In my ongoing effort to demystify the professorial profession, I’m about to reveal to you that professors write their own “prep pages,” too. Here are my unvarnished, uncorrected writings, as I attempted to make sense of all the avant-garde theory I’d been reading on my last sabbatical:<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been reading theory of the avant-garde and seeking a feminist approach or angle. At the same time, I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019ve found lacking in the two major theories I\u2019ve encountered.<\/p>\n
Renato Poggioli [who I haven’t assigned you] is helpful in illuminating the psychology of the avant-garde, identifying 4 different attitudes. He\u2019s also good about acknowledge the different publics, or public spheres, for the avant-garde. And I really like the way he acknowledges the ag\u2019s involvement with the very publics it attacks or opposes. At one point he argues that, \u201cto go on strike, you have to be employed,\u201d which is an excellent insight that could cast light on why access to the a\/g might be more problematic for women and people of color. They can\u2019t strike if they haven\u2019t been hired in the first place.<\/p>\n
Poggioli sees the early 20th<\/sup> century a\/g as an extension of Romanticism, which inaugurated the cult of originality, novelty, radical individualism, and resistance to traditional forms and hierarchies. But as Burger (and his translator point out), Poggioli is weak in his historicism. His theory can\u2019t differentiate the 20th<\/sup> century a\/g from its Romantic precedents, nor account for the emergence of the a\/g in the early 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n Burger gives us a more precise historical explanation, seeing Decadence (art for art\u2019s sake) and the bourgeois claim for artistic autonomy as precursors to the a\/g\u2019s rejection of those ideals. Once artistic autonomy is achieved and art is released from any obligation to society, the a\/g arises to reject the social ineffectuality of art and work toward a reengagement between art and every day life.<\/p>\n What I like about Burger is his interest in the social praxis of art\u2014and of criticism. I like his dialectical approach to previous theories, which he does not outright reject, but instead works in and against them to resolve unaddressed or hidden problems. I like his insistence on the precise historical and social settings that gave rise to the a\/g.<\/p>\n What I find insufficient about his theory is its monolithic explanation for the a\/g: all true a\/g artists must be motivated by a desire to reject artistic autonomy and to attack the institution of art. Certainly Duchamp\u2019s ready-mades exemplify this position and the Futurists aggressively attacked all institutions, but so many avant-gardists continue to claim artistic autonomy, including, Duchamp and the Futurists. And some are clearly motivated by other interests entirely.\u00a0 I also think it is problematic to claim that artists are rejecting the institution of art, because some may not yet have had access to the institution, while others (especially in America) may be trying to establish an institution (e.g. modern American poetry) for the first time. It\u2019s as if Burger develops a theory of the avant-garde based on Duchamp\u2019s provocations as paradigmatic. But in doing so, he eliminates a whole range of a\/g approaches and positions. And Duchamp has a very peculiar and privileged position as a white European man. He can, for example, develop a grotesque female alter ego like RRose Selavy, without necessarily compromising his manhood or his genius. But a female alter ego, like the Baroness (is it really an alter ego or just her public persona?) or like Loy\u2019s pseudonyms, risks relegating the female artist to the grotesque, insane, or margins.<\/p>\n All the major theories of the avant garde seem based upon the examples of white male artists. If we include women in the frame, would the definitions and theories change? I\u2019ve been wanting to find a theory that incorporates women, and when I came across Griselda Pollack\u2019s article, I rejoiced.<\/p>\n Her opening remarks said everything I\u2019d been thinking \u2013 wishfully thinking or wishing I could think.<\/p>\n Starting with the point that our histories and canons of modernism and the avant garde belie the real, formative presence of women artists, editors, and publishers in these movements. \u201cthe initial institutionalization of modernism not only failed to acknowledge the centrality of gender to both modernity and its modernisms; it actively fabricated a monogendered, selective narrative of modern art, even in the living presence of the women who defined their moment of modernity through their massive participation in all areas of culture\u201d (795). What results is a \u201cmasculine legend of the avant-garde.\u201d And the theories are based on this legend.<\/p>\n Pollack implies the need to recuperate Clement Greenberg\u2019s initial theory of the \u201cavant-garde as a structural position placing itself aesthetically at a distance from the very bourgeois society on which it, nonetheless, depended economically.\u201d This statement seems very close to my idea that we might think of the avant-garde as a strategic position, rather than a platform or doctrine.<\/p>\n Pollack also seems to implicitly critique Burger and Poggioli when she challenges the \u201clinear temporality associated with the avant-garde as the progressive as well as transgressive agency of modernist culture.\u201d Both Poggioli and Burger, in positioning the avant-garde as the necessary end of an artistic teleology, place it on a timeline. In contrast, Pollack suggests \u201cthere were diverse and discontinuous avant-garde moments<\/em> at which the defining collision of social and aesthetic radicalisms occurred.\u201d (796) In the place of a linear timeline, Pollack calls attention to the second meaning of \u201crevolution,\u201d not only rupture, but also revolving.<\/p>\n Pollack doesn\u2019t reject historical positioning, however. Using Kristeva, Pollack argues that the \u201cavant-garde first emerged in the later nineteenth century to challenge the historically specific articulation in bourgeois society of economic, social, and symbolic forces.\u201d This is a much broader, yet more concrete target of attack than Burger\u2019s artistic autonomy and the institution of art. Even more promising, Pollack, via Kristeva, argues that \u201cAs an effect of the bourgeois triangulations of state, family, and religion\u2026 gender\/sexual difference emerged as a central question of avant-gardism, in the form of a psychosymbolic and metaphorical engagement with \u2018the feminine.\u2019\u201d Here she\/they are careful not to equate \u2018the feminine\u2019 with actual women, but is a \u201csymbolic negativity\u201d\u2014the \u201cnot me\u201d or \u201cother\u201d against which Man defines himself.<\/p>\n This argument suggests a neat solution to a problem I\u2019ve been turning over in my mind. I\u2019ve been worrying the idea that Loy is always talked about in relation to her gender subversions\u2014she\u2019s always limited by her engagement with gender issues. So I\u2019ve been wanting to open up consideration beyond gender to questions of audience, performance, and the public sphere. But instead of seeing gender as a concern limited to and that limits women artists, instead we can see gender\/sexuality as a central question of avant-gardism. It is her attention to gender that contributes to her\u2014and her male cohorts\u2014position as avant-gardists. In this way, gender is at the center of all avant-garde practice, not just women artists\u2019 preoccupation. Or as Pollack so nicely puts it, \u201cthe modern was also a moment of radicalization of gender and sexual difference\u201d (809). We might rethink modernity as staging \u201ca profound and long-lasting cultural drama with sexual difference at its heart that emerged into historico-symbolic significance at the moment of the first historical avant-garde that challenged state, family, and religion in bourgeois society, placing gender symbolically on its agenda at the same time as bourgeois society placed specific obstacles in the path of thinkers\/artists\/writers who were women<\/em>.\u201d (798)<\/p>\n [note: interesting that Pollack choses a stage metaphor here, writing of a cultural drama. Here she seems intellectually and imaginatively in line with Loy, who recognizes gender and sexuality as theatre\u2014as a kind of performance or even a performativity, some required, compulsory, and inescapable.]<\/p>\n In this same paragraph asserting the centrality of gender to avant-garde practice, Pollack acknowledges that men and women necessarily grapple with the issues differently, based on their respective positions in bourgeois society, which she calls a \u201cpsychopositional difference.\u201d \u201cWhile the masculine artist could distance himself from bourgeois culture in the fiction of autogenesis through hysterical identification with\/appropriation of the maternal-feminine, which was then folded into the creative masculine bachelor-subject, women artists had to negotiate the mythic artist-mother fantasy in relation to an all too concrete, socially authorized notion of woman-mother.\u201d (797) Here she could and must be talking about Marcel Duchamp\u2019s fiction of Rrose Selavy, which then gets folded into the legendary status of the Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Large Glass.<\/p>\n So I am loving Pollack\u2019s repeated call to define the \u201cavant-garde as a series of self-differentiating identifications that formed avant-garde moments<\/em>.\u201d She defines it as \u201ca concrete cultural phenomenon that is realized in terms of identifiable (though never predetermined) practices and representations through which it constitutes itself in relation to, and at a distance from, the overall cultural patterns of its time.\u201d (800) Her definition is strategic, social, and historical. Individuals in particular historical moments identify with others in a self-selecting group to imagined themselves as creating or effecting some form of difference that distinguishes them from cultural norms. Such a definition allows for multiple, revolving, discontinuous, overlapping, intersecting, parallel, and conjoining currents or moments of avant-garde practice, with variable motives, attitudes, targets, and publics.<\/p>\n And yet Pollack disappoints by replacing one monolithic preoccupation with another: instead of attacking the autonomy of art, in her Kristevan theory of the avant-garde, artists fixate on thinking about the \u201cmaternal-feminine.\u201d (810) I don\u2019t deny a motivating interest in reconceptualizing a \u201cmaternal-feminine\u201d symbolic, but to place this concern at the center of avant-garde praxis returns us to a more rigid, homogenous theoretical framework. It seems to go against the productive premise of rethinking the avant-garde in terms of strategic positions and socio-historical moments.<\/p>\n So, I want to engage in a dialectical relationship with the theorist who have come before me: Greenberg, Poggioli, Burger, and Pollack.<\/p>\n From Greenberg, I want to reclaim the notion of the avant-garde as a structural position (though I would substitute the word \u201cstrategic\u201d for structural in order to allow for a more flexible framework). From Poggioli, I want to reclaim the various psychological attitudes and publics for avant-garde practice. From Burger, I want to reclaim dialectical critical practice, as well as the necessity of historicizing ourselves, the objects we study, and the theories we develop. From Pollack, I want to reclaim the actual, vigorous, and vital participation of women in avant-garde moment, and the ability to see how women\u2019s access to the strategic position of avant-garde practice is historically and socially inflected by gender conventions in bourgeois culture\u2014and by extension by avant-garde cultures that engage in dialectical relationships to the culture they critique, not always rupturing its gender ideologies, but just as often revolving them back into place, albeit in a different aesthetic form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In my ongoing effort to demystify the professorial profession, I’m about to reveal to you that professors write their own “prep pages,” too. Here are my unvarnished, uncorrected writings, as I attempted to make sense of all the… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-dr-chill"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/files\/2017\/01\/eye-300x225.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3220,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219\/revisions\/3220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}