This seminar is a hybrid event, available to join in person or online via Zoom.
Anachronic Avant-Garde: Re-Shaping Social Temporality After Aesthetic Historicism
Sascha Bru (University of Leuven)
The early 20th-century avant-garde is most often read in opposition to Realism—whose formal conventions across the arts were experimentally transgressed by the avant-garde so as to open up a much wider palette of artistic tactics unveiling the real—and Aestheticism—whose mantra of l’art pour l’art the avant-garde left behind so as to see art enter into renewed coalitions with social praxis. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that, in order to define what has counted as avant-garde art also after the so-called ‘historical’ avant-garde, that is also in the later 20th century and into our own, we additionally need to read the early 20th-century avant-garde in opposition to Aesthetic Historicism. Not only was Historicism the most dominant style across the arts around 1900 (and not just in the West, but also in its colonies). Its various ways of evoking a sense of pastness through the eclectic citation of older motifs and forms also reduced art to the rear-guard of history. Aiming to impact social praxis in the now (contra Aestheticism) by way of its alternative tactics of representation (contra Realism), the avant-garde realized that also the backbone of Historicism, its orientation toward the past, had to be broken and that art also had to reflectively deploy its inherently anachronic nature to reimagine not just the past but also the present and the future. This realization entailed a redefinition, also adopted by later avant-gardes, both of the work of art—now seen as an instrument, machine or organism reflectively constructing and organizing time on its own terms—and the nature of artistic labor—now conceived as a temporal experiment that produces aesthetic practices and objects that seek to perturb or impact history as it unfolds, in other words, as a practice that itself makes history. To illustrate this hitherto neglected aspect of the avant-garde, in the second part of this paper, I will turn to a series of singular examples of 20th and 21st century avant-garde art that set out to re-shape the (always complex and variegated) temporal organization of social spaces and places, small and large.
Sascha Bru is a professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (Belgium). Bru is the author of The European Avant-Gardes, 1905–1935: A Portable Guide (2018) and Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception (2009). He has authored a large number of scholarly articles on avant-garde art and writing that have appeared in English, French, German, Dutch, Icelandic, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and Chinese. Bru has also (co-)edited over a dozen of books, including Crisis: The Avant-Garde and Modernism in Critical Modes (2022), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Europe 1880–1940 (2013), and The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde (2009). With Tyrus Miller, he is currently co-authoring a book on aesthetic avant-garde experimentation with time and history.
Avant-Garde Historiographies: Constructing Historical Time In the Image of Art
Tyrus Miller (University of California, Irvine)
In this paper I will consider the historicity of the avant-garde in a dual perspective. On the one hand, the art of avant-garde appears as a counter-historical phenomenon that poses a thoroughgoing challenge to historicist concepts such as causation, succession, development, and synchronous context. A conceptual legacy of the art of the 20th century was, as Bürger and others have argued, to explode the traditional boundaries of art and undermine the possibility of a style-based or formalist historiography of art. A history of the avant-garde, accordingly, must account for interwoven social, political, technological, anthropological, and spiritual dimensions that compel the articulation of new historiographic frameworks. These are, at least partially, inspired by the formal-rhetorical structure of exemplary avant-gardist works themselves. On the other hand, transcending their art-historical significance, avant-garde works of art may also inspire alternative ways of thinking about historical time and hence applications of avant-garde historiography to other historical contexts and questions. I will consider examples of this new historiographic space opened by the avant-garde, discussing examples from the 20th century such as the work of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and Humphrey Jennings, as well as recent critical work developing notions of anachronicity, polychronicity, non-linearity, and contemporaneity (usually associated with “contemporary art”) in relation to the avant-garde.
Tyrus Miller is dean of the School of Humanities and a professor of art history and English at University of California, Irvine. He is the author of several books on modernism and the avant-garde, including Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (1999), Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde (2009), Modernism and the Frankfurt School (2014), and Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetics, History, Utopia (2022). He edited the Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis (2016) and has also edited and translated Georg Lukács’s post-World-War-II essays in Hungarian, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945–1948 (2013). With Sascha Bru, he is currently co-authoring a book on aesthetic avant-garde experimentation with time and history.
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