The last decade has seen an increasing use by young artists of strategies and forms derived from neo-avant-gardes—Fluxus, Conceptual or Performance art. This has called forth charges of plagiarism from an older generation of artists, who feel the young brats are getting credit for ‘things we did thirty years ago’, without acknowledging and sometimes—even worse—without knowing their predecessors’ work. Are these repetitions, then, the blind, dumb survivals of forms long past their prime? There are indeed young artists making neo-Conceptual or Fluxus-type work that seems an exasperatingly minuscule variation on what has been done before: creating ‘social works of art’ by cooking dinners or spending the night with strangers; taking ‘jobs’ in non-art professions. While many such strategies bear an uncanny resemblance to activities in the sixties that were far more marginal, and far less commercially successful, the fact remains that the repetition of a given practice within a changed historical and cultural context has a different meaning and function. Theory has not found it easy to come to grips with this phenomenon, in part because we still find it difficult to think about history in terms of survivals and repetitions—as what Hal Foster has called a ‘continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts’.footnote1
The crucial question is whether (and how) artists actually manage to reactivate avant-garde impulses, or whether they merely recycle some of its forms in a nostalgic mode. In the first instance, they would resemble Benjamin’s Jacobins, seizing on the revolutionary potential of the Roman Republic to realize its now-time.footnote2 In the second, they would be closer to the postmodern pastiche-artists that Jameson analysed in the eighties as, precisely, recycling disembodied signs. Whereas Benjamin perceived the liberating potential of breaking through linear history in order to arrive at a ‘dialectical image’, Jameson concluded that the postmodern era resulted in a consumption of nostalgic motifs completely devoid of true historical consciousness. The active, revolutionary repetition described by Benjamin had been perverted into a passive, consumerist reflex.footnote3 The distinction between the two positions, however, is not necessarily clear-cut. There may be complex amalgams of both in any historical phenomenon—delusion and denial as the boon companions of insight. Aby Warburg was convinced that the practice of the Renaissance was just such a hybrid—artists deliberately sought to use antique forms, seeing a now-time in them; but they were also taken over by the forms, possessed. Their repetitions were not completely sovereign and intentional; at times they were involuntary, like neurotic symptoms.footnote4 Nonetheless, Warburg was firmly on the side of reason, and focused on artists’ attempts to master the pagan impulses encoded in the antique Pathosformeln that they deployed.
With various degrees of explicitness, some of the recent repetitions of avant-garde strategies have highlighted the question of art’s role vis-à-vis the—or a—public. While art has been ever more widely publicized, its public role, in a more fundamental sense, has become more doubtful. This problem has, of course, been tackled in various instructive ways at different points in the history of the avant-garde. Contemporary artists often offer repetitions-with-variations on these earlier approaches, thus pointing the way to a renewed historical examination of these ‘anticipated futures’ and ‘reconstructed pasts’. Social theory has also focused on the problematic role of the public sphere and investigated the different forms it can take. Following leads from both art and theory, we enter a realm where even apparently blind repetitions may be of significance as mnemonic traces; where even involuntary symptoms may yet contain re-activating elements.
Any reappraisal seems doomed to begin by repeating what Peter Bürger wrote in the Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), even if it goes on to criticize or dismiss it. Bürger’s book is the theoretical consummation of the late-sixties’ break with a depoliticized conception of the avant-garde. Clement Greenberg had used the term as a synonym for his idea of modernism, to mean ‘purified’ arts locked up within their own ‘area of competence’, their own history. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, both the Greenbergian and the Bürgerian conception of the avant-garde can be seen as responses to Schiller’s contention that art and aesthetic play, as the essence of man, would bear ‘the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’.footnote5 As Rancière has shown, the crucial ‘and’ within ‘art and life’ has been variously interpreted. Like others before him, Greenberg went on to link art and life by conceiving of an independent ‘life of art’, from Manet to Morris Louis. On the other hand, Bürger focused on the way movements such as Dada and Surrealism, whose importance had been minimized by the ‘modernist’ conception of the avant-garde, had attempted to use art to transform life. Modern art’s autonomous and specialist status was treated as a hindrance to be overcome; art should not be limited to its own small sphere, it should revolutionize society. The ultimate aim of Dada, Surrealism and the ‘historical avant-garde’ in general had been to integrate art into the Lebenswelt, into society and everyday life.
The historical avant-garde had failed, but Bürger was comparatively forgiving about this, while being notoriously hard on the postwar neo-avant-gardes who, in his view, merely repeated the forms and strategies devised by their predecessors, reaping huge institutional and commercial success without any real struggle for change. Bürger has been criticized for his blindness to the distinctions within this repetition—not seeing how the neo-avant-garde had tried to adapt to new circumstances. The historical avant-garde, too, had often opted for mockery of capitalist modernity (Dada), or utopian evocations of what cannot be (De Stijl) rather than attempting to integrate art and life.footnote6 This is certainly true, but what matters is that there was a constant oscillation in the avant-garde between irony, utopian visions and the desire to effect real change: the first two could lead to the last, which could itself revert to the ironic or utopian distance when it was frustrated. Malevich’s visions found their counterpart in the Constructivist attempts to realize a ‘productivist’ art; Constant allied his New Babylon, which remained essentially an art project, with the Situationists’ revolutionary interventions.
In a noteworthy repetition-and-critique of Bürger, Jürgen Habermas has argued that the attempt to ‘reconcile art and life’ he described was doomed to failure because it operated from only one of the autonomous spheres of which modern society consists.footnote7 For Habermas, as for Weber, modern society involved the disintegration of unified ‘worldviews’ into the separate fields of science, art and morals, or law; each one largely the domain of specialists. The avant-gardes may have tried to leave the art world behind in order to reform life, but they had not succeeded in penetrating any of the other spheres. The basic structure of modern society was left unscathed. Habermas was not particularly sad about this failure of the avant-garde project: in his view, the destruction of the different spheres would mean a regression, a break with the ‘project of modernity’ that emerged with the Enlightenment.
The Weberian spheres of art, science and law are not, of course, completely isolated from each other, even if their internal discourses are largely autonomous. They also co-exist within the public sphere, whose origins Habermas traced to the ‘reasoning citizens’ of eighteenth-century Britain.footnote8 While each of the specialized domains has its own, internal semi-public space—constituted by art journals, or scientific conferences, for instance—they also require a general public sphere to mediate between themselves and the rest of society. It is through this Öffentlichkeit that the smaller spheres have effects on the ‘outside world’. This was dramatically manifest when art criticism first emerged as an autonomous sphere within public debate, in the eighteenth century: the first critical reviews of the French Salon were illegal pamphlets, for the assault on state-sponsored artists was seen as undermining the entire Ancien Régime: when the decadence of its art was decried, so was the rottenness of the state.