GRAIL OF INFLUENCE.

Rethinking the Avant-Garde: Between politics and Aesthetics

The University of Notre Dame Center for Continuing Education Conference.

April 14-15, 2000

In the academic search for the grail of influence, the University of Notre Dame sponsored a conference on "Rethinking the Avant-Garde: Between Politics and Aesthetics" to provide a more nuanced investigation of the role of the avant-garde in a re-evaluation of modernism. The two-day conference held at the University's South Bend campus attracted 135 participants and focused on historical avantgarde movements indigenous to modernism, including Italian and Russian Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Imagism, Cubism, Vorticism, Negritude and Surrealism, as well as examined the relationship between the avantgarde and contemporary visual art.

In "Avant-Garde, Vanguard or 'Avant-Garde': What We are Talking About When We are Talking about Avant-Garde," Per Backstrom of the University of Troms, Norway, approached the avant-garde as a linguistic divide between Romance and Germanic language-speakers in their goal to include art in life. Fellow panelist Bill Frein of the University of Toledo dealt with the political influence of avant-garde in "Neither Right nor Left: Revolutionary Fascism and the Avant-Garde." He stated that as a force for social change, this movement did not succeed and concluded that it could not have succeeded.

Of particular interest to the visual arts was the panel on "The Avant-Garde and Contemporary Film" in which the panelists--all from Indiana University--delivered papers on "The mass-cultural marvelous," the return of the avant-garde man and the illusionism of Stanley Kubrick.

Justus Nieland cited critics of the "mass-cultural marvelous," and admitted that films sometimes prove to be sublime, particularly last summer's The Thomas Crown Affair (1999, by John McTiernan), a remake of the 1968 Norman Jewison original that chronicles the art capers of its titular hero, a debonair New York City mergers and acquisitions maestro who attempts to stave off his billionaire's ennui by first robbing and then cheekily returning a $100-million Claude Monet landscape painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art while simultaneously romancing a female insurance investigator. "Given the film's fascination with art's market value," Nieland stated, "it's probably no surprise that the commodity and the aesthetic become indistinguishable signifiers of Crown's superb taste: he sails a Lucent Technologies catamaran, buys Bulgair jewelry, drinks Pepsi and appreciates impressionist masters."

More surprising to him is the film's baffling avant-garde leitmotif, a copy of Ren[acute{e}] Magritte's famous Le Fils de l'homme (The Son of Man, 1964) that literally covers the stolen Monet, serving as camouflage. Nieland reads the portrayal of the artist's iconic bowler-hatted bourgeois gentleman with an apple suspended over his head, as a "meditation on the inextricability of the mysterious and the everyday, the occulded lyricism of quotidian banality." He notes how curious this avant-garde attack on "an inevitably-coded, mass-cultural reality" is. It becomes more and more curious when, in returning the Monet to the museum, Crown dresses as Magritte's hatted gentleman. So do dozens of others, providing him protection for his caper, "enacting," as Nieland describes, "a re-enchantment of a disenchanted world as capitalist rationality by quite literally reintegrating art into the praxis of life."

Nieland thus probes the presence of the avant-garde in contemporary Hollywood film: the "marvelous within the popular." He suggests that by "miming self-consciously Magritte's own technique, the 1999 forgery of the 1968 Hollywood original is an imperfect job, but postmodern Hollywood's imprecise simulation enables a playful return to the theme of aesthetic forgeries, hoaxes and thefts that so fascinated avant-garde artists ... that calls into question ideas of what constitutes 'art.'" He calls for scrapping such mass-culture consumption of avant-gardism for a "model that changes the culture industry and which is neither entirely lost nor sacrificed in the event."

This return to futurism and the cultural politics of the early modern period was explored in Edward P. Comentale's paper "'Call Yourself a Man!' The Return of the Avant-Garde Man in Contemporary Film." He stated that certain films contain "apocalyptic imagery" that rehearses bodily disruption in order to recuperate bodily wholeness. He sees its origins in the futurist F. T. Marinetti's love of a "bourgeois culture of contraction... torn "between custom and revolution, stoicism and violence." The new millennium male returns in American Beauty (1999, by Sam Mendes), says Comentale, in the main character of Lester who triumphs over "his physical, political and spiritual decline." Comentale argues that the film is essentially chauvinistic and that it celebrates the culture of late capitalism.

To Commentale Fight Club (1999, by David Fincher) offers an anti-capitalist attitude with male characters "bored and angry with a culture industry that can only render them weak, homogenous and feminine" who as a result seek "spiritual redemption and renewed faith" by pummeling each other. What also intrigues Comentale is that the film "associated the violent rhetoric of fascism with the central mechanism of capitalism itself" in the club's creation of a totalitarian regime.

"For true avant-garde artists," Comentale explained, "the gang takes vengeance upon its city with absurd acts of defiance and disruption"--and yet, "along with the film's violent attack on commodities, one finds dozens of product placements and quite spectacular visions of Brad Pitt's bloodied torso." Comentale asserted that the film "allows us to reconsider the choices we've made in defining and judging the past and its political legacy."

Stephan Wender treated "Eyes Wide Shut and the Traumatic Illusionism of Stanley Kubrick" as a "ponderous recital of the most well-worn motifs of Freudian modernism-- eros/thanatos, voyeurism, castration anxiety, the primal scene." He stated that the "Kubrickian worldview seems somehow misplaced when brought to bare on the erotic obsessions of a guilt-ridden New York doctor ....The blankly recorded images and avoidance of subjective point-of-view shots keep the audience restlessly unsutured throughout, and this unremitting distanciation is a deliberately perverse exercise in alienation."

Wender views Kubrick's cinematography as referring to the "spectatorial gaze back upon itself, disrupting its fetishizing power in a way that has close affinities with the 1960s art movement known as superrealism." In so doing Kubrick "harnessed superrealist cinematography in tandem with the one remaining surrealist resource that has not, and indeed cannot, become co-opted: the experience of everyday life with an urban culture of cammodification." To support his thesis, Wender noted how Kubrick's camera captures store windows and facades along with star Tom Cruise, "virtually equating his fray into the demi-monde with a shopping excursion."

Perhaps the most far-reaching influence of the avant-garde was described by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi of Butler University in "Peter Greenaway: An Avant-Gardist of and for the Millennium." She examined how Greenaway's work over the last 30 years engages with avant-garde art in its multiple manifestations indigenous to modernism, structuralism in cinema, sixties pop-art and postmodernism. She believes that Greenaway's relationship to modernism and postmodernism "confronts us with the political and aesthetic dimensions of art of the past century." Her focus encompassed Greenaway's engagement with Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Hollis Frampton, R. B. Kitaj and Andres Serrano.

In describing Greenaway's films Willoquet-Maricondi noted how he embraced certain features of the structuralist movement such as the exploration of formal obtrusiveness, the fore-grounding of the projection aspect of cinema and an interest in landscape. She showed how Greenaway's particular brand of structuralism has often been compared to the work of the American structuralist Frampton in creating a cinema that is not readily accessible to the audience. This is achieved, she said, "through an overindulgence in structuring devices or organizational grids, such as the alphabet, numbers, or the calendar" as does the artist's viewfinder in The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and the scientists' gridded tables in A Zed and Two Noughts (1985). However, she stressed that Greenaway is too much of an individualist in his art to be labeled a structuralist. "His individuality as an artist lies in his particular chosen context of influences," she concluded.

Four keynote speakers dealt with such key issues as the spectator's role in art, the power of the avant-garde in a technological age, the question of whether surrealist black humor is masculine or feminine and T. S. Eliot as avant-garde poet. Drawing on the magic of The Titanic (1998, by James Cameron) in involving audiences, Martin Jay of the University of California at Berkeley traced the history of audience involvement in popular culture from scream machines to high culture's concern with the real as at the recent controversial Brooklyn Museum of Art show, "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection," referring to it as a "titillating engagement of virtual experience." Believing that art lost its "force because of the rapid growth of mass culture and technology," Krzysztof Ziarek of the University of Notre Dame called for a new configuration of aesthetics and power. He stated that the value of the avant-garde with its qualities of technology should be the "power to bring us face to face with technology." Susan Rubin Suliemann of Harvard University made the case for feminine writers of surrealist black humor. She noted how these writers give a new view of Surrealism by their attacks and lampoons of the male surrealists who dominated and denigrated their female counterparts. Marjorie Perloff of Stanford University meticulously examined Eliot's sound structure, syntax, urbanism and surreal sense of time in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Proof rock," written when he was 22, as signs of his avant-garde poetry.

Following the constant academic examination and classification of intellectual endeavor, this conference explored the role of various avant-garde movements from Italian and Russian Futurism to Surrealism by defining works that expressed the essence of a specific movement, comparing various works in a specific movement, relating intersections between aesthetic content and political ramifications and finally surveying the boundary between modernism/postmodernism and the potential for an avant-garde.

While the conference called for papers to reconsider the theories of the avant-garde as either purely concerned with aesthetics or for being experimental and only concerned with political ramifications and to negotiate between politics and aesthetics to provide a more nuanced investigation of the role of the avant-garde in a reevaluation of modernism, no such emblematic investigation emerged. Perhaps the current status of the avant-garde is best explained in "Forgetting Gertrude Stein to the Letter," by Eval Amiran of Michigan State University, who commented, "the artist-innovator saw himself first of all as someone who has been refused, accused of....Later, when the avant-garde's provocation was accepted and reintegrated into the category of art, it still carried within it the connotation of 'nonart' that resulted from its rejecting. Thus was created the misleading image of a history of art that 'advanced' only by integrating a rapidly changing succession of negations of itself, as if changing a tradition m eant the same as effacing memory, as if the only guarantee of the future was to make a tabula rasa of the past. The avant-garde, then, can be seen as a dynamic quality of expression in relation to history and not a genre feature..."

SARAH MILES WATTS is a professor of English and Film studies at SUNY Geneseo and Assistant for Development at Visual Studies Workshop.