There is a moment when artists gestures of rupture, which are not able to become acts (effective interventions in social

processes), become rituals. The original impulse of the vanguards brought them into association with the secularizing project of modernity; their incursions sought to disenchant the world and desacralize the conventional, beautiful, complacent ways in which bourgeois culture represented it. But the progressive incorporation of their insolence into museums, their reasoned digestion in the catalogs, and in the official teaching of art, made the ruptures into a convention. They established, then, that the artistic production of the vanguards should be subjected to the most frivolous forms of ritualism: vernissages, the presenting of awards and academic consecrations. But vanguard art was also converted into ritual into a different sense. To explain it, we must introduce a change in the generalized theory about ritual. It tends to study them as practices of social reproduction. It is assumed that they are places where society reaffirms what it is, defends its order and its homogeneity. In part, this is true. But rituals can also be movements toward a different order, which society still resists or proscribes. These are rituals for confirming social relations and giving them continuity (celebrations attached to natural acts: birth, marriage, death), and others are designed to effect in symbolic and occasional scenarios, impracticable transgressions in real or permanent form. In his anthropological studies of the Kabyle, Bourdieu (1990a) notes that many rituals do not have the sole function of establishing the correct ways of acting, and therefore of separating what is permitted from what is prohibited, but rather also of incorporating certain transgressions while limiting them. The ritual, cultural act par excellence (210), which seeks to impose order in the world, fixes which conditions are legitimate necessary [end of p. 23] and inevitable transgressions of limits (211). Historical changes that threaten the natural and social order generate oppositions and confrontations that can dissolve a community. Ritual is capable of operating, then, not as a simple conservative and authoritarian reaction in defense of the old order, but rather as a movement through which society controls the risk of change. Basic ritual actions are de facto denied transgressions. Ritual, through a socially approved and collectively assumed operation, must resolve the contradiction that is established by constructing, as separate and antagonistic, principles that have to be reunited to ensure the reproduction of the group (212). In light of this analysis we can look at the peculiar type the vanguards establish. The literature on ritualism is concerned chiefly with rites of entry or of passage: who, and with what requirements, may enter a house or a church; what steps must be fulfilled in order to pass from one civil status to another or to assume an office or an honor. The anthropological contributions to these processes have been used to understand the discriminatory operations in cultural institutions. The ritualization that museum architecture imposes on the public is described: rigid itineraries, codes of action to be strictly represented and performed. Museums are like lay temples that, like religious ones, convert objects of history and art into ceremonial monuments. (Canclini, pp. 23-24) *** One of the most severe crisis of the modern is produced by this return of ritual without mythsIn lacking totalizing accounts to organize history, the succession of bodies, actions, and gestures becomes a different ritualism than that of any other ancient or modern society. This new type of ceremonialism does not represent a myth that integrates a community, nor the autonomous narration of the history of art. It does not represent anything except the organic narcissism of each participant. (Canclini, p. 25)

***

But then how do we go from each intimate and [end of p. 25] instantaneous explosion to the spectacle, which presupposes some kind of ordered duration of images and dialogue with the viewers? How do we go from loose pronouncements to discourse, form solitary pronouncements to communication? From the artists perspective, performances dissolve the search for autonomy of the artistic field into the search for the expressive emancipation of the subjects and, as the subjects generally want to share their experiences, they fluctuate between creation for their own sake and the spectacle; often this tension is the basis for aesthetic seduction. This narcissistic exacerbation of discontinuity generates a new type of ritual, which is in truth an extreme consequence of what the vanguards came to do. We will call them rites of exit. Given that the maximum aesthetic value is constant renovation, to belong to the art world one cannot repeat what already had been done---the legitimate, the shared. It is necessary to initiate noncodified forms of representation (from impressionism to surrealism), invent unforeseen structures (from fantastic to geometric art), and relate images that in reality belong to diverse semantic chains and that no one had previously associated (from collages to performances). No worse accusation can be made against a modern artist than to show repetitions in his or her work. According to this sense of permanent escape to be in the history of art one has to be constantly leaving it. On this point I see a sociological continuity between modern vanguards and the postmodern art that rejects them. Although postmodernists abandon the notion of rupture---key in modern aesthetics---and use artistic images from other epochs in their discourse, their method of fragmenting and dislocating them, the displaced or parodic readings of traditions, reestablish the insular and self-referential character of the art world. Modern culture was formed by negating traditions and territories. Its impulse is still guided by museums that look for new audiences, by itinerant experiences, and by artists who use urban spaces that are culturally dissimilar, produce outside of their countries, and decontextualize objects. Postmodern art continues to practice these operations without claiming to offer something radically innovative, incorporating the past---but in an unconventional way---with that which renews the capacity of the artistic field to represent the ultimate legitimate difference. Such transcultural experimentation engendered renovations in language, design, urban forms, and youth practices. But the main fate of the vanguards and of the disenchanted rituals of the postmodernists has been the ritualization of museums and of the market. Despite the desacralization of art and the artistic world and the new open channels to other audiences, the [end of p. 26] experimentalists accentuate their insularity. The primacy of form over function, of the form of saying over what is said, requires from the spectator a more and more cultivated disposition in order to understand the meaning. Artists who inscribe in the work itself the questioning about what the work should be, who not only eliminate the naturalist illusion of the real and perspective hedonism but who rather make the destruction of conventions, even those of last year, their method of visual enunciation, are assured, on the one hand, Bourdieu says, of dominion in their field, but on the other hand, they exclude the spectator who is not disposed to make his or her participation in art an equally innovative experience. Modern and postmodern art propose a paradoxical reading, since they presuppose the dominion of the code of communication that tends to question the code of communication (1971, 1352).

Are artists really assured of dominion in their field? Who remains as proprietor of their transgressions? By having accepted the artistic market and the museums, the rites of exit, and incessant flight as the modern way of making legitimate art, do they not subject the changes to a framework that limits and controls them? What, then, is the social function of artistic practices? Have they not been assigned---with success---the task of representing social transformations, of being the symbolic scenario in which the transgressions will be carried out, but within institutions that demarcate their action and efficacy so that they do not disturb the general order of society? It is necessary to rethink the efficacy of artistic innovations and irreverences, the limits of their sacrilegious rituals. Attempts to break the illusion in the superiority and the sublime of art are in the final analysis, according to Bourdieu, sacralizing desacralizations that scandalize no one but the believers. Nothing demonstrates better the tendency toward the self-absorbed functioning of the artistic field than the fate of these apparently radical attempts at subversion, which the most heterodox guardians of artistic orthodoxy finally devour (1977, 8). (Canclini, pp. 25-27) Notes: 1. Pierre Bourdieu writes extensively on this topic

Works Cited
Canclini, Nestor. "From Utopias to the Market." Canclini, Nestor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1995. 12-40.