Notes from Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant Garde

Zanrovi su prividni, mada postoji studij I proucavanje poezije I umjetnosti.

Publika nije nikada pasivna, uvijek imaju misljenje/predrasudu. Zavisno od situacije
tumac koristi svoju predrasudu.
Mi gledamo na proslost iz perspektive nase epohe, mi to ne mozemo poreci.
Drustvena funkcija religije: religija ublazava patnju, ali takodjer ogranicava srecu.
Kada je covjek saznao da je religija apstraktna ili prividna on ju je na nekin nacin
pretvorio u filozofiju, te ju je prestao smatrati vjerom.
Adorno avangarda nema funkciju (Burger pak smatra da avangarda ima/treba da ima
funkciju razonode ili da pokrene diskusiju)
Avangarda na neki nacin stabilizira sve sto joj se nadje na putu protestuje

uvjete protiv kojih

Umjetnost nam daje barem imaginarnu satisfakciju/zadovoljstvo nasim individualnim

potrebama koje svakodnevni zivot potiskuje.
Individualne potrebe/momenti ne bi trebali biti lahko easily povezani. Njihova funkcija se
tako gubi.
Dada nema stil, nema ethos ona je po burgeru pravi primjer historijske avangarde zato
sto totalno nije dio neke institucije, nije vezana za istu.
Benjamin reprodukcija u mehanicko doba mijenja poimanje umjetnosti.
When art takes the place of religion art generates ritual rather than existing for the ritual
WB of Dada Their poems are a word salad containing obscenities and every
imaginable waste product of language
Art nowadays is made with profit in mind. How does poetry, the anomaly fit in?
The written word does not have a moment like painting does with photography because
literature can never take a snapshot although people have tried like say the imagists
but even this is a version. Of course realist photography is a version too
Art differs from everyday life; it is magical. Therefore all arts are jumbled together as a
whole. Like the vile notion poets must stick together.
When art loses its functional value it gains educational value (the furtherance). But it is
often light education disguised as furtherance
Model (Function, production, reception):

Thick
line
Thin line = minor break

major

break

In courtly art the artist becomes aware of his uniqueness

The citizen who, in everyday life has been reduced to a partial function (means-ends
activity) can be discovered in art as human being
The institution has defined art as things which are in the institution this happens
because of a sociological rather than an aesthetic reason. Similar ideas in Return of the
Real, Foster.
For Burger the true avant-garde artist wants to break with the system. This is often
difficult for a modern day artist after Duchamp, as when he broke the system the art then
became the system think also L.H.O.O.Q. key-rings at The Tate.
The culture industry has brought about the false elimination of the distance between art
and life
Any argument that a readymade negates the notion of the art work being produced by
the individual is unfounded as it is his idea and ideas are now what art is
Tzara and Breton give instructions on how to make art. This is an attack on the notion of
an individual making art i.e. the artist is simply a worker when making a cut up poem
from an arbitrary newspaper
Today the only works which really count are those which are no longer works at all.
Adorno
But lots of the bourgeoisie favour Jack Vettriano, photo of a dog with a speech bubble
going woof, etc. How is this art given back to us from the institution?
The Flarfists treat their action as the first time in poetry rather than as the umpteenth
hackneyed time in art. The problem of splitting disciplines in art: in terms of intention
and manufacture
Much conceptual art (including poetry) does not give enough attention to form
The famous Flarf story that Sullivan tells of a vanity publisher accepting his Google
mumbo-jumbo.
This is a peculiar notion. The vanity press, the same as the institution, does not take
experimental unless there is to be money to be made in it.

Anti-tradition became tradition. So did it not win then? It did not as Fountain is now
treated as part of our leisure and separate from our life praxis
The argument that arts and crafts, and cookery and gardening is art, as it is the peoples
truly
The neo avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely
avant-garde intentions.
To remain in silence?
Things always become new but what is meant by new by the avant-garde is total
newness a radical shift.
Adorno belives that the artists drive to be new is analogous to the consumption of new
goods by buyers in capitalist governments
Warhol and the abstract expressionists accept this and is not therefore avant garde
Just as consumption has need of fads so too does art need them. There are perhaps
today many more movements and they become replaced as king movement at a quicker
rate of transition think of the coming and going of minimalism but did it really go? Was
it exhausted aesthetically?
Are there more movements because of globalisation and media coverage?
The results of some Dada works is that they are free of ideology. Say for example chance
pieces but the alleatory action is not free of ideology; in fact it is heavily conceptual
For Burger Cubism isnt anti-tradition (therefore is not the avant-garde) as it does not
represent a true shift. i.e. we can all read the painting (a collective, sociable experience;
see model)
In non-avant-garde works the whole needs its parts and the parts needs its whole. This is
not the case in avant-garde works think about the Jason Rhoades large detritus
sculptures/installations
For the avant-garde, process and outcome are more important than content
This refusal to provide meaning is experienced as shock by the recipient.
Avant-garde hopes that the:
Refusal to give meaning = recipient is shocked = recipient reconsiders their life praxis /
realises life praxis is separate from art
BUT
The shock is generally non-specifically directed and therefore the recipients respond with
blind fury, do not know how to read the work and therefore do not change their life praxis
or even consider it as separate from life

Is a solution to direct the shock? Not to tell the audience the meaning but to tell them it
is OK to have an individual reading and that one can be part of a collective within
individual readings think presentation of The Other Room, if p then q
I remember reading somewhere about someone getting a Salt catalogue through their
door and disliking the way it was marketed, saying it was pointless to package Alan
Halsey in a glitzy way. The reason being that since Halseys current audience are above
such marketing techniques and there is therefore no need to market the book in a glitzy
way. The answer is simple they are trying to create an audience and not shock people so
much so that the audience doesnt consider the prospect of approaching the work. We
must remember the Salt list is very strange now with their publications over the last two
years
Burgers book essentially ignores Futurism both Russian and Italian. Is this because
Futurism never became institutionalised as did Dada and surrealism; it simply died
The institution is happy to play Duchamps games as he signals that all is to be
consumed and sold and therefore the institution can sell what it wants everything
The avant-garde destroyed the notion of aesthetic hierarchy. This can often be misread
as the need to consider everything
Brecht attempted to change the institution from within
Is this what innovative poetry attempted but instead weakly became part of a sub-culture
of tradition in the universities and then shut shop in terms of its responsibility to tell
people about the distinction of life art praxis; letting slam and story-telling (prose written
in stanzas) to remain the institution in terms of festivals and media coverage?
The Other Room attempts to change the system from within, slow as that may be and
with the little power it has
Is the internet an institution of sorts?
Key Differences between Poggioli and Burgers Theory of the Avant-Garde:

Comments:

Both reach a theory of types of significant change and characteristics of a certain type of
grouping. They could be labelled with different terms than avant-garde perhaps
Burger lays claim to being correct with the proof coming as his is a hermeneutical study
whereas Poggiolis theory is based on general knowledge and vague definitions.
#1 Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-garde [1974] -Art into life
#2 What is, for Peter Brger, the historical avant-garde? - Dada, Surrealism,
Russian avant-garde after October revolution

#3 What are the common features? - Do not reject individual artistic techniques and
procedures of earlier art, but rather they reject that art in its entirety -Radical break
with tradition. -In their most extreme manifestations, their primary target is art as an
institution such as it has developed in bourgeois society.

#4 What about cubism? - Part of historical avant-garde because it questions linear

perspective that had prevailed since the RenaissanceBUT it doesnt share basic
tendency: sublation of art in the praxis of life.

Peter Brgers Theory of the Avant-garde (published in 1974) has been a milestone within
art theory, and especially within the art theory on the art of the (early) 20th century. His
text serves as a key quote in numerous books on Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism or the
Neo-Avant-garde.[3]
In his book Brger describes a historical development of the art. Summarized, one can
roughly single out five historical developments in his text. First in account is sacral art,
which had its place in churches and still had a clear function. The painters mostly stayed
anonymous and the reception was collective. The second step was, according to Brger,
courtly art, which exactly like sacral art had a clear function (namely to represent the
court and praise the prince) and, again the reception was collective. The only shift that
can be registered lies in the way of production. Painters are not anonymous anymore but
the production became more individual.
The third historical episode in Theory of the Avant-garde is bourgeois art. With the
emancipation of the bourgeoisie, under capitalism, art became relatively autonomous
and created its own sphere. There has been a clear shift within the constitution of art;
from a functional media which should address a (sacral or sociable) collective towards an
(autonomous) art that has become a mere individual matter.
According to Peter Brger this new autonomy of art has started during the time of, what
he calls, aestheticism, with which he means the time after Kants theories. Brger
analyses Immanuel Kants and Friedrich Schillers views on taste and aesthetics. Kant
says that there are two forms of knowledge, namely the logical and the sensual.
Aesthetics are in between those two forms of knowledge, whilst taste is free and without
interest as it is supposed to have an universal claim.
The bottom line of this is that art is autonomous as it cannot be judged with interest,
which means that neither the church nor the court can produce/have art that serves for
their interest without losing its claim to universality. The theories that Kant generated

reached their full-blown form in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Symbolism
and the thought of l'art pour l'art (e.g. Mallarm).
Art has become self-reflective and at the same time, says Brger, functionless. At this
point, when artists recognized this detachment from the active life praxis, the fourth
period in art history started, namely the avant-garde. This must not be confused with
Modernism, which describes a change or better: evolution of style (like Cubism) whilst
the avant-garde project involved radical change of the way of life.
Through self-criticism, artists became aware of the inability of art to have an effect on
every-day-life. The artists developed new ways of overcoming this functionlessness (e.g.
the new, the chance and the montage).
With this attempt Brgers description of the motivation of the avant-garde movement
stands against Adornos definition of the modernist art, which he sees as twofolded.
For Adorno art is negative on different levels, whereas Brger describes the efforts of the
avant-garde to re-integrate art into life practices in more positive terms.
However, Brger asserts that this project (re-integreation into every-day-life-praxis)
failed. The avant-garde has become historical and got integrated into the museum. That
means it has become institutionalised and at the same time detached from everyday life
or the aim to have an effect on it. This becomes quite obvious with the appearance of the
Neo-avant-garde (which can be counted as the fifth historical step in art history).
The Neo-avant-garde operates within a paradox situation. They criticise institutional facts
but at the same time can only do so within an institutional framework. An example for
this is Daniel Buren. He attacks the museum in his texts.[8] At the same time he
produces works in/for the museum and therefore becomes part of the system. In the 60s
for example he produced invisible art works in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam,
where he painted his famous strips on the backs of other painting so they would become
invisible for the audience but still would have their place in the museum. The same
situation can be recorded in regard to artists like Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke or Michael
Asher. The whole concept of institutional critique has been incorporated into the
discursive and with that, one could argue, lost a bit of their critical potential.
In his 1974 work, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Brger developed a sociological
argument that the practices of the historical avant-garde had emerged as a fusion of art
and life, merging practices into a hybrid assault on autonomy that can be characterized
as distinctly avant-garde. Refuting previous positions, Brger argued that the avantgarde wasnt concerned with merely dismantling the classifications of art, but the
institution of art in its entirety. This was dramatically opposed to Clement Greenbergs
hegemonic theory of art practice, where the segregated medium was the sole attribute
through which the avant-garde could advance. It was in opposition to this diffusion of art
practice that Brgers theory framed a radicalized lens through which the avant-garde
could be reconceptualised: combatting the segregation of medium with a deliberate
fusing of the structures of art and their political and social histories. This paper will look
at the significant role fusion, as a strategy, plays in Brgers seminal work and its
reception. It is the recognition of fusion as an oppositional system in art production that
not only distinguishes his approach from early incarnations of modernism, but has also
seen the extension of his work into ongoing critical projects in art theory in America,
which have radicalised fusion as a critical and creative practice.

When Peter Brger wrote his short but influential Theory of the Avant-Garde in 1974 he
was writing in a cultural climate of immense change where many of the structures and
institutions of modernism were being violently torn apart. Frustrated with the failures of
the May 1968 riots in Paris [95] and committed to extending the Marxist dialectic of the
Frankfurt School, Brgers treatise is written partly out of disgust with the rampant
commoditisation of the art market and partly out of a personal need to document the
unprecedented historical transformations that were occurring in front of him. Brger drew
heavily from the aesthetic positions of Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno and Walter
Benjamin that had presciently linked the practices of art with those of capitalist
production thereby demonstrating the revolutionary potential and limitations of the
autonomous art object. For Adorno in particular, the category of art raised important and
unprecedented questions in relationship to cultural production, and foreshadowed the
inherent commercialisation with which capitalism and autonomy were intertwined.
However, Brgers thesis goes beyond the social philosophy of art and its critical
reception in order to sketch a historical framework for the avant-garde and an ideological
critique of its tactics.
Brgers subject matter is not new. By 1974, theorising the avant-garde had been a
fascination of critics for over four decades and had been somewhat of a preoccupation in
American art theory and particularly within the formalist circle of Clement Greenberg and
his followers. The point of departure for Brgers Theory of the Avant-Garde was its
insistence on developing a radicalised historical structure for studies of the avant-garde,
positioning the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s as the origin of radical art and all
subsequent activity as a derivation of this initial and most pure revolutionary form.
Brger rejected the more heavily trodden path of theorising the avant-garde in dialectical
opposition to the popular (or kitsch). Instead, Brger conceptualised the avant-garde as a
distinct historical phenomenon, peculiar to the first decades of the twentieth century and
in opposition to the bourgeois aesthetic practices that were, in his view, rampant in the
historical periods either side of it.
Brgers argument is relatively straightforward. He argued that a process of
institutionalising art had occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
and this had led to the gentrification of art and the isolation of its inherently bourgeois
audience [35-54]. In this sense, he follows the earlier precedents of Adorno and
Benjamin, who drew a distinction between organic and nonorganic artworks: the
former being associated with the bourgeois structures intrinsic to the production of art
and meaning and the latter with the category of avant-gardiste works characterised by
fragmentation and a collapse of the structures of holistic meaning. Brger maintained
that the radical creative approaches of the first decades of the twentieth century were an
attempt to both identify and dismantle this institutionalisation of art, attacking the
bourgeois gentrification of art process and, ultimately, realigning creativity with the
experience of modern life. In short, the historical avant-garde attacked the autonomy of
the art object and its institutionalisation and conflated the categories of art and life. For
Brger this meant that the history of the avant-garde needed to be distinguished from
the broader history of modernism.