork:HarryN. Abrams, 1966).
31. The first serious intimation of postmodernism in visual art drawson this avant-gardeproject to
challenge the modernism advanced by Greenberg. In "Other Criteria" (1968/72) Leo Steinberg plays
on the classic definition of modernist self-criticism: rather than define its medium in order to
"entrench it more firmly in its area of competence" (Greenberg in "ModernistPainting" [1961/65]),
Steinberg calls on art to "redefine the area of its competence by testing its limits" (OtherCriteria
[London: Oxford University Press, 1972], p. 77).
18
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
there will be no more representation."32 Here Rodchenko declaresthe end of
painting, but what he demonstratesis different. It is the conventionalityof painting:
that it could be delimited to primary colors on discrete canvases in his artisticpolitical
context with its specific permissions and pressures-this is the crucial
qualification. And nothingexplicitis demonstratedabouttheinstitutionofart. Obviously
convention and institution cannot be separated, but they are not identical. To
collapse convention into institution produces a type of determinism; to read
institution as convention produces a type of formalism. The institution of art
enframesconventions, but it does not constitutethem, not entirely. However heuristic,
this difference does help to distinguish the emphases of historical and neo-avantgardes:
if the first focuses on the conventional, the second concentrates on the
institutional.33
A related argument can be advanced about Duchamp, as when he signed a
rotated urinal with a pseudonym in 1917. Rather than define the fundamental
properties of a specific medium from within as does Rodchenko, Duchamp
articulates "the enunciative conditions" of the modern art work from without.34
But the effect is similar: to reveal the conventional limits of art in a particular time
and place-this again is the crucial qualification (obviously the contexts of New
YorkDada in 1917 and Soviet Constructivism in 1921 are radically different). And
here, too, apartfrom the local outrage provoked by the vulgarobject, the institution
of art is not much defined. Indeed, the rejection of Fountain by the Society of
Independent Artists exposed its discursive parameters more than the workperse.35
In any case, like the Rodchenko, the Duchamp is a declaration, a performative:
Rodchenko "affirms";Duchamp, in the guise of R. Mutt, "chooses."Neither work
purports to be an analysis,let alone a deconstruction. The modem status of painting
as made-for-exhibition is preserved by the monochrome (it may even be perfected
there), and the museum-gallery nexus is left intact by the readymade.
Such indeed are the limitations underscored fifty years later by artists like
32. Alexander Rodchenko, "Working with Mayakowsky," in FromPainting to Design: Russian
ConstructivistArt of the Twenties(Cologne: Galerie Gmurzyska, 1981), p. 191. How are we to read the
retrospective aspect of this statement? How retroactive is it? For a different account, see Buchloh,
"PrimaryColors,"pp. 43-45.
33. Myaccount of this difference is informed by FrazerWard, "Institutional Critique and Publicity"
(manuscript).
34. See Thierry de Duve's "Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism" in this issue.
35. But then is there a perse here apart from this rejection? It may also be that the policy of the
exhibition-to include all comers in alphabetical order-was more transgressive than Fountain
(despite the fact that its rejection belied this policy). In any case, Fountainposes the question of the
nonexhibited:not shown, then lost, later replicated, only to enter the discourse of modern art retroactively
as a foundational act. (MonumenttotheThirdInternationalis another important instance of a work
turned into a fetish that covers its own absence, a process that I attempt to theorize below in terms of
trauma.) Of course the nonexhibited is its own avant-garde paradigm, indeed its own tradition, from
the Salon des refuses and the Secession movements of the nineteenth century to canceled exhibitions
in our own time, most significantly that of Hans Haacke at the Guggenheim in 1971-an example that
again may point to the heuristic difference between convention-critique and institution-critique.
19
OCTOBER
Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, and Hans Haacke, who were
concerned to elaborate these same paradigms in order to investigate this exhibition
status and that institutional nexus more systematically.36To my mind this is
the essential relation between the most significant historical and neo-avant-garde
practices. First, artists like Flavin,Andre,Judd, and Morris in the early 1960s, and
then artists like Broodthaers, Buren, Asher, and Haacke in the late 1960s, develop
the critique of the conventions of the traditional mediums, as performed by
Dada, Constructivism, and other historical avant-gardes, into an investigation of
the institution of art, its perceptual and cognitive, structural and discursive
parameters. This is to advance three claims: (1) that the institution of art is grasped
as such not with the historical avant-garde but with the neo-avant-garde; (2) that the
neo-avant-garde at its bestaddressesthis institution with a creativeanalysis at once specific
and deconstructive(not a nihilistic attack at once abstractand anarchistic, as often with the
historical avant-garde); and (3) that, rather than cancel the historical avant-garde, the
neo-avant-garde enacts its projectfor thefirst time-a first time that, again, is theoretically
endless.It is thus that the Buirgerdialectic of the avant-gardemight be righted.
*
Of course my thesis has its own problems. First, there is the historical irony
that the institution of art, the museum above all else, has changed beyond
recognition, a development that demands the continual transformation of its
avant-garde critique as well. A reconnection of art and life has occurred, but
under the terms of the culture industry, not the avant-garde, aspects of which are
appropriated by spectacular culture in part through its neo repetitions. This
much is due the devil, but only this much.37Rather than render the avant-garde
36. The Museed'artmoderneof Marcel Broodthaers is the masterpiece of this analysis,but let me offer
two later examples. In 1979 Michael Asher conceived a project for a group show at the Art Institute of
Chicago in which a statue of George Washington (a copy of the celebrated one by Jean Antoine
Houdon) was moved from the central front of the museum, where it performed a commemorative and
decorative role, to an eighteenth-century period gallery,where its aesthetic and art-historicalfunctions
were foregrounded. These functions of the statue became clear in the simple act of its displacement-as
did the fact that in neither position was the statue allowed to become historical. Here Asher elaborates
the readymade paradigm into a situational aesthetics ("Inthis work,"Asher comments in Writings,"Iwas
the author of the situation,not of the elements" [p. 209]) in which certain limitations of the art museum
as a place of historical memory are underscored.
Myother example is also an elaboration of the readymadeparadigm,but one that traces extrinsic
affiliations. MetroMobiltan(1985) by Hans Haacke consists of a miniature facade of the Metropolitan
Museum replete with its noble motto about the disinterested nature of art. It is also decorated with the
usual banners, one of which announces a show of ancient treasures from Nigeria. The other banners,
however, are not usual: they are quotations from policy statements of Mobil, sponsor of the Nigeria
show, about its involvement with the apartheid regime of South Africa. In this work the double-talk,
the co-duplicity, of corporation and museum is made patent, again through the simple use of the
applied readymade.
37. Bfrger acknowledges this "false elimination of the distance between art and life" and draws
from it two conclusions: "the contradictoriness of the avant-gardiste undertaking" (50) and the
20
MichaelAsher.Installationat the
ArtInstituteofChicago.1979.
(Photo:RustyCulp.)
Hans Haacke.MetroMobiltan. 1985.
OCTOBER
null and void, these developments have produced new spaces of critical play and
prompted new modes of institutional analysis. And this reworking of the avantgarde,
in terms of aesthetic forms, cultural-political strategies, and social
positionings, has proved to be the most vital project in art and criticism over the
last three decades at least.
However, this only points to one historical problem, and there are theoretical
difficulties with my thesis as well. Again, terms like historical and neoavant-garde
may be at once too general and too exclusive to use effectively today.I
noted some drawbacksof the first term; if the second is to be retained at all, at
least two moments in the initial neo-avant-garde alone must be distinguished: the
first moment represented here by Rauschenberg and Kaprow in the 1950s, the
second moment by Buren and Asher in the 1960s.38As the first neo-avant garde
recovers the historical avant-garde, Dada in particular, it does so often literally,
through a reprise of its basic devices, the effect of which is less to transformthe
institutionofartthantotransformtheavant-gardeintoan institution.This is one ruse of
history to grant Burger, but rather than dismiss it as farce we might attempt to
understand it-here in analogy with the Freudian model of repression and repetition.39
On this model if the historical avant-garde was repressedinstitutionally, it
was repeatedin the first neo-avant-garde, rather than, in the Freudian distinction,
recollected,its contradictions worked through. If this analogy between repression
and reception holds, then in its first repetition the avant-garde was made to
appear historical beforeit was allowed to become effective, i.e., before its aestheticnecessity
of some autonomy for art (54). Buchloh is more dismissive. "The primary function of the
neo-avant-garde," he writes in "PrimaryColors,"was not to examine this historical body of aesthetic
knowledge [i.e., the paradigm of the monochrome], but to provide models of cultural identity and
legitimation for the reconstructed (or newly constituted) liberal bourgeois audience of the postwar
period. This audience sought a reconstruction of the avant-garde that would fulfill its own needs, and
the demystification of aesthetic practice was certainly not among those needs. Neither was the integration
of art into social practice, but rather the opposite: the association of art with spectacle. It is in the
spectacle that the neo-avant-garde finds its place as the provider of a mythical semblance of radicality,
and it is in the spectacle that it can imbue the repetition of its obsolete modernist strategies with the
appearance of credibility" (p. 51). I do not question the restricted truth of this specific statement
(made in relation to Yves Klein) so much as its confident finality as a general pronouncement upon
the neo-avant-garde.
38. Obviously this singling out is artificial: Rauschenberg cannot be detached from a specific Cage
milieu any more than Kaprow can be dissociated from a general Fluxus ethos, and Buren and Asher
emerge in spaces vectored by very different artistic and theoretical forces. Other historical examples
would also generate other theoretical emphases.
39. Again Buchloh has led the way:"Iwant to argue, against Burger, that the positing of a moment
of historical originality in the relationship between the historical avant-gardeand the neo-avant-garde
does not allow for an adequate understanding of the complexity of that relationship, for we are
confronted here with practices of repetition that cannot be discussed in terms of influences, imitation,
and authenticity alone. A model of repetition that might better describe this relationship is the
Freudian concept of repetition that originates in repression and disavowal"("PrimaryColors,"p. 43).
It is this suggestion that I take up below. In "Painting: the Task of Mourning,"Yve-AlainBois applies
the Freudian concept of working-through to the end of painting (in Endgame,ed. David Jocelit
[Boston: ICA, 1986]).
22
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
political ramifications could be sorted out, let alone elaborated.40 On the
Freudian analogy this is repetition, indeed reception, as resistance.And it need not
be reactionary; one purpose of the Freudian analogy is to suggest that resistance is
unknowing, that it is a process of un-knowing. Thus, for example, as early as
Rauschenberg and Johns there is a Duchamp genre in the making, which is not
only at odds with his practice but paradoxically in advance of its recognition, and
maybe in resistance to it as well-to its final work (the posthumous Etantsdonnes),
to some of its principles, to many of its ramifications.
The important point is that the becoming-institutional of the avant-garde
does not doom all subsequent art to court buffoonery. It also prompts in a second
neo-avant-garde a critique of this process of acculturation and/or accommodation.
Such is the principal subject of an artist like Broodthaers whose extraordinary
tableaux evoke cultural reification only to transform it into a critical poetic.
Broodthaers often uses shelled things like eggs and mussels to render this hardening
at once literal and allegorical, in a word, reflexive-as if the best defense
against reification were a preemptive embrace, a dire expose, of it.41 More
generally, this becoming-institutional prompts in the second neo-avant-garde a
creative analysis of the limitations of both historical and first neo-avant-gardes.
Thus, to pursue one aspect of the reception of Duchamp, in several texts since the
late 1960s Buren has questioned the Dadaist ideology of immediacy (or what
Buchloh calls the "petit-bourgeois anarchist radicality"of Duchampian acts); and
in many works over the same period he has combined the monochrome and the
readymade into a device, his now-signature stripes, to explore what these paradigms
exposed, only in part to occlude: "the parameters of artistic production and
reception."42 Such elaboration is a collective labor that now cuts across entire
generations of neo-avant-garde artists-to develop paradigms like the readymade
from an object that purports to be transgressive in its very facticity (as in its first
neo repetition), to a device that addresses the seriality of objects and images in
advanced capitalism (as in Minimalist and Pop art), to a proposition that explores
the linguistic dimension of the work of art (as in Conceptual art), to a marker of
40. This is not the fate of the historical avant-garde alone; Buchloh characterizes the reception of
Asher in this way too. See his Editor's Note in Michael Asher, Writings1973-1983 on Works1969-1979
(Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), vii.
41. In this strategy, which is as old as modernism, an individually assumed reification is taken up,
homeopathically or apotropaically, against a socially enforced reification. In paired poems in Pense-Bete
(1963-64), "La Moule" (The Mussel) and "La Meduse" (The Jellyfish), Broodthaers gives us two
complementary totems of this tactic. The first reads: "This clever thing has avoided society's mold./
She's cast herself in her very own./ Other look-alikes share with her the anti-sea./ She's perfect." And
the second in part: "It'sperfect/ No mold/ Nothing but body" (translated by Paul Schmidt in October
42 [Fall 1987]). Also see Buchloh, "Marcel Broodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde,"where he
notes that Broodthaers was influenced by Lucien Goldmann, who in turn studied with Georg Lukacs,
the great theorist of reification. Broodthaers was also influenced along these lines by Manzoni.
42. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962-1969," in October55 (Winter 1990), pp. 137-38. As Buchloh
remarks, this critique is directed less at Duchamp than at his neo progeny.
23
OCTOBER
MarcelBroodthaers.White Cabinet
and White Table. 1965.
24
DanielBuren.Exhibition,RueJacob,
Paris. 1968.
(Photo:BernardBoyer.)
physical presence (as in site-specific art of the 1970s), to a form of critical mimicry
of various discourses (as in allegorical art of the 1980s), and, finally,to a probe of
sexual, ethnic, and social differences today (as in the work of such diverse artists
as Sherrie Levine, David Hammons, and Robert Gober). In this way the so-called
failureof both historical and first neo-avant-gardes to destroy the institution of art
has enabledthe deconstructive testing of this institution by the second neo-avantgarde-a
testing that, again, is now extended to different institutions and
discourses in the ambitious art of the present.
But lest I render this second neo-avant-garde heroic, it is important to note
that its critique can also be turned on it. If the historical and the first neo-avantgardes
often suffered from anarchistic tendencies, the second neo-avant-garde
sometimes succumbs to apocalyptic impulses. "Perhapsthe only thing one can do
after having seen a canvas like ours,"Buren saysin one such moment in February
1968, "is total revolution."43This is the language of 1968, and artists like Buren
often use it: his work proceeds from "the extinction" of the studio, he writes in
"The Function of the Studio" (1971); it is pledged not merely to "contradict"the
game of art but to "abolish"its rules altogether.44In this rhetoric, which is more
43. Buren quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years:theDematerializationof theArt Objectfrom 1966 to 1972
(New York:Praeger, 1973), p. 41.
44. Daniel Buren, "The Function of the Studio," October10 (Fall 1979), p. 58; and Reboundings,trans.
Philippe Hunt (Brussels:Daled & Gevaert, 1977), p. 73. This language governs influential theory of the
time too, as in this trumping of ideology-critique by Barthes, also in 1971: "Itis no longer the myths
which need to be unmasked (the doxa now takes care of that), it is the sign itself which must be
OCTOBER
Magazine.1990.
'S:
, .:'
'
'Ei si
Situationist than situated, there are strong echoes of the oracular, often machistic
pronouncements of the high modernists. Our present is bereft of this sense of
imminent revolution; it is also chastened by feminist critiques of revolutionary
language as well as by other suspicions about the exclusivity notjust of art institutions
but of critical discourses as well. As a result contemporary artists concerned
to develop the institutional analysis of the second neo-avant-garde have moved
awayfrom grand oppositionsto subtle displacements(I think of artists from Louise
Lawler and Silvia Kolbowski to Christopher Williams and Andrea Fraser) and/or
strategic collaborationswith different groups (Fred Wilson and Mark Dion are
representative here). This is one way that the critique of the avant-garde
continues, indeed one way that the avant-garde continues. Far from a recipe for
hermeticism or formalism, this is in fact a formula of practice. It is also a precondition
of any contemporary understanding of the different phases of the
avant-garde.
shaken" ("Change the Object Itself," in Image-Music-Text,trans. Stephen Heath [New York:Hill and
Wang, 1977], p. 167). How are we to relate such institution-critique in art and theory to other political
forms of intervention and occupation around 1968? For me this question is riddled by a particular
photo-document of an April 1968 project by Buren, which consisted of 200 striped panels posted
around Paris-to test the legibility of painting beyond the limits of the museum, among other purposes.
In this one instance the panel is posted over various ads on a bright orange billboard, but it also
obscures what appears to be a handwritten announcement of a student meeting at Vincennes (again
this is April 1968). Wasthe placement inadvertent?How are we to mediate these image-events?
26
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
LouiseLawler.Untitled (Rooster).
1993.
RobertGober.Untitled. 1993-94.
27
MarkDion.Department of Marine
Animal Identification of the Cityof
NewYork (Chinatown Division).
1992.
FredWilson.Mining the Museum.
BaltimoreMuseumofArt.1992.
What'sNeo about theNeo-Avant-Garde?
Perhaps now we can return to the initial question: how to narrate this
revised relation between historical and neo-avant-gardes? The premise that an
understanding of an art can only be as developed as the art must be retained, but
again not along historicist lines, whether in analogy to anatomical development
(as momentarily in Marx) or in analogy to rhetorical development, of origin
followed by repetition, of tragedy followed by farce (as persistently in Burger).
Different models of causality, temporality, and narrativity are required; far too
much is at stake in practice, pedagogy, and politics simply to do without them.
In order to advance a model of my own, I need to foreground an assumption
already at work in this text: that history, in particular modernist history, is often
conceived, secretly or otherwise, on the model of the individual subject, indeed as
a subject. This is plain when a given history is narrated in terms of evolution or
progression, as often in the late nineteenth century, or conversely in terms of
devolution or regression, as often in the early twentieth century (the last trope is
pervasive in modernist studies from Georg Lukacs to the present). But this modeling
of history continues in contemporary criticism even when it assumes the death of
the subject, for often then the subject only returns at the level of ideology (e.g.,
the Nazi subject), the nation (now imagined as a psychic entity as often as a body
politic), and so on. As is clear here from my treatment of the art institution as a
subject of resistance, I am as guilty of this vice as the next critic, but rather than
give it up I want to make it a virtue. For if this analogy to the individual subject is
all but structural to historical studies, why not apply the most sophisticated model
of the subject, the psychoanalytical one, and do so in a manifest way?45
In his best moments Freud limns the psychic temporality of the subject,
which is quite different from the biological temporality of the body, the
epistemological analogy that informs Bfirger via Marx. (I say "in his best moments,"
for just as Marx often escapes the propping of the historical on the biological,
Freud often succumbs to this modeling.)46 For Freud, especially as read through
45. This continuation of the subject by other means was pointed out to me by Mark Seltzer; I
practice it most egregiously in "Postmodernism in Parallax" (October63 [Spring 1993]). In part it stems
from the imperative to think the atavistic aspects of contemporary politics in a psychoanalytic frame,
especially nationalisms and neo-Fascisms (the work of Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen on identification and
SlavojZizek on fantasy is important here). It is also driven by a strong sense of a traumatic core within
historical experience, of which the Holocaust is often taken as a kind of paradigm. Obviously this
application has its dangers, one of which is an open invitation to immediate identification with the
traumatized victim-a point at which the general culture and the academic vanguard now converge
(sometimes the model of both seems to be Oprah,and the motto of both "EnjoyYour Symptom!").
Today the active areas of humanities are reconfigured not as cultural studies (as many hoped and some
feared) but as traumastudies.Repressed by various poststructuralisms, the real has returned-but not
just any real, only the traumatic real.
46. Despite the efforts of Lacan to save Freud from his "pretheoretical"heritage, this propping of the
historical on the biological may be fundamental to Freud in a way that it is not to Marx-in his
Lamarckianrecourse to phylogenetic fantasies, to psychosexualstages, to developmental logics in general.
29
OCTOBER
Lacan, subjectivity is not set once and for all; it is structured as a relay of anticipations
and reconstructions of traumatic events. "Italwaystakes two traumas to
make a trauma,"comments Jean Laplanche, who has done the most to clarify the
different temporal models in Freudian thought.47 One event is only registered
through another that recodes it; we come to be who we are only in deferredaction,
in Nachtrdglichkeit.It is this analogy that I want to propose for modernist studies
at the end of the century: I believe historical and neo-avant-gardes are constituted
in a similar way, as a continual process of protension and retension, a complex
relay of reconstructed past and anticipated future-in short, in a deferred action
that throws over any simple scheme of before and after, cause and effect, origin
and repetition.48
On this analogy the avant-garde work is never historically effective or fully
significant in its initial moments. It cannot be because it is traumatic:a hole in the
symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least
not immediately, at least not without structural change. (This is the other scene of
art that critics and historians need to register: not only symbolic disconnections
but failuresto signify.)49This trauma points to another function in the repetition
of avant-garde events like the readymade and the monochrome: not only to
deepen such holes but to bind them as well. And this function points to another
problem: how are we to distinguish the two operations? Can they ever be so separated?50Of
course there are related repetitions in the Freudian model that I have
47. Jean Laplanche, NewFoundationsof Psychanalysis,trans. David Macey (London: Basic Blackwell,
1989), p. 88. Also see his Seduction, Translation, the Drives, ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton
(London: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1992). Though influenced by Lacan, Laplanche takes a very
different view of the role of "thevital order"in Freud.
48. Above I said "comprehended" rather than "constituted,"but the two processes are imbricated,
especially so in my analogy if the avant-garde artist-critic assumes the position of both analyst and
analysand. There are merits to this model that will require another essay to argue through, but there
are problems as well (in addition to the very problem of analogy). How might this model of deferral
negotiate other kinds of delays and differences, across other cultural space-times? How restricted are
its temporalizations?
49. Here too old semiotic and social-historical approaches seem to converge, in part around the
psychoanalytic. T.J. Clark intimated this over twenty years ago in his introduction ("On the Social
History of Art") to Imageof thePeople(London: Thames & Hudson, 1973): "Asfor the public, we could
make an analogy with Freudian theory.... The public, like the unconscious, is present only where it
ceases; yet it determines the structure of private discourse; it is key to what cannot be said, and no
subject is more important" (p. 12).
50. "The crucial point here," Zizek writes in his Lacanian gloss on this question, "is the changed
status of an event: when it erupts for the first time it is experienced as a contingent trauma,as an intrusion
of a certain nonsymbolized Real; only through repetition is this event recognized in its symbolic
necessity-it finds its place in the symbolic network; it is realized in the symbolic order" (The Sublime
Objectof Ideology[London: Verso, 1989], p. 61). In this formulation repetition appears curative, even
redemptive, which is unusual for Zizek,who privileges the intransigence of the traumatic real. Thus formulated
in relation to the avant-garde, the discourse of trauma is no great improvement over the old
discourse of shock, where repetition is little more than absorption, as it is conceived here by Bfrger: "As
a result of repetition, it changes fundamentally: there is such a thing as expected shock.... The shock is
'consumed'"(81). The difference between shock and trauma is important to retain; it may point to
another heuristic distinction between modernist and postmodernist discourses more generally.
30
What'sNeoabouttheNeo-Avant-Garde?
smuggled in here: some in which the trauma is acted out hysterically, as the first
neo-avant-garde acts out the anarchistic attacks of the historical avant-garde;
others in which the trauma is worked through laboriously, as later neo-avantgardes
develop these attacks, at once abstract and literal, into performances that
are immanent and allegorical. It is in all these ways that the neo-avant-garde acts
on the historical avant-garde as much as it is acted on by it; that it is less neothan
nachtrdglich;that the avant-garde project in general develops in deferred action.
Once repressed in part, the avant-gardedid return, and it continues to return, but
alwaysfromthefuture:such is its paradoxical temporality.51So, again, what'sneo about
the neo-avant-garde?
*
I want to return very briefly to the strategy of the return with which I began.
Whether the recoveries in art of the 1960s are as radical as those of Marx, Freud,
or Nietzsche in theory of the time cannot be decided. What is certain, however, is
that these returns are as fundamental to postmodernist art as they are to poststructuralist
theory: both make the breaks that they do through such recoveries.
But then these breaks are not complete, and we have to qualify our definition of
epistemological rupture. Here too the notion of deferred action is useful, for
ratherthan breakwith thefundamentalpracticesand discoursesof modernity,thesignal
practicesand discoursesofpostmodernityadvancein a nachtriglich relationtothem.52
And there is more, for, beyond this general nachtrdglichrelation, both postmodernist
art and poststructuralist theory have developed the specific questions
that deferred action poses: questions of repetition, difference, and deferral; of
causality, temporality, and narrativity. Apart from the topics of repetition and
return remarked here, the neo-avant-garde is obsessed with the twin problems of
temporality and textuality-not only the introduction of time and text into spatial
51. See Zizek, SublimeObject,p. 55. Duchamp criticism hardly needs another magical key to the
work, but it is extraordinary how recursion and retroactivity are built into his art-as if Duchamp not
only allowed for deferred action but played with it as his very subject. The language of suspended
delays, the trope of missed encounters, the concern with infra-mincecausalities, the obsession with repetition,
resistance, and reception, is everywhere in his work, which is, like trauma, like the avant-garde,
definitively unfinished but alwaysalready inscribed. As but one example, take the famous specifications
for the readymades in "The Green Box": "byplanning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a
date, such a minute), 'to inscribea readymade'-The readymade can later be looked for.-(with all
kinds of delays). Theimportantthingthenisjust this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech
delivered on no matter what occasion but at suchand suchan hour.It is a kind of rendezvous" (Essential
Writings,p. 32).
52. In a sense the very discovery of Nachtrdglichkeitis deferred. However operative in such texts as
the Wolf-Mancase history,it wasleft to different readers like Lacan and Laplanche to make its theoretical
implications explicit. Moreover, Freud could not be fully aware that his own thought developed in
nachtrdglichfashion: e.g., not only the return of trauma in his work but also the double temporality
through which trauma is conceived there-the diphastic onset of sexuality, the fear of castration (that
requires both a traumatic sighting and a paternal injunction), and so on.
31
OCTOBER
and visual art (the famous debate between the Minimalists and Fried is but one
battle in this long war), but also the theoretical elaboration of museological time
and cultural intertextuality (announced by artists like Smithson and developed by
artists like Lothar Baumgarten in the present). Here I want only to register that
similar questions, posed in different ways,have also impelled the crucial philosophies
of the period: e.g., the elaboration of Nachtriglichkeitin Lacan, the critique
of "expressive causality" in Althusser, the genealogical analyses of Foucault, the
reading of repetition and difference in Gilles Deleuze, the articulation of
differancebyJacques Derrida.53 "It is the very idea of a first timewhich becomes
enigmatic," Derrida writes in "Freud and the Scene of Writing" (1966), a fundamental
text of this entire antifoundational era. "Itis thus the delay which is in the
beginning."54So it is for the avant-gardeaswell.
53. In the essaydevoted to this concept, perhaps the crucial one in the shift from a structuralistto a
poststructuralist problematic, Derrida writes: "Differanceis neither a wordnor a concept.In it, however,
we shall see the juncture-rather than the summation-of what has been most decisively inscribed in
the thought of what is conveniently called our 'epoch': the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure's
principle of semiological difference, difference as the possibility of [neurone] facilitation, impression
and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and
the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger" (Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison
[Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973], p. 130).
54. Jacques Derrida, Writingand Difference,trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), pp. 202, 203.
32