Art and politics: on the critic Hal Foster: do the ideas of the avant-garde still make sense in a multi-polar artworld?

The last ten years have witnessed an extraordinary boom in the art market. An emphasis on money or spectacle overshadows all other types of conversations about the value of contemporary art. For those in search of a different approach, Hal Foster has always been a voice to heed. In his articles in the London Review of Books, Artforum and The Nation, as well as his books and contributions to the already classic Art Since 1900 (Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, 2005), Foster shows why the questions we ought to ask about art are not how much it can be sold for or whether it enables underrepresented minorities to speak. And he still sees a use for the idea of an avant-garde.

There is a vast room on the second floor of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome that contains nothing but futurist works of 'regime art.' Many pieces that have origins in fascist iconography easily belong--the international conversation of form can't be mistaken--with their European peers of the teens, 20s and 30s, most of which had radically opposed ideological allegiances and philosophical underpinnings. The commonalities these pro-fascist regime works have with Vorticism or Art Deco are easy enough to recognize. However, thinking about Soviet Constructivism when faced with a large ensemble of Italian nationalist speed-movement paintings--topped by the Duce's phallically protruding chin ("I am referring here to the group of paintings by Gerardo Dottori, Polittico fascista, 1934")--gives one pause. Surely, Fortunato Depero and Max Ernst can't be related?

Hal Foster notes that it is impossible to understand the meaning of the avant-garde without taking into account its diachronic positioning; simply put, historicity is of the essence for the meaning of an artwork. Thinking about the avant-garde, Foster argues that we must begin by asking a number of questions. Do avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes--irrespective of their claims of originality--have precedents, descendents, any historical kin? How was the earliest avant-garde incorporated into the structures it was trying to redefine, and in the process relieved of its avant-garde designation? How will the present and the future situate contemporary works of art in the history of the avant-garde--and political history, too? In Return of the Real (1996), Foster shows how a succession of post-World War II visual artists and critics are reactive to each other, and how predecessors come to be chosen. Foster refutes in careful detail Peter Burger's insistence that the avant-garde was a unique historical event, and that visual art reached its apogee in the 20s and 30s, after which come only footnotes--Foster, that is, and a visit to any modern art museum.

History tells us that modernist or avant-garde artworks were more often than not seen as subversive or an irritant by totalitarian regimes. The best-known cases are the destruction of the Soviet visual and poetic avant-gardes in favour of Socialist realism and the condemnation of "degenerate" art by the Nazi regime. I grew up in Communist Yugoslavia, where the banning of the first staging of Waiting for Godot in the 50s--more for provoking aesthetic unease than for any identifiable ideological reasons--is a memorable part of theatre history. There are significant counterexamples of avant-garde art that were ideologically compatible with fascist regimes. The Italian Futurists and modernist poets like Eliot and Pound are among them.

This is all too simple. However important the history of official reception, it is more important to engage with the art forms of the avant-gardes themselves. Works of art signify politically in a variety of ways, and this signification is always affected by rime. The politics associated with a work of art is not necessarily identical to its (author's) declared politics. By taking a closer look at the work of Filippo Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Foster is interested in showing how broader fascist impulses are manifested through art. With the help of psychoanalytical readings, Foster shows how the early modernist fascination with exotica and the primitive, or the first avant-garde's predominant masculinism will shift in the interpretative field. Past practitioners can also be repositioned by our contemporaries, who claim shared kinship with them, or enact a kind of familial rebellion against or full rejection of what they represent. It is not enough to acknowledge that a male painter's figuration of women is reductive--we should probe artistic procedures it contains and examine if any of these works of art indeed lead to unequivocal interpretation.

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If Joan Copjec analyzes in the work of women visual artists the formations and failures of the closure of the notion of woman (or to put it in Lacanian vulgate, that complexity of existing women undermines the Woman and therefore whatever its patriarchal oppressive aspects as well), Hal Foster focuses on the working of masculinity in the early and late avant-gardes and shows perceived solidity of maleness/masculinity (again, in Lacanian terms) as a ruse and a sham--and the elaborate pageantry with which it permeates culture as fictions it fundamentally needs. Both critics analyze art that goes to the core of how gendering happens, but masculinity remains much less scrutinized as a contingent gender, and Hal Foster's work tangentially redresses that as well.

Avant-garde--male--artists have reacted in different ways to the weaknesses in the symbolic order. As Foster shows in Prosthetic Gods (2004), one way was to act on aggressive impulses to armour the self and the We of collective belongings (Lewis), or to rejoice in destruction and dismemberment as a path to a new, firmer self (Marinetti). A completely different way to go about it is "phallic divestiture"--opening up the failures of the subject and identification, embracing via art what should be disavowed--and Foster analyzes these aesthetic and psychic processes in Max Ernst's work.

These two sides to phallic distress can even be merged into the same artistic procedure: mimetic exacerbation. Foster finds its origins in Dada, but the phenomenon is now happily spread across disciplines. When identification is so tightly and earnestly followed as to not allow any deferment--when a belonging to a collectivity (nation or gender, for instance) is affirmed with no failures and no hesitations--we are in the sphere of mimesis that has gone too far. Slavoj Zizek analyzes Neue Slovenische Kunst in this rein, as art that reveals the arbitrariness and frailty of belonging to a nation by adopting and re-enacting the processes of nation-hood literally and ardently. Any artistic elaboration of a repressive or arbitrary structure through all too faithful adoption--irrespective of the author's earnest intention to strengthen, rather than undermine the structure--is a mimetic exacerbation waiting to be discovered. The most cheerful looking Cindy Sherman stills have this quality, with the imagery that fully embraces instances of femininity found in advertising or Hollywood films. The scene of Marcello's harem of women in Fellini's film, 8 1/2 (1963) is another case in point: the fantasy of owning a house full of women which you desire and which you sort out by age, division of labour and level of coercion to be applied is probably one of the most feminist cinematic sequences ever made. Precisely because the inner workings of a patriarchal fantasy are made so visible, the critical stance is almost immediately apparent.

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The good news from Hal Foster, then, is that (avant-garde) lads will not always be lads. They will either too eagerly assert through their art what is beyond their reach (masculine armouring; the containing of the sexually or racially other into reassuring artistic forms) or will openly reveal the fault lines of patriarchy--and that in fact those fault lines run through their own bodies as well (see the work of Max Ernst or Robert Gober, for instance).

But even after it becomes obvious that the meaning of the old avant-garde is continuously evolving, the question remains whether we should continue using the term avant-garde in contemporary conditions. What is the philosophical prize that we allot with this designation? Although, as we've seen, the politics of a work of art is a complex matter, the avant-garde will more often than not represent a rejection of the status quo. A sine qua non of an avant-garde spirit is not the striving for artisan kind of excellence within the discipline as much as an artistico-political, all-encompassing change--be that change in how we perceive art or the change in organization of societies.

This leads us to the important consideration of the (f)utility of the modern/postmodern distinction in contemporary and future visual art.

A simplified understanding posits any art with grand reformist and universalist or novelty pretensions as modernist, and art offering itself as a re-signification of and intervention into the preceding (whether trends or canons) as postmodernist. Foster shows that both what is described as 'modern' and what is described as 'postmodern' can contain avant-gardist tendencies, but neither will necessarily have this content; both can succumb to pastiche, or status quo enjoyment. Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia (1951), "the cult of the new, and thus the idea of modernity, is a rebellion against the fact that there is no longer anything new." Is it possible to sustain notions of the new and the truly avant-garde, in this very late age of technical reproducibility? Foster often reminds us that Benjamin argued as early as the first half of the 20th century that the aura had already gone from the works of art and had moved to celebrity culture. If capitalism is massively de-aura-izing art and aura-izing mass media imagery, branding, design and fashion, can we perhaps hope for a new kind of aura for the arts? Can we allow for sweeping statements without a trace of irony or cynicism?

But we in capitalist countries are lacking certain conditions under which art-making can be seen as so critical and powerful as to threaten 'society's peace" as art is occasionally perceived by more openly repressive regimes. We enjoy more liberties, but art--let's stay with visual arts for a moment--seems to be losing the audiences that would look to it to address questions of the greatest importance. The answer here could be purely sociological; easier access to art via more education and poverty reduction will create audiences eager for more arts in their lives and politics--but do contemporary visual art forms willingly accept delegation to entertainment, and to 'stuff' to be owned and houses to be ornamented? This is where the question of the avant-garde always made sense.

What complicates things further is the significance of the American situation, which a number of countries, Canada included, increasingly share. In an atmosphere where public art funding and art education are not agreed upon values, the avant-gardist critique of art institutions and the habits of art consumption have the potential to gain unexpected new resonances. Foster argues that the Right in the US consistently understood the social importance of art and showed through its actions how seriously they meant it, while we on the Left debate the political potential of art. Accusations that a work of visual art can offend centuries-old religious institutions, undermine Western civilization, be abject or be something that can victimize unsuspecting consumers--which is some of the rhetoric typical of a conservative backlash against art--should not be all that worrisome. Such a reception for art indicates that it matters.

What demands more alertness is the seemingly smooth incorporation of 'creativity' into new capitalist economies. The creative industries agenda, put forth by an increasing number of municipal and provincial/state jurisdictions, including Toronto, celebrates arts in terms that venture capitalists would understand--as a source of innovation, flexibility and, ultimately, profit. The argument is that artistic activity makes for corporate and labour structures that allow more creativity and therefore greater financial success. Exit the avant-garde here, in a search of a place outside the exchange system.

Julian Stallabrass points out that in the early 90s, the Young British Artists, constrained by years of Thatcherism and hostility to funding art infrastructures, forewent the established curatorial routes and engaged in direct conversation with the media and wealthy donors--that is, created venues to reach audiences. Stallabrass argues (in High Art Lite [1999] and elsewhere) that this detrimentally affected the art they made. It all resulted in widespread adoption of media provocation, acceptance of hype, spectacle and person branding.

The mass and Internet media additionally complicate avant-garde potentials but do not shut doors to it. However, for the avant-gardes to come, Luddite yearnings and dreams of fullness are not plausible now. The machinic, virtual, animalistic and unconscious that dis-identify and partake in the human have always been part of the avant-garde and will continue to be in its future. But, as Foster shows, the avant-garde to come is not of the Derridean a-venir kind, which is always shaping up and "never quite that," always eluding determinate designation. Rather, the spirit of the avant-garde is alive, and is present not as one movement at a time, or even one person at a time, but one artistic intervention at a time. Foster's criticism helps attune our alertness to it.

* Lydia Perovic has written for n + 1, OpenDemocracy.org, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, Critical Sense, Books in Canada and Xtra!--among other publications. A review on ethics and sexuality is coming up in the journal Social Semiotics, and she should now be working on a piece on women in British television comedy for FlowTV.org.