Metzler Lexikon Avantgarde (review)

This general encyclopedia of the avant-garde, the first of its kind if we disregard existing dictionaries devoted to regional avant-garde movements, is well edited. It will become a major resource for anybody interested in avant-garde art and literature of the 20^th century. The entries, written by a sizeable number of international specialists from a broad variety of disciplines, are unfailingly informative and concise and cover an astonishing number of movements, practices, and personalities. There are some true gems and unexpected discoveries, such as the articles covering literary avant-garde practices in the Arab world and in Turkey, or the meticulous entries dealing with 20^th-century art and literature in Eastern Europe. Some, but surprisingly few, items are missing (one might have wished for separate coverage of Sots art, or of important groups such as Collective Actions or the [post-] Yugoslav retro-avant-garde; the latter formation is mentioned in an entry on the group "Neue Slowenische Kunst"). Particularly useful are the broadly conceived surveys of avant-garde practices in major countries of the world, from Germany to the United States, Japan, and several Latin American nations.

On occasion, there are complications, such as when the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde movements (and pivotal groups like Gorgona) are listed under "Croatia," a state that did not exist when these groups operated. This is not a moot point since the specific conditions of life in formerly Socialist Yugoslavia were formative for neo-avant-garde artists in the 1960s and 70s. A similar point could be made about neo-avant-garde art in the Russian part of the former Soviet Union, which the book lists under "Russia," even though much of Moscow-based neo-avant-garde practice in the 1970s was inextricably tied to life in the former Soviet Union. The rather broad definition of "avant-garde" in this volume means that its entries could be extended virtually ad infinitum. For instance, there is a (brilliant) short entry by Frieder Nake on what he calls computer art, but there is none on net art or on other forms of new media art.

None of this, however, can seriously distract from the considerable strengths of the volume. Among them are the substantive and often up-to-date bibliographies at the end of each article (and, finally, at the end of the volume), which make its entries even more usable. Of course when it comes to a dictionary with a sweeping ambition such as this one, the inevitable question is: what is avant-garde? Pointedly, van den Berg and Fähnders omit the direct article from the title of their work ("Avantgarde," not "Die Avantgarde"), signaling in this way that they view "Avantgarde" in true Hegelian fashion as a disparate historical phenomenon that is, however, not immune to synthesis (in a dictionary that admits its own fragmentariness, for example). They use "Avantgarde" the way we have become accustomed to using the term "modernism"—that is, less as a reference to a specific historical formation than as a broadly conceived, if historically specific, épistéme. In a detailed and on occasion programmatic preface they brilliantly develop the idea of the avant-garde as a network, an idea that was preempted incidentally by the Polish conceptual artist Jarosław Kosłowski with his international artists' NET already in the early 1970s.

The editors explicitly reject Peter Bürger's (Foucauldian) view of the relationship between the historical avant-gardes and the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s as being characterized by break and rupture. Rather than being stuck, as Bürger would have it, in unthinking repetition and in the reduction of the historical avant-gardes to a toolbox of deadpan stylistic devices, the postwar neo-avant-garde, according to van den Berg and Fähnders, remains "Avantgarde," picking up the threads after the interlude of the various rappels à l'ordre and the (Socialist) Realisms of the 1930s and 40s. From this perspective, the inclusion of practices such as 1950s...