On Not Tearing Down MoMa: Or, What's Bernstein's Game, Anyway?

If you'd wandered into the garden lobby of the Museum of Modern Art early last February, you might have met the sight (and considerable sound) of Charles Bernstein declaiming from Marinetti's 1909 "Fururist Manifesto." It might have been a bit unnerving, since in addition to calling for new types of beauty the manifesto cries out for the glorification of war, and nationalism, the denigration of feminism and of women in general, and the destruction of libraries and museums. As this last call echoed forth, you'd have been forgiven for looking nervously around you to see if the black-clad New Yorkers were responsive to this line of rhetoric, ready to rise from their poses of studied torpor and tear MoMa, brick by brick, to the ground.

There was no need to worry, though. The crowd remained docile. Neither they nor Bernstein seemed to want to actually act on Marinetti's words (for which I'm grateful — I like museums, and women, and I'm not keen on war). In fact, Bernstein followed up by reading from a feminist manifesto by Mina Loy, presumably as a kind of penance for having belted out Marinetti's misogynist remarks. Bernstein then read a manifesto of his own, though one with a curious origin for the manifesto genre. It was commissioned by Poetry magazine, and composed by Bernstein alone, not on behalf of some rag-tag group of outsider malcontents sulking in a garret in some low-rent arrondissement. Even more curious than the origin of Bernstein's manifesto, given the properties of the genre, was the curious lack of agenda, the absence of emphasis on any kind of collective program (Bernstein's manifesto defined language poetry as "a loose affliation of unlike individuals"), and the lack of the genre's usual stress on some kind of aesthetic/political newness. The manifesto opens by drawing attention to this last lack: "I love originality so much," says Bernstein, "I keep copying it."  Later he adds "I’m the derivative product of an originality that spawns me as it spurns me. "


So what's Bernstein's game? Marinetti's Futurist manifesto was many things (including bellicose and misogynistic), but first and foremost it was an avant-garde statement, with everything that implies: it was for aesthetic newness, but also for smashing the institutions (like museums) that separated art from the rest of life.  "A roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace," said Marinetti, and part of the meaning of his claim was that the truest beauty exists outside the halls dedicated to hallowing aesthetic appreciation and reverence for tradition.  And whatever else we may say about Bernstein's reading of the "Futurist Manifesto" at MoMa, it wasn't an avant-garde event.  The crowd didn't rise up to topple the sculpture behind Bernstein, nor was he disappointed that they didn't.  After all, he still had Loy to read from, and the piece he'd written at the behest of the Poetry Foundation.  And it's not just that Bernstein seemed comfortable in the kind of institution Marinetti loathed.  In reading Marinetti and Loy, Bernstein was doing something else Marinetti despised: honoring the literary past.  Not only did Bernstein do his level-best to read from Marinetti with the requisite passion: he later spoke in defense of the genre of the manifesto itself, praising its chief anthologist (Mary Ann Caws) and attacking those who think poetry can do without the genre (a set of straw men, I think, since they went unnamed and the arguments attributed to them seemed incredibly simple).


If the game wasn't avant-gardism, what was it?  I don't think there was anything so simple as a smug irony, though there was certainly opportunity enough to make one had that been Bernstein's intent.  After all, he was reading from a document calling for the destruction of museums in a museum.  It would have been easy to turn the reading into an event that said "ha ha, you lost, we museum-lovers are still here, and we can read your words without fear," like a bunch of GOP plutocrats chuckling over a copy of the Communist Manifesto that somehow turned up at the country club.  But the reading of Marinetti served as prelude to a defense of the idea of manifestos, so ironic smugness wasn't Bernstein's game, either.

The name of Bernsteins' game is, I think, arrière-gardisme.  The term arrière-garde has been used in a number of different senses, but the one that pertains here is the one articulated by William Marx and the contributors to the collection of essays he edited in 2004, Les arrière-garde au XXe siècle (the idea has also been used with reference to American writing in Marjorie Perloff's recent Unoriginal Genius).  Marx's idea is that much experimental writing from the middle of the twentieth century onward bears strong affinities to the historical avant-garde, but has an difference as well: unlike the original avant-garde, arrière-gardistes  show a reverence for the history of avant-garde writings and actions, and wish to preserve or extend them.  While a poet like Marinetti dreamed of the destruction of traditions and museums, a poet like Charles Bernstein reveres the avant-garde past, seeking to revive the literary and cultural energies that were lost during the First World War. 

If Bernstein is seen as an avant-gardist, it’s hard to explain why he read from Marinetti’s manifesto in the Museum of Modern Art: from an avant-garde perspective, reading Marinetti in such a context seems at best like an irony, at worst like a betrayal.  But when we see Bernstein as a member of the arrière-garde, the picture changes.  An arrière-gardist, after all, has something an avant-gardist did not have: an avant-garde tradition behind him.  And a museum is a perfectly appropriate place to revere tradition.


[Update January 5, 2011: Joyelle McSweeney takes issue with this post in interesting ways]

The Avant-Garde for Beginners

My colleague Josh Corey has been temporarily felled by some dread illness, and I've just been told I'm going to be pressed into service tomorrow to cover a class session introducing the idea of the avant-garde.  Thank god I'm an old bastard, now, and have a general storehouse of notes on all literary topics.  I'll be bodging something together out of sections of two old essays of mine, "The Death of the Critic" (from Louis Armand's book Avant-Post, now viewable in its entirety online) and "The Avant-Garde in Babel," which appeared in Action Yes (you can find it online, along with the much-superior essay to which it responds).

I've cut down some passages and done some re-arranging of bits and pieces. Here, in the event you're interested, they are.

Modified Passages from "The Death of the Critic"


1. The Avant-Garde as Linguistic Skepticism

A classic definition of avant-gardism, one that seems to serve as a kind of accepted folk-wisdom among experimental poets in our time, was articulated by Renato Poggioli in his 1968 study The Theory of the Avant-Garde.  Poggioli’s idea of the avant-garde, which is essential but not sufficient for my purposes, proposes that avant-gardism proceeds from the assumption that languages and systems of expression are, by their nature, entropic.  Avant-garde writing is, in this view, an inevitable reaction to “the flat, opaque, and prosaic nature of our public speech, where the practical end of quantitative communication spoils the quality of the expressive means.”  For Poggioli, the “conventional habits” of expression in a bourgeois, capitalist society are subject to a “degeneration,” and the role of the avant-garde must be renewal.

This idea does not originate with Poggioli, but derives from a long tradition of thinking about experimental art, much of it from the era of the historical avant-garde itself.  Much of what Poggioli has to say, for example, was already present in Victor Shklovsky’s seminal article of 1917, “Art as Technique.”  Here, Shklovsky presents the problem of linguistic entropy as a problem of ever-decreasing experiential returns: “If we start to examine the general laws of perception,” he writes,

we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.  Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us.

In this view, ordinary life in modern society is inherently a matter of alienation, not merely from one’s labor, but from one’s every action: “...life is reckoned as nothing.  Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.”  If, as Shklovsky claims, “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” then the technique of art must be “to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception...” 

2. Historical Examples of Linguistic Skepticism Predating the Avant-Garde

One irony of Victor Shklovsky’s status as a kind of patron saint of the avant-garde is that the examples he chooses to illustrate his idea of art as the defamiliarization of experience are not drawn from the powerful currents of avant-garde practice that flowed through Russia in 1917. Instead, Shklovsky derives his most extended and convincing examples from classic nineteenth-century Russian writers such Tolstoy and Gogol.

Also, skepticism about language’s ability to remain fresh and retain meaning was already present in the late eighteenth century (ix), the period in which Schiller and Goethe wrote:

All dilettantes are plagiarizers. They sap the life out of and destroy all that is original and beautiful in language and in thought by repeating it, imitating it, and filling up their own void with it. Thus, more and more, language becomes filled up with pillaged phrases and forms that no longer say anything...

3. The Avant-Garde as Institutional Skepticism


Some thinkers hold that if the avant-garde is to be understood as something distinct from the artistic and literary traditions that preceded it, it must possess some quality or propose some project other than defamiliarization and linguistic regeneration.  Jochen Schulte-Sasse follows the Peter Bürger of Theory of the Avant-Garde when he maintains that this quality is to be found in the avant-garde’s questioning of the institutions of art.  Schulte-Sasse begins with the premise that the late-nineteenth century Aesthetic movement was predicated on notions of aesthetic disinterest and autonomy.  While the movement constituted a kind of critique of the bourgeois, utilitarian world, it was a dead-end in that it removed art from the world of power.  Art became otherworldly, incapable of intervening in civil society, and its critique of capitalist values became a matter of an impotent refusal rather than a force for active intervention.  As Schulte-Sasse puts it,

Aestheticism’s intensification of artistic autonomy and its effect on the foundation of a special realm of aesthetic experience permitted the avant-garde to clearly recognize the social inconsequentiality of autonomous art ...  For [Peter] Bürger, then, the development of the avant-garde has nothing to do with a critical consciousness about language… [F]or him the turning point from Aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art comprehended the mode in which it functioned in bourgeois society, its comprehension of its own social status.  The historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution “art” and the mode in which autonomy functions. 

The avant-garde, in this view, turned against the institutions of art (literary forms of publication, art galleries, museums, good taste and conniseurship, etc.) and the theory of art (autonomous art for art's sake) that underwrote those institutions.  It is in this respect, Schulte-Sasse says, that the avant-garde differed from Modernism:

Modernism may be understandable as an attack on traditional writing techniques, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack meant to alter the institutionalized commerce with art.  The social roles of the modernist and the avant-garde are, thus, radically different.

The carefully unpurchasable, deliberately unbeautiful nature of much avant-garde work can be taken as signs of the Bürger/Schulte-Sasse thesis in action.

A Passage Adapted from "The Avant-Garde in Babel" 

The Bäckström Schema

The four or five terms for experimental art and literature that Per Bäckström refers to in his essay on the different forms of experimental art and literature in different national traditions are modernism, avant-gardism, vanguardia (and its variants in the different Romance languages), and postmodernism.

Bäckström sees modernism as a term used in the Germanic and Anglo-American traditions to indicate an aesthetically experimental kind of art that defines itself by its rejection of popular culture’s kitschiness and clichés.

The avant-garde, in the precise usage of German theorists like Peter Bürger, refers to a movement that combined aesthetic and political radicalism, seeking to regenerate life by eliminating the boundary between art and life.  In this view the avant-garde is less worried about maintaining a distance from popular culture than is modernism.

Although there has been much ink spilled in arguing over the definition of postmodernism, Bäckström finds its most useful definition to be one based on its complex relationship to modernism and popular culture.  Postmodernism contains within itself the formal experimentalism of modernism, but it also refutes modernism’s distaste for pop culture.

Vanguardia and its variants are terms from the Romance languages that refer to a range of experimental literary and artistic activity, including both anti-pop-cultural forms and politicized forms.

The overall field depicted would be that of artistic experimentalism in general, and one could plot the co-ordinates of the movements designated by the Bäckström’s terms thusly:

Forget the Art World: Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and the Future of the Avant-Garde

So there I was, lounging around on the couch, swilling coffee, munching a scone and beginning to suspect that this Sunday's New York Times was one of the dullest in recent memory, when the lovely and talented Valerie Archambeau drew my attention to a piece by Randy Kennedy on street art, the occasion of which was the installation of Shepherd Fairey's famous Obama portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. The article began with an anecdote about the artist Banksy, which woke me up more than the three cups of Intelligentsia Finca Santuario had been able to:

In 2005, the British artist Banksy — then on the verge of becoming probably the world’s most famous street artist — walked into the Museum of Modern Art and three other New York museums done up in a beige raincoat and fake beard, looking more like a subway flasher than a “quality vandal,” as he called himself. Once inside he furtively mounted his own work among the masterpieces, relying on speed and two-sided tape rather than curatorial consent as his way into the collections, at least until guards noticed. “These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires,” he wrote later in an e-mail message to a reporter, explaining his dim view of museums and his desire to see his work inside one purely to poke fun at the whole idea. “The public never has any real say in what art they see.”

This is great stuff! For one thing, it offers a fantastic example of an actual avant-garde action, something much rarer than you'd think, given how often the term 'avant-garde' gets thrown around. Often, it seems to be some sort of synonym for formal oddness, but in its more restricted sense the term refers to art that takes the institutions of art (museums, galleries, art history, the high-gloss prestige factory that goes by the name "the art world," etc.) as its medium, and takes a critical stance toward the norms of those institutions. As Jochen Schulte-Sasse put it, "the historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution 'art,'" and in 2005 Banksy was clearly working in this mode. I mean, his real medium wasn't the visual art he was posting on the wall — it was the act of posting something in that particular space. Compare Banksy to someone like, say, Damien Hirst, and you can really sense the difference: Hirst is sometimes called avant-garde, but he's entirely a creature of the "art world," making stuff that is discussed and sold in terms dictated by that world — but the Bansky of 2005 was standing outside that scene, and meddling with it.

I've met plenty of people (they shall remain namless) who like the kind of thing Bansky did in '05 so much that they've talked of it in heroic terms, as if taking, say, art history as one's medium made one's work superior to work in other media like, say, paint or clay or stone. I've always thought there was an irony to this: the guys I'm thinking of are way too postmodern to dream of forming a hierarchy of art based on genre (you know: tragedy is better than comedy, or classical music is better than rock music, or whatever). But they seemed to set up an even more restrictive hierarchy by claiming that the medium of an artwork made it inferior or superior to other works. In a way, their position is just a twist on Kant's idea of barbaric taste in which a work is valued not for its form, but for the kind of stuff it's made of. If you call a piece of jewelry beautful because it is made of diamonds and platinum, or you admire a car interior because it is done up in leather, you're engaging in the kind of taste Kant called barbaric. I don't see how this is much different if the medium in question is conceptual. But I digress: Banksy's artwork (or art action) is good stuff, I think, regardless of the medium.

Anyway. Randy Kennedy's article got me thinking about two historical developments pertaining to the avant-garde, the first of which I suppose is an irony, and the second of which is best described as an incipient historical tipping point.

Here's the irony: while the avant-garde set out to attack the institutions of art, it has in large measure been absorbed by those institutions. Although Banksy has been pretty successful at keeping his work from being turned into museum and gallery fodder, such has not been the case for many avant-garde types. I don't think I've got much more to say about this than what I said in an article in Action Yes last year:

It is certainly true that institutions such as museums, galleries, literary anthologies, academic departments of art and literature, and the like are still with us, having withstood the assaults of the avant-garde. And it is equally true that these institutions have absorbed the very avant-gardes that challenged them, to the point where Peter Bürger can complain that “the demand that art be reintegrated in the praxis of life within the existing society can no longer be seriously made” (35).

There is a great irony in reading a statement like this, from the National Gallery of Art’s archive commemorating their 2006 Dada exhibition: "448 works in a wide range of media, including collages, assemblages, photographs, prints, drawings, paintings, posters, films, and audio recordings were presented in this multimedia installation that traced the history of the Dada movement.... Audio recordings of sound poems by Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and Raoul Hausmann were played in listening chambers, and selected short Dadaist films were shown in a continuous loop in a special viewing area within the installation. An audio tour was narrated by National Gallery of Art director Earl A. Powell III and others." The idea of a special viewing area is anathema to the movement that despised the institutional separation of art from the bustle of life, and unless Earl A. Powell III was present during his narration, and visitors were equipped with wet sponges to hurl at him, the spirit of the movement that invited viewers to take axes to artworks was deeply violated. Even such resolutely anti-institutional neo-avant-garde practices as Allan Kaprow’s Happenings (and his later Activities) have fallen prey to the institutions of art they were designed to challenge and circumvent. These participatory and deliberately spontaneous and ephemeral entities have been filmed, documented, and embalmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, whose Kaprow exhibit is called (apparently without irony) “Art as Life.”

I'm actually ambivalent about this institutionalizing of the anti-institutional. In a way, it's a neutering of the work. But it's also how I find out about it. I suppose it's like pinning a butterfly to a mounting-board and putting it under glass: you kill the thing in order to show it to people. (I'm not totally against this: I've got a bad-ass Malaysian Cicada mounted in a frame on the mantlepiece, and love looking at the thing. It must weigh a half pound).

So much for the irony, and my, or our, complicity in it all. What about the thing I'm somewhat clumsily calling an 'incipient historical tipping point'? Let me back into the point I want to make by taking a look at Bansky's comment about galleries. “These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires,” said Bansky, “the public never has any real say in what art they see.” I want to say he's right in that first bit, in that galleries and museums are trophy cases for millionaires. Trust me on this: I'm an art-school brat, and I've been around this stuff long enough to know that the kind of cultural-capital accumulation games, the exclusions and class-establishing ploys Pierre Bourdieu described in Distinction are very real. But I've got a couple of reservations that keep me from flat-out endorsing Banksy's statement. Firstly, while galleries and museums are trophy cases for millionaires, they aren't only that. They have a host of functions: like libraries, they sometimes serve as impromptu daytime homeless shelters; they also serve as safe upper-middle-class date venues; they also provide what they claim to provide — access to many wonderful works of art that can mean a lot to a viewer. These aren't mutually exclusive functions.

As for the second bit of what Banksy says, I actually disagree: the public has a great deal of choice about what it sees. In fact, it usually chooses not to see what's in a museum. Many people rightly catch on to the millionaire trophy case function of galleries, and feel unwelcome there. So they choose not to go. Bourdieu has some good stuff about this in Distinction, in the sections on the "entitlement effect." But I'm already digressing and meandering, so I'll leave off with it and not quote Bourdieu right now. Anyway, the popular rejection of galleries connects up to a statement by another artist discussed in Kennedy's article, Shepard Fairey, and this brings me at last to the idea of an incipient historical tipping point for the avant-garde.

But the Shepard Fairey moment [the installation of his portrait of Obama in the National Portrait Gallery] may be less significant for what it says about how museums view street artists than for how those artists have come to view museums — how for many younger artists, street and otherwise, museum enshrinement no longer represents the kind of end zone it did for many who came before, even those like Keith Haring who began with street art and deep misgivings about the establishment. In interviews, Mr. Fairey, 38, has stressed how honored he is to be in the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution and about as American as a museum can be. He has also stressed that he doesn’t see it as a place in a hierarchy but instead on a kind of continuum, right alongside the work he creates with the police on his trail or album covers for bands or work commissioned by huge companies like Dewar’s or Saks Fifth Avenue...

What's interesting about this passage is the way it shows us that the de-hierarchizing tendencies of our time are really starting to amount to something. I mean, it has always been the case that the official art-world was only one of many fields for aesthetic activity. But the art-world hasn't always seen itself that way, and it has often been able to project the illusion that it was the scene that mattered. But centralization and hierarchization continue to wane (probably for technological and socio-economic reasons too big for us to fully grasp, let alone change, even if we wanted to, which I don't). And this has implications for the avant-garde. I mean, as late as 2005 Banksy could still talk about galleries and museums as if they were the dominant force that we needed to rebel against, and he could work against them using the fine old tactics of the avant-garde. But (to lapse into unforgivable academese) avant-gardism of this kind is intended as the negation of a dominant set of institutions. And we're reaching a point where this kind of action makes less sense than it once did. What do you do when those institutions have been swamped amid all the other venues for aesthetic production and display? Attacking a giant Godzilla is one thing, but what to do when the miraculous shrink-ray of postmodernity reduces that Godzilla to just one more regulation-sized iguana among many others? You've got to change your game. The way Shepard Fairey has done.

All of this resonates with a conversation I had with my colleague Dave Park the other day. He'd stopped by to pick me up on the way to a brunch party and we sat around getting tanked up on coffee and talking Foucault and Bourdieu (Dave's a social scientist, and knows his way around this stuff by different paths than I do). We got on to the notion of utopias and their negation in anti-utopias, and Dave proposed the idea of heterotopia: that is, of the rejection of the notion of an ideal-world, and of the negation of that ideal-world by its critics (who hold up implicit or explicit counter-utopias). The true happy state is a plural one, a heterotopia of many possibilities. The best case for art now seems to be heterotopic, rather than the false utopia of the official art world, or the negation of that utopia by the old-school avant-garde.

Vive La Belgique Sauvage: The Superiority of the Minor Avant-Garde

Alrighty then. So I've got about a half-dozen writing committments simmering in the critical kitchen, and several bits of administative trivia waiting to be swept under the rug. And a guest-room only half converted into a nursery. So the only rational thing to do is to continue writing about Belgian surrealism, even though I've wrapped up my official commitment in that area and sent the little essay off to the editors of the relevant journal. Anyway, it's all I've thought about this morning, as I cleaned up my notes and files from the writing of the essay.

So here's what I'm thinking: Belgian surrealism was the real deal, and those Belgians who stayed at home in Belgium were in a crucial sense better positioned to carry out one of the central projects of the avant-garde than were their Parisian and New York-based colleagues. That is: their eccentricity vis-a-vis the centers of artistic and literary reputation-making actually helped them to develop a critical attitude toward the institutions of culture. And wasn't the development of such an attitude one of the main goals of the avant-garde from Dada on?

Just about anything one reads about the Belgian surrealist scene (which started up in the 20s and continued to thrive well into the 60s) mentions the unpretentiousness and affability of it all. In contradistinction to the status-monkeys vying for Breton's blessing in Paris, or trying to pick up some of Dali's commercial luster in New York, we always hear of a Belgian scene dominated by people who actually liked one another, and pursued their work as a form of pleasure and intellectual engagement free from reputation-grubbing and political maneuvering. An example ready to hand from my files is Klaus Herding's 1982 review of a Magritte exhibition that placed M.'s work in the context of the Belgian scene from which the famous artist emerged. "Belgian surrealism," writes Herding, has up to now

...been overshadowed by the French artistic canon, yet here it reveals itself as highly distinctive and at the same time more firmly rooted in the native soil than its Parisian counterpart. In the André Breton circle, for example, there was a clash between exclusivity (for which a conventional term was le château) and a revolutionary demand for validity for all (the expression for this was l'océan)... the Belgian branch purported to be more 'reasonable,' jollier and more relaxed: good food and drink rather than male sado-masochistic fantasies were the rule when its practitioners met, and from 1949 until 1951 Magritte, Mariën, Louis Scutenaire, Paul Nougé, Paul Colinet and Robert Willems contributed as cartoonists to the weekly magazine Vendredi.

It sounds like a good-natured, congenial scene, which didn't take itself too seriously (a particular crime for surrealists, I should think). Of course there's a price one pays for shunning ambition (I mean ambition in the very bourgoise sense of material self-advancement, and the artsy variant where we simply substitute a lust for personal fame and the piling up of cultural capital around one's name for the regulation bourgeois' accumulation of economic capital), and Michel Delville, the guy who hipped me to Belgian surrealism in Liège a decade ago, understands this well. Here's a bit from his essay "The Secret History of Belgian Surrealism," which we ran in Samizdat back in 2001:

Correspondance, the first Belgian Surrealist magazine, was founded by Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans and Marcel Lecomte in 1924, the same year as Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto. Since that time, Belgian poetry has remained one the European avant-garde’s best-kept secrets. The names of Nougé, Chavée and Dumont are conspicuously absent from most anthologies and literary histories, and Belgian surrealism is generally considered as a non-literary phenomenon and almost systematically confined to the paintings of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. Unlike many other Belgian writers who moved to Paris to make a career (the examples of Georges Simenon, Henri Michaux, Pierre Alechinsky and many others come to mind) most Belgian surrealists published their work in their home country, and this may explain their lack of recognition outside a small circle of connoisseurs and specialists. Perhaps it is the sense of being relegated to the margins of francophone culture that accounts, at least in part, for the radical, convulsive spirit that runs through the history of the Belgian counterculture, from proto-Dada poet Clément Pansaers to Noël Godin, the now world-famous entarteur who recently hit Bill Gates with a cream pie...

The interesting bit here, for me, is the way the deliberate self-marginalization of the group actually allows them to develop a special perspective, a more subversive "radical, convulsive spirit" than is found elsewhere in surrealism. One way to think about this special perspecitve is with the concept of "minor literature" articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For them, minor literature is not (or not necessarily) a literature written by an ethnic or cultural minority — though it can happen that way, and may even help. I mean, Kafka — whose relationship to language and ethnicity was all kinds of crazy — offers Deleuze and Guattari their test case for minor literature in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. But it's important to note that D. and G. aren't talking about a literature written, identity-politics style, to represent a particular identity group and its interests (though they weren't against that sort of thing). A minor literature represents, rather, something more like a deep, even intuitive, critical attitude toward the dominant ways of representing the world. Both the values of the dominant culture and the language expressing those values (that is, the dominant culture's major literature) are held up to question by the writer of a minor literature, who therefore becomes “a sort of stranger within his own language.”

Reidar Due, in his book Deleuze, gets the gist of this down rather economically, saying: “To be a classical writer one has to have access to a central viewpoint from which to represent the moral, cultural, and political structure of a society. Minor literature, by contrast, views society from an oblique, marginal angle.” He then goes on to contrast Goethe, as a classic or major author, with Joseph Conrad, whom Due sees as a writer of minor literature in the Deleuzian sense:

With his drama Faust Goethe created a representation of middle-class values and dilemmas (morality and sex, thought and action) in which subsequent generations of middle-class citizens could recognize themselves. That made Goethe a classical author. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, by contrast, depicts English colonialism as a hell of barbarism and cruelty — and he can do so [sic] because he produces specific intensive states within the English language, liberating it from its conventional rhetorical virtues of wit, elegance, and satire.

Minority, then, is stylistic and moral dissent, and it's important too: as Deleuze and Guattari oxymoronically put it, “there is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor.”

I think the deliberately self-marginalizing Belgian surrealists, off doing their own thing in the provinces, are well positioned to take an eccentric and critical stance toward the institutions of the dominant literature and culture in Paris. I suppose Breton and co. could be said to represent a minor-lit stance toward the big culture of, say, La Nouvelle Revue Française, but the Belgians hold minor status even with relation to the Paris-New York avant-garde scene. Their refusal to beat feet over to the city of lights to make it on the scene there is already a kind of statement to this effect.

Anyway. The Belgians' position outside the main institutions of Francophone culture (even avant-garde Francophone culture) is, ironically, a great strength for them in pursuing one of the main projects of the avant-garde: the undermining of cultural institutions. My great touchstone for the hows and whys of the avant-garde questioning of the institutions of art is Jochen Schulte-Sasse's introduction to Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, where he tells us about how the avant-garde evolved out of a sense of the limits of late-nineteenth-century aestheticism (you know: Oscar Wilde and company). It's probably not necessary to quote from it here, but in the great scheme of things this whole post is unnecessary, so in the spirit of general egregiousness I'll quote my favorite chunk of Schulte-Sasse's intro to Bürger:

Aestheticism’s intensification of artistic autonomy and its effect on the foundation of a special realm of aesthetic experience permitted the avant-garde to clearly recognize the social inconsequentiality of autonomous art and, as the logical consequence of this recognition, to attempt to lead art back into social praxis....the turning point from Aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art comprehended the mode in which it functioned in bourgeois society, its comprehension of its own social status. The historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution “art” and the mode in which autonomy functions.

So that's a general avant-garde project — and I think we can see how in a sense it's also a particular kind of minor literature project: in questioning the institution of art it also questions the forms and values of classical art. But the Belgian surrealist move — coming from a group on the fringes of the avant-garde, which is to say from the fringes of the fringe — involves questioning both the classic literature and the central core of the avant-garde itself.

The work of Marcel Broodthaers offers a good case in point (but he's just one among many — he comes to mind largely, I think, because there was an exhibit of his down at the Arts Club in Chicago last time I had lunch there with my appropriately avant colleague Davis Schneiderman). Some of Broodthaers' thumbings-of-the-nose at the institutions of art were done with a light touch. I particularly like how he simply declared the existence of the "Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles" one day. It was located in his apartment (and, later, became a kind of umbrella organization, or faux-organization, for many of his activities, and for the writings and performances of his friends. Eventually he expanded it to include a "Section Littéraire" and a "Section Cinéma." It was a great way of poking fun at the pretentions of Official Culture.

Official culture, though, is a pretty easy target. Broodthaers went further, often questioning or undermining the conventions of the avant-garde itself. I keep coming back in my thinking to his "Pense-Bête," a piece where he took some of the unsold copies of a book of poems he wrote and clumsily cast them (along with a child's ball) into a hunk of plaster. It's important to the piece that the books sit loosely in the plaster, and could be pulled loose and read. Think about it: when the only people likely to view the piece (afficionados of the avant-garde) come to see it, they are faced with the contradictions of the avant-garde art lover. On the one hand, they're all committed to the idea that art isn't sacred and shouldn't be cut off from us by any sacred aura. On the other hand, to actually pick up one of the books and read it would be to violate the decorum of the gallery: they'd be damaging an exhibit. Of course they shouldn't be bothered about damaging an exhibit: hadn't the great Dada heroes placed small axes next to their work, along with invitations for spectators to destroy anything they disliked (hence ceasing to be mere spectators)? But the contradiction of being avant-garde and being an art-lover was too much. As Broodthaers observed in "Ten Thousand Francs Reward," no one actually ever violated the sacred aura of the exhibit to read a book: they all looked at them politely, like the most bourgeois of exhibition-consumers:

Here you cannot read the book without destroying its sculptural aspect. It is a concrete gesture that passes the prohibition on to the viewer — at least that's what I thought would happen. But I was surprised to find out that viewers reacted quite differently from what I had imagined. Everyone so far, no matter who, has perceived the object as an artistic expression or a curiosity. "Look! Books in plaster!" No one had any curiosity about the text; nobody had any idea whether this was the final burial of prose or poetry, of sadness or pleasure"

I'm not sure whether he showed them, or they showed him, but I am sure about what's on display: the contradictions of avant-garde art itself.

Another way Broodthaers' "Pense-Bête" challenges the norms of the avant-garde is by causing us to question the nature of one of the major avant-garde forms: the readymade. Dieter Schwarz (to whose thinking I'm indebted in everything I say about Broodthaers) has a lot to say about this in an old issue of October. "In contradistinction to the readymade, which is selected by its 'author, being thereby instated as an aesthetic object'" says Schwarz, "the poems of Pense-Bête [the book, not the sculpture of the same name] remain part of a literary discourse, for the author's statement is obviously .... inscribed within a cultural tradition." That is: the readymade is usually a testament to the aesthetic gaze and aesthetic intention of the artist: he sees something and, by selecting it, declares that it has aesthetic value. Here, though, the found object has already been designated as an aesthetic object (in a literary sense, not a sculptural one), and has been so designated by the same guy who is now presenting it as a found object. And can an object really be called a readymade when it is the artist in question who actually made the object (albiet for a different purpose)? If the readymade asks "what makes art art?", then "Pense-Bête" asks "what makes a readymade a readymade?" So the avant-garde questioner of art finds himself interrogated. The minor avant-garde takes a good, hard, critical look at the classic avant-garde. And does it while having a good time, too.

Michel Delville got it right, I think, when he said (in "A Secret History of Belgian Surrealism") that many works of Belgian surrealism were enabled by the distance from the fame-hunting, revolution-dreaming world of Parisian surrealism. The Belgians, says Delville, "were inspired by the chink of beer bottles, the smell of fried sausages and the sight of people pissing in the streets on their way back from the local café. As Louis Scutenaire once put it, in Belgium 'on boit de la bière et on mange de la viande / Et tout le monde est une bande d’abrutis' ('we drink beer and we eat meat / And we’re all just a bunch of morons')." Now that's what I call a liberating vision of art!

Action Yes!

Don't you think Johannes Göransson's Action Yes has the best name for a literary journal since Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (which was going for quite a different effect)? Sure you do! Agreed, then! Anyway, there's a new issue up, packed (as usual) with smarter-than-the-average-journal stuff, the lone exception being my own humble essay "The Avant-Garde in Babel," in which I try to respond to the overwhelming erudition of Per Bäckström's "One Earth, Four or Five Words: The Notion of 'Avant-Garde' Problematized" from the previous issue. Bäckström and I both try to get at just what it is we talk about when we talk about avant-gardism. He gets a lot further than I do.

I'm genuinely stoked about the direction Johannes is taking Action Yes: there's lots of adventurous work to read, and there seems to be a genuine effort to bring critical prose — often on large topics — to the fore, rather than confining it a back-of-the-book reviews section. Also, as an unreconstructed drawer of diagrams, I'm very happy that Johannes posted the chart I drew of Bäckström's schema of modernism and the avant-garde:

I always find charts like this good as points of departure, but bad as points of arrival.

Speaking of departure, there's a knock on my office door, so I'm heading out of blogspace posthaste. Ciao!