Resisting the Question, “What Is an Avant-Garde?”

“What is an avant-garde?” I don’t think there is a more timely question scholars interested in the history and theory of radical cultural production can ask. More than a simple inquiry, it is an invitation to recalibrate our key term and review in critical spirit our theoretical paradigms, the historical narratives that frame our subject as an evolving sociocultural phenomenon, and the institutional and geopolitical positions that enable us to research, write about, and teach the avant-garde.

There’s nothing new about asking, “What is an avant-garde?” or recognizing that doing so has broader implications than the mere meaning of a word. It is, to repeat, a timely question, a question that orients us towards contingencies of time and place, towards the conditions and horizons of our ability to know our subject. It is asked and answered—sometimes explicitly, more often tacitly—every time an artist writes a manifesto or a critic uses the word “avant-garde” to describe a poem or painting. Most of the time, the asking and answering fall within conventional understandings and applications of the term and its history. On occasion, however, they can spark a genuine “shock of the new” (to recall Robert Hughes),¹ unsettling assumptions, shifting paradigms, bringing to light formerly encrypted histories, and recasting disciplinary configurations.

For example, when French anarchist artists and art critics asked the question in the 1880s, they challenged the prevailing notion that avantgarde art was whatever most effectively abetted the socialist propaganda engine. Against that presumption, post-Impressionist painters and decadent poets asserted the right to explore form and content that were in no direct way at the service of political movements, but that, as they saw it, challenged the status quo nonetheless.² The consequences were remarkable: in the short term, movements such as neo-impressionism and decadentism devoted to the exploration of L’art pour l’art, journals, and a network of galleries to promote the new art; in the long term, the aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, which have proved so crucial to our understanding of the politics of aesthetic form.

A century later, to cite another example, feminist, queer, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and critical-race theorists asked the same question and, in so doing, unveiled the Eurocentrism, sexism, racism, and homophobia not only of the historical avant-garde but also of the academic discourses and institutions that had canonized it. When they asked “What is an avant-garde?” a rash of other questions followed: Why were there so few women and non-Europeans in the textbooks? Museum shows? Galleries? Why were so many vanguards cozy with fascists and sleazy marketers? And why had it taken so long to recognize these obvious inequities? The question now cast light on the reactionary politics that sometimes informed the historical avant-garde’s radicalism, the scholarly discourses that described it, and the gallery and museum system that supported it. Further, the question drew attention to an aspect of the avant-garde sorely unattended by scholars and critics: that the avant-garde, in Paul Mann’s words, was a “discursive economy” with all the vested interests that contour any system of circulation.³

These two examples—two of a bunch—show that to ask the question “What is an avant-garde?” is to be part of a venerable tradition, a tradition that, rather like the avant-garde itself, often turns on tradition itself to reveal and recast the conditions and horizons of tradition itself.

This essay is intended in that spirit. I will argue that our understandings of the avant-garde are tethered to perspectives that deplete our efforts to define, theorize, and historicize the avant-garde. Specifically, I will argue that we cannot answer the question, “What is an avant-garde?” until we better comprehend (1) the history of the field of avant-garde studies itself, (2) the contradictions inherent in any effort to compose a historical narrative of the avant-garde, and (3) the conceptual and historiographical limits that come into play when we define the avant-garde as an artistic, as opposed to a broader...