|
...contemporary groups like Nouveau Realisme, Art, or Minimalism, the Situationist International has been marginalized as a result of the group's continued adherence to a Marxist revolutionary perspective that most other groups and artistic practices have given up. Even though artists associated with conceptual art and minimalism, such as Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre, all exercised a kind of self-critical praxis in which they addressed the development of advanced mass-mediated capitalism, they were much more affirmative toward this development and the coming of the consumer society than were the Situationists, who after a few years excluded more or less all practicing artists from the group in the hope of releasing a post-artistic revolutionary praxis from the confines of the art institution. The Situationists rejected the art institution with militant fervor, and argued that the isolated work of art no longer possessed critical potential. Therefore, art had to die. The Situationists made short shrift of this: art was a thing of the past, and now it had to be realized in revolutionary praxis.
The "political" commitment of the Situationists meant that the group did not fit into the overall picture of the development of art after World War II, when the original project of the avant-garde more or less disappeared or at least weakened considerably. The Situationist International was marginalized to such an extent that it was not even granted a place in the various art-historical and sociological accounts of the development of the avant-garde. The Situationist group does not appear in Peter Burger's classic book from 1974, Theorie der Avantgarde, in which the distinction between modernism and avant-garde is drawn consistently for the first time. According to Burger, the avant-garde was characterized by a critical attitude toward the relative independence that art had been permitted in bourgeois society and by an independence that made it possible for the individual artwork to express "irrational" needs and preserve a representation of freedom in a society characterized by means-ends rationality. The avant-garde attacked the aesthetic autonomy with which the work of art had been endowed by art as institution, and the avant-garde tried to integrate art into life praxis. "The avant-garde turns against ... the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends" (Burger, 1984: 22). The avant-garde thus rendered visible the institutional status of art and shifted the boundaries between art and life praxis.
According to Burger, the critique of the aesthetic autonomy and the institutional status of art advanced by the historical avant-garde "failed," inasmuch as art-as-institution was able to "recuperate" the attempt to integrate art into life. Although Burger tends to turn the history of the avant-garde into an "art-internal" history, he nevertheless indicates that the historical avant-garde suffered defeat not just because of the paradoxical nature of its project--art is a zone exempt from commodification from which a radical and alternative potential can be formulated, but art has limited social effects and thus has to be abolished as a separate sphere--but also because of the historical development where fascism and Stalinism eradicated the avant-garde. After the war, the neo-avant-garde, according to Burger, was unable to reestablish the project of the historical avant-garde: the negation of the autonomy of art and the integration of art with a revolutionized life. But the Situationist International was engaged in precisely this project. However, Burger does not analyze the Situationists. Instead he "closes" the avant-gardist project and renders it historical. With a reference to Marx, Burger writes that the neo-avant-garde was a farcical repetition of the heroic failure of the historical avant-garde. According to Burger, the attack on the institutional status of art was reduced to an empty gesture by the neo-avant-garde, who thereby transformed the critique of the institution of art into an institutionalized transgression with no connection to life praxis. "[T]he neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions" (Burger,...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Social Justice
New transdisciplinary visualities as an alternative to redistribute th..., June 22, 2006
Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.
Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication
name or publication date.
About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company
analysis or best practices in managing your organization,
Goliath can help you meet your business needs.
Our extensive business information databases empower business
professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible,
authoritative information they need to support their business
goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting,
company research or defining management best practices -
Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.
|
