Art System and post-WWII Avant-Garde Art

Any present consideration of avant-gardes has to recall certain aspects of the early 20th century avant-garde movements (the “historic avant-gardes”), their structural-aesthetical as well as historico-political features, their international origins and their dispersal within geopolitical stratification enforced by Cold War division between 1947 and 1991. Peter Bürger insisted on the distinction, later symptomatically blurred, between the early 20th century modernist and avant-garde movements.1 He pointed to a fundamental difference between modernist and avant-gardist strategies used to negate existing 20th centuries social relations. While modernism, according to Bürger, functioned as a strategy of deviation from linguistic norms and clichés, or as an assault on traditional techniques of writing, painting etc., avant-garde strategies were something altogether different in that they staged a total assault on the existing social order, having as their goal the complete transformation of the conditions under which art is produced and distributed in modern industrial society. Whereas modernism could comfortably develop within the framework of progressive bourgeois liberalism, the avant-garde movements operated on the basis of an utopian political imaginary openly flirting with leftist, and to a lesser extent, right-wing proto-totalitarian utopianism. But regardless of avant-garde sympathies with the organized political movements, it is equally important to emphasize that the early 20th century avant-garde movements represented an esthetically and politically ambiguous and elusive phenomenon, which was, paradoxically, equally threatening to all three competing ideologies of the last century. Certain political and cultural circles in America, as well as in Nazi Germany, for example, perceived avant-garde art to be carrying the virus of Communism, while for the real Communists in Soviet Union, especially during and after the rise of Stalinism, avant-garde and modern arts were regarded to be the cultural expression of the Western bourgeoisie decadence.

The turning point for the future of the avant-garde art in the 20th century however happened already in 1930s and 1940s in United States. In How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Serge Guilbaut provides a detailed analysis of the complex social, intellectual and economic alchemy responsible for the “de-marxification” and de-politicization of modernist and avant-garde art.2 But in exchange for what was taken away, Guilbaut argues, the intense cultural debates in America in the period between the wars provided a new discursive as well as economic system to protect the political and aesthetical ambiguity and vulnerability of the avant-garde art, which so far resisted assimilation into homogenized political systems establishing themselves in Europe.

Clement Greenberg’s modernist doctrine played an instrumental role in establishing this new system of art in providing not only charismatic critical interpretation for modernist-abstract art but also in redirecting avant-garde attachment from ideological-political to liberal and later neo-liberal economic relations of the post-war and cold war period.
In his 1939 essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch”Greenberg posited:

"No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an élite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real."3

The newly established and quickly developing art system – that is, the autonomous (depoliticized) network connecting artists, galleries, collectors, museums, curators, editors, publishers, designers, promoters and finally audiences – its existence or non-existence, or the level of its development – became a central reference point of the post-WWII avant-gardes. In the post WWII period, ‘art system’ or ‘art world’ became not only the reference point for defining relations such as north - south, east - west, but also for formal and historical analysis of the art practices under consideration. Were they produced and distributed within or conscious of the art world’s existence, or were they cut off from it, developing their practices in direct relation to or confrontation with their respective societies?
The most notable similarity of all non-western post-WWII avant-gardes is that they remained in a much more politicized and polarized relation toward both the national political and institutional conditions and the expanding hegemony of the West. (This is a fundamentally schizophrenic, or ‘double bind’ position, which deserves special attention because it still prevails today). On the other hand, western neo-avant-gardes became more and more occupied with the art system itself and became, with the exception of 1968’s neo-left revival, largely detached from collective political and social struggles. As Jack Burnham wrote, Western neo-avant-garde artists at one point realized that the art system, technically speaking, could function without an artwork, while an artwork cannot function without the support system.4 While the subversive withdrawal of the artwork as an object and the turning of attention to the meaning and value-producing system of the art world itself became the main preoccupation of the Western neo-avant-garde art, this—paradoxically-- didn’t really hurt or change the system very much. Quite the opposite: it accelerated its expansion and substantially empowered it. The neo-avant-garde’s break with high modernist narratives was of course significant but on the other hand the neo-avant-garde movements in the West inherited a modernist art system, which adapted to new narratives and continued its post-modern expansion.

Against this background, it has to be emphasized that the 1968 New-Left reformist student and art movements still provided an important international platform within which we can discover and analyze the similarities, or the existence of a common international or global cause which was strongly connecting non-Western and Western post WWII avant-garde movements into a world-wide whole. In 1968, wrote Franco Berardi, with a synchronicity previously unheard of in human history, great masses of people from all over the world -- workers and students – fought both the capitalist moloch and the authoritarianism of the socialist world. The internationalism of 1968 was, according to Berardi, the first phenomenon of conscious globalization.5 At Berkeley, students mobilized for Vietnam, while in Shanghai students rallied in solidarity with the Parisien students. In Prague students were fighting against Soviet authoritarianism, while in Milan the enemy was the capitalist state. Nevertheless, historically, 1968 didn’t mark the return to 20th century political radicalism as much as it signified the end of industrial society and the beginning of the post-industrial, post-political, post-Fordist era accompanying a process leading to current disembodiment of the nation-state.

Let me now try to derive some conclusions from the above. There is no doubt that there was a vibrant post-WWII avant-garde production in various non- western countries of South America, Eastern Europe and beyond, but these art practices, regardless of their political and aesthetical significance, remained largely unrecorded and critically undigested since they were produced within or on the margins of incompatible national support systems which were mostly in the service of authoritarian, non-democratic political regimes.

The systemic gap between Western and non-Western art of the second part of the 20th century grew in importance after 1989 with the emergence of curatorial practices and discussions about the art and politic of a new trans-national, global relations. After the fall of real socialism and the final decline of Marxism (which was the amalgam for the avant-garde in 20th century) the problem of western art’s post-WWII avant-garde over-institutionalization (or over-systemization, administration, bureaucratization, academicization) and non-Western’s art under-institutionalization (its under-systemization, administration, bureaucratization, academicization) shifted to a completely new realm. Although, immediately after 1989, the trans-national option was still perceived as one of revitalizing and expanding 20th century internationalism, it soon became apparent that a completely new mode of production and new a historic condition was emerging—one characterized by the capacity of trans-national globalization to generate and proliferate so called non-spaces, non-places, or non-sites.

The genealogy of the non-site-place-space concepts leads us back to 1968 when American artist Robert Smithson introduced the concept of non-site versus site. He divided the sphere in which (post-WWII avant-garde) art operated into site and the non-site.6 He further defined the site as becoming the margin, where the emerging formation of information culture -- the non-site – was becoming the center of the system. More recently, French anthropologist Marc Augé reintroduced this division in a quite similar way, referring to non-places of constant circulation, consumption and communication -- such as airports, shopping malls, highways, train stations, cinemas, art biennials, market fairs, corporate-work infrastructures -- as opposed to anthropological places, which he defined as sites that have “social bonds inscribed in them”.7 Rastko Mocnik, on the other hand, speaks of non-space and warns of the dangers of defining oneself as belonging to it – as “Eastern!” ( or self-identifying under any other non-Western geo-political label). “Eastern” he wrote,

"... of course means still ‘Eastern’: prey to its own history, … it is specific, localized because it is enmeshed within its own past, not emancipated from history: while what parades as general, universal, canonic, as the measure against which the peripheral, the provincial is to be measured – is what long ago was emancipated from its own history, from any history, for this is why it can be imposed as ‘general canonic’ and the measure, because it is a-historical. Speaking about space, one speaks about TimeSpace. The space of the East is, within the current ideology, a timed space. Correlatively, the ‘timeless’ West is presented as non-space."8

History, as some of us know, is a primary issue for East European post-WWII avant-garde practices. We can confirm this simply by looking at the titles of books and exhibitions such as Misko Suvakovic’s Impossible Histories, Boris Groys’s When History Becomes Form, Victor Tupitsyn’s Museological Unconscious, Zdenka Badovinac’s “Interrupted Histories”. But the non-space of the transnational art world doesn’t really care for history. What it cares for is information. The burden of traumatic history (colonialism, real socialism, military dictatorships) as well as the threat of amnesia characteristic of non-Western avant-garde art is degrading, and disqualifies more than it legitimatizes in the long term. And that, as Mocnik concludes in his ‘East’, is not only a strong invitation to amnesia that non-space demands, but also already a falsification of the world history that would, according to the underlying interests of the non-space, better be forgotten. What is at risk of being forgotten are the very different histories and experiences of the 20th century, which have to be consciously reconsidered and re-politicized if a fair history of the 20th century post-WWII avant-garde art is to be written and remembered.