"How to Start an Avant-Garde" by Robert Ray

How to Start an Avant-Garde is an essay by Professor Robert Ray who teaches English and Film Studies in Florida. He is the author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton University Press); The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (Harvard University Press); and How a Film Theory Got Lost, and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press). He teaches courses in film studies, contemporary criticism, and intellectual history, with a particular interest in experimental critical practice. He holds a PhD from Indiana University, an MBA from Harvard, a JD from the University of Virginia, and an AB from Princeton.

How to Start an Avant-Garde

Although its demise is periodically announced—most recently at the hands of that all-purpose assassin-without-passport, “Theory”—the avant-garde survives as an attitude, a temptation, and even an aesthetic practice. Confronted with media culture's voracious powers of assimilation, which can, within a few years, popularize something such as Punk Rock by transforming it first into “New Wave” and later (and more profitably) into “Alternative,” the avant-garde seems left without its defining characteristic, its refusé status.

Indeed, late-twentieth-century Western culture, wired from birth to grave, requires that we reformulate two famous avant-garde maxims: Gertrude Stein's dismissal of Oakland (“There is no there there”) and Jean-Luc Godard's definition of film (“Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times a second”). In the land of fax machines, cellular phones, and cable TV, “There is no outside there,” and we live under the regime of “Ideology 180,000 times a second.” The avant-garde, of course, has not remained unaffected by this new environment, characterized most of all by speed. But to assume that increasingly rapid co-option will destroy the avant-garde ignores how much the avant-garde itself has, throughout its history, promoted its own acceptance.

From the start, its preferred analogy was to science, where the route from pure research to applied technology is not only a matter of course, but also a raison d'etre for the whole enterprise. From this perspective, the avant-gardist's typical complaint about assimilation seems misguided. When the Clash's Joe Strummer denounced fraternity parties' use of “Rock the Casbah” as mindless dance music, he seemed like a chemist protesting the use of his ideas for something as ordinary (and useful) as, let us say, laundry detergent.

The Impressionists, on the other hand, the first avant-garde, understood almost immediately that assimilation was a necessary goal. As a result, those wanting to start a new avant-garde should study their strategies, especially those designed to deal with the one great problem that, since Impressionism, has dictated the shape of the art world—the problem of the Gap. As a movement, Impressionism arrived at a moment when art (and, by implication, almost any innovative activity) encountered a new set of circumstances. In particular, for the first time in history, the art world began to assume that between the introduction of a new style and its acceptance by the public, a gap would inevitably exist.

As Jerrold Seigel summarizes: The Impressionists' self-conscious experimentalism, their exploration of the conditions and implications of artistic production in a modern market setting, and their sense that they bore the burden of an unavoidable opposition between innovation in art and society's hostile incomprehension—all made their experience paradigmatic.

There is another, more lyrical, way of putting the matter: No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. And they refuse to accept it for a very simple reason and that is that they do not have to accept it for any reason... In the case of the arts it is very definite. Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer...

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. Although Gertrude Stein argued that an innovator's contemporaries dismiss his work simply because “they do not have to accept it for any reason,” the standard art history account of the matter runs somewhat differently. In the wake of the French Revolution, the decline of the stable patronage system, which had rested on a small sophisticated audience, ready to commission and purchase art, resulted in an entirely new audience for painting—the bourgeoisie, newly come to power (both politically and financially) but less sophisticated, less secure about its own taste. Such an audience (the prototype of the generalist lost in a world of specialization) will inevitably prove conservative, will inevitably lag behind the increasingly rapid stylistic innovations, stimulated in part by this very system (which, after all, is a marketplace, thriving on novelty) and its technology (particularly photography, the technology intervening most directly into painting's realm).

Mass taste, in other words, must be educated to accept what it does not already know. Of course, most mass art (Hollywood, for example) avoids taking on that project and merely reproduces variations of familiar forms. But unless avant-garde artists remain content with posthumous success (represented as the only “genuine” kind by Balzac's Lost Illusions, a principal source of the avant-garde's myth), they must work to reduce the gap between the introduction and acceptance of their work.

How do they go about doing so? How do you start an avant-garde? Although the avant-garde carries the reputation of irresponsible rebellion, it, in fact, amounts to the humanities' equivalent of science's pure research. Having derived its name from the military (particularly, from the term for the advance troops entrusted with opening holes in the enemy position) and having repeatedly committed itself to scientifically conceived projects (e.g., Zola's “Experimental Novel,” Breton's “Surrealist Manifesto”), the avant-garde has always had its practical side. Indeed, in many ways, it amounts to a laboratory of creativity itself. Thus, the question “How do you start an avant-garde?” has implications for any undertaking where innovation is valuable. Not surprisingly, sociologists of science have long been interested in this question. More to the point here, a large, although scattered, body of writing has developed around the problem of the gap between the introduction and acceptance of modern art.

Tom Wolfe's Painted Word, witty and cynical, takes up journalistically what Francis Haskell's “Enemies of Modern Art” and Rosen and Zemer's “Ideology of the Licked Surface: Official Art” treat learnedly. In what follows, although I will refer to those sources, I will draw primarily on what remains the best discussion of the Impressionists' role in the new art world, Harrison and Cynthia White's Canvases and Careers. That book makes clear that even if you are a great artist, if you want art to become not a hobby but a paying career, you must attend to the issue of the Gap. In fact, you should follow The Eight Rules for Starting an Avant-Garde:

1. Collaboration.

Outsiders working together have a better chance of imposing themselves than does someone working alone. Think of Romanticism (Coleridge and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller), Cubism (Picasso and Braque), Surrealism (Breton, Eluard, and Aragon), Deconstruction (Derrida, DeMan, and Miller), Punk Rock (the Sex Pistols, the Clash). Other members of your group will refer to you, cite you, make contacts for you, and collaboration typically proves aesthetically stimulating as well. From the outset, the Impressionists understood this principle. As early as 1864, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille painted together in the forest of Fontainebleau, and subsequently they shared Parisian studios or apartments. Even Manet, a relative loner among the Impressionists, maintained an informal salon at the Café Guerbois, where writers (especially Zola) and other artists (e.g., the photographer Nadar) mixed with the painters.

2. The Importance of the Name.

A crucial factor in the Impressionists' success was the movement's name, which Harrison and Cynthia White point out “was in the great tradition of rebel names. Thrown at them init ially as a gibe to provide a convenient handle to insult them, it was adopted by the group in defiance and for want of a better term and made into a winning pennant” (111). “Impressionism” aptly describes much of their work; the name was easy to remember and carried with it the theoretical justification for a style that seemed unfinished, especially when compared to the fini or “licked” surface of their official, accepted contemporaries, the Pompiers.

No avant-garde group has ever achieved major acceptance without a catchy name: think of Futurism, Structuralism, Situationism, the Yale School, Fauvism, La Nouvelle Vague, and even Dada, a parody of such names, meaningless, or at least intended to be. The name provides a group identity. Using the “Impressionists,” Zola and other critics lumped the individual painters together, and they began to think of themselves as a more coherent group than at first they had actually been. The name provided a hook for critics and dealers, furthering publicity: to review one of the Impressionists was to review them all. The final stage of this group identity generally results in the formation of some official institute or association: the Impressionists formed their own joint stock company, which staged their exhibitions.

3. The Star.

Avant-garde movements need a key figure whose glamour and prolificness will attract and focus the attention of outsiders. The Impressionists had Manet—rich, witty, articulate, and shocking, while also being, by virtue of his training and disposition, the most clearly linked to the great traditions of French painting. Other movements had their own stars:

Cubism: Picasso
Futurism: Marinetti
The Bauhaus: Gropius
Modernism (musical branch): Stravinsky
Surrealism: Breton
Relativity: Einstein
Situationism: Debord
Abstract Expressionism: Pollock
Pop Art: Warhol
La Nouvelle Vague: Godard
Punk Rock: Johnny Rotten
Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss
Semiotics: Barthes
Deconstruction: Derrida
Rap: Public Enemy

4. Traditional Training.

Even if you eventually reject its precepts, some encounters with a profession's more or less official schools give you a sense of what to expect. With that work behind you, you have a better chance of justifying your own deviations by demonstrating that you have chosen to ignore standards that you have mastered. With the bourgeois audience, nothing helped Picasso's reputation more than his masterful skills in conventional drawing. Almost all of the Impressionists (Cezanne is the great exception) studied at either the École des Beaux-Arts or privately with academic painters. Sometimes the definition of “traditional training” may prove less obvious. With Punk Rock, for example, formal music study mattered far less than extensive experience in working bands: thus, for all its self-propagated myth of amateurism, Punk's important bands always contained pros. Yes, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious were novices, but drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones were certainly not.

5. The Concept of the Career.

The Impressionists demonstrate the effectiveness of refocusing one's attention away from individual paintings, executed for specific occasions designated by a patron, to a whole career and its evolution. Thinking in terms of a career means constructing a narrative that will make sense of an artist's development. The Gap, of course, makes such career thinking more subtle, a matter for continual renegotiation. Adopting the extreme long view amounts to accepting a success that will be, at best, posthumous.

Stendhal's famous line “I have drawn a lottery ticket whose first prize amounts to this: to be read in 1935” represents the test case. As a publicity gambit, it is perfect, wittily establishing the frame of reference most beneficial to his difficult writing: given wider circulation in his own lifetime, it might even have helped him sell more books. The extent to which Stendhal was content with this ultimate payoff, however, was a direct function of his having other sources of income. An avant-gardist without such independent means should probably adopt Andy Warhol's approach instead: “Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.”

6. New Avenues for Distribution and Exhibition.

The Impressionists' Salons des Refusés, group shows staged by dealers, and one-man exhibitions are all the equivalent of the new record labels (Punk's Stiff and Rough Trade) and new journals (e.g., October, Camera Obscura, Diacritics, Substance) that provide places where off-beat work can appear when the official channels (the major labels, PMLA) are closed. Durand-Ruel, the principal Impressionist dealer, founded his own journal. He also opened new markets for art, particularly in America, by redefining art as an investment, a speculation with possibilities of appreciation, thereby enabling sales to that class which understood money more than painting: the bourgeoisie.

7. Reconceptualization of the Division of Labor.

In the French Academy system, painters (at least those enthroned in the Institut) also functioned as judges, selecting the works that appeared in the annual salons. They both painted and set the standards for new painting. Rapidly detecting this conflict of interest, which discouraged the reception of even slightly different work, the Impressionists, perhaps imitating the burgeoning industrial reyolution surrounding them, divided the labor: painters stuck to painting, leaving to dealers and critics the task of assessment.

In many ways, the avant-garde's history represents a constant tinkering with the division of labor, usually in ways that challenge contemporary arrangements. Thus, with the factory system established as the norm, Duchamp chose to act not only as an artist, but also as his own dealer and critic, thereby recombining the roles the Impressionists had divided. Duchamp's example has become the postmodern standard, with artist/theoretician/publicist figures such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine.

8. The Role of Theory and Publicity.

In The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe decries Abstract Expressionism's reliance on the criticism that sustained it. That symbiotic relationship, however, began with Impressionism and the period of the new, insecure purchaser. Twentieth-century art made that relationship permanent. requiring, as T. S. Eliot put it, that an innovative artist help create the taste by which his work will be judged. New styles typically demand a new critical idea. Impressionism, as many art historians have observed, marked a shift from arguments about subject matter (deemphasized by many Impressionists) to ones about style. If, according to Wolfe, the key to Abstract Expressionism's success was the concept of flatness (which justified nonfigurative painting to a skeptical public), Manet et al. benefited from the concepts of “the impression” and “the painting of modern life,” terms that legitimized both the sketchy, unfinished appearance of many Impressionist paintings and their everyday, nonclassical subjects.

Even more important, writers favorable to the Impressionists redefined the notion of the artist, who became less an artisan, working for traditional patrons, than a romantic outsider, speculating on future recognition. This new critical idea turned conventional standards upside down. By recasting the Academy as a group of outdated stuffed shirts, vestiges of the ancien regime's hostility toward bourgeois economic and social power, the Impressionists' critics effectively identified the artist with his new client and made rejection by the academy itself the sign of worth. This move proved decisive.

The most brilliant discussion of its effects appear in Francis Haskell's “Enemies of Modern Art,” which turns on Impressionism's critical reception. Haskell wants to remind us how ugly those paintings once seemed. He quotes Albert Wolff, an important critic, reviewing the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876: The rue Le Peletier is out of luck. After the burning down of the Opera, here is a new disaster which has struck the district. An exhibition said to be of painting has just opened at the gallery of Durand-Ruel. The harmless passer-by, attracted by the flags which decorate the façade, goes in and is confronted by a cruel spectacle. Five or six fanatics, one of them a woman, an unfortunate group struck by the mania of ambition, have met there to exhibit their works. Some people split their sides with laughter when they see these things, but I feel heartbroken. These so-called artists call themselves “intransigeants,” “Impressionists.” They take the canvas, paints and brushes, fling something on at random and hope for the best. (207)

In both its tone and judgment, this passage seems as disastrous as a more famous one that appeared in the New York Times in 1956, when television critic Jack Gould reviewed the Milton Berle Show appearance of Elvis Presley: Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore, not nearly so talented as Frank Sinatra back in the latter's rather hysterical days at the Paramount Theater.

This kind of mistake began with Impressionism, the event that revealed how the gap between the introduction and acceptance of radically new art had become systemic. In “The Ideology of the Licked Surface: Official Art,” Rosen and Zemer dramatize this point by concentrating on a single year, 1874, and the painters missing from the Palais du Luxembourg, then France's official museum of modern art: no Manet, no Monet, no Renoir, no Degas, no Cezanne—indeed no painters whom we now consider important: “Over the course of the century,” Rosen and Zemer write, “a gap had opened like a trench between the museum and the new art” (218) so that by 1874, the curators had entirely excluded precisely that body of work that future generations would come to regard as the best of its time. Some of Impressionism's critics were ambivalent about their own responses to these works, whose newness broke with the very forms the writers themselves had previously worked to establish.

Indeed, Impressionism prompted its most scrupulous reviewer to articulate, perhaps for the first time, one of the two great dangers facing any critic of any avant-garde: the possibility that one might simply be too old to understand what had arrived, the problem that we might call “critical senility.”

Reviewing the 1868 salon show, Theophile Gautier, one of the best critics of his generation, diagnosed himself: Faced with this paradox in painting, one may give the impression—even if one does not admit the charge—of being frightened lest one be dismissed as a philistine, a bourgeois, a Joseph Prudhomme, a cretin with a fancy for miniatures and copies of paintings on porcelain, worse still, as an old fogey who sees some merit in David's Rape of the Sabines. One clutches at oneself, so to speak, in terror, one runs one's hand over one's stomach or one's skull, wondering if one has grown pot-bellied or bald, incapable of understanding the audacities of the young. ... One reminds oneself of the antipathy, the horror aroused some 30 years ago by the paintings of Delacroix, Decamps, Boulanger, Scheffer, Colot, and Rousseau, for so long excluded from the Salon. ... Those who are honest with themselves, when they consider these disturbing precedents, wonder whether it is ever possible to understand anything in art other than the works of the generation of which one is a contemporary, in other words the generation that came of age when one came of age oneself. ... It is conceivable that the pictures of Courbet, Manet, Monet, and others of their ilk conceal beauties that elude us, with our old romantic manes already shot with silver threads.

In this new environment, criticism becomes precarious. In 1881 an event occurred that upped the stakes: less than two years before his death, for a rather ordinary effort by his own standards (a painting called M. Pertuiset, the Lion Hunter), Manet won the salon's second-place medal. A few months later, thanks to a friend in the Ministry of Arts, he also received the Legion d'honneur. The importance of these circumstances, in Francis Haskell's opinion, cannot be overstated: Manet, the greatest enemy the Academy had ever known, Manet who had been mocked as no other artist ever before him: Manet was now honoured by the Academy, decorated by the State, accepted (however grudgingly) as an artist of major significance.

Everything will now be acceptable at the Salons: that is the implication that is drawn from all this. ... The acknowledgement that there had been a war, but that the critics had (so to speak) lost it and that it was in any case now over, is perhaps the single most important prelude to the development of what we now think of as modern art. (217-218) From this point on, critics grow wary.

Aware of previous mistakes, reviewers become increasingly afraid to condemn anything, since anything might turn out to be the next Manet. Hence, the second of modern criticism's two great dangers, what Max Ernst called “overcomprehension” or “the waning of indignation”: having propagated the notions of rejection and incomprehensibility as promises of ultimate value, the avant-garde had protected itself from bad reviews. In initiating this move, Impressionism prefigures postmodernism' s diminished concern for the work of art itself, as opposed to the contexts in which such work might occur.

With the rise of what Gerard Genette has called “the paratext,” meaning and value become highly negotiable, just like commodities, just like paintings themselves. And theory and publicity turn out to be the principal tools for influencing the ways in which art will acquire meaning. In the age of Madonna, publicity's importance should be obvious. The Impressionists, however, over a century ago, recognized its role in starting an avant-garde. By the second half of the twentieth century, strange things had become possible.

As I discussed in chapter 3 [of his book, How a film theory got lost and other mysteries in cultural studies -editor] , years after his films' release, Douglas Sirk could now completely transform their meaning simply by saying something about them, thereby achieving a Midas-like alchemy that converted forgotten commercial melodramas into celebrated critical “subversions.”

Since the time when Impressionism first showed us how to start an avant-garde, the role of what has come to be known as Theory has grown enormously. Bohemianism, after all, was from the start what the Goncourt brothers called “a freemasonry of publicity.” Indeed, the avant-garde attitude, which since Impressionism has appeared in painting, music, architecture, literature, and film, has begun to enter the realm of criticism itself. The formally experimental work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida offers us the early signs of this move. In retrospect, this development seems inevitable. Given the avant-garde's urgent need to contract the Gap, it had to depend on theory as its advocate. Sooner or later, having invented the script for this project, the supporting player would have to take center stage. We have reached that moment now.