“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”: The avant-garde in the works of Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Ruiz

This essay seeks to explore the meaning of the “avant-garde” in the work of two Chilean artists, novelist Roberto Bolaño and filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. Political exiles working in different mediums, their works share in the reflexive exploration of the relationship between art and the praxis of life. I seek to illustrate the avant-garde ethic at the heart of their works by showing that both artists problematize the concept of individual creation through disruptions and repetitions. Related to this, the line between producer (artist) and recipient (reader or spectator) is blurred when the recipient is invited to actively contribute to the production of meaning. I argue that the artists’ performance of avant-garde gestures and their direct references to avant-garde histories open a space for reflexivity, an instance of recuperation. In this space the artwork is not a product but a process. Art becomes a life-process. In this way their work seeks to recuperate and continue the avant-garde’s project: to question the autonomous status of art in society.

My understanding of the avant-garde draws from Peter Bürger’s theorization of the term and from Paul Mann’s arguments about the importance of discursive intervention on the avant-garde. Bürger draws attention to the historical basis of the avant-garde and to its relationship with the institutions of art. He discusses how the historical avant-gardes – the French and German literary and visual avant-garde of the1920s – launched an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society (49). According to Bürger, bourgeois art “is the objectification of the self-understanding of the bourgeois class. Production and reception of the self-understanding as articulated in art are no longer tied to the praxis of life” (47). This means that bourgeois art mirrors a bourgeois view of the self as split from the praxis of life. The effect of this dissociation gives the false perception that the work of art is totally independent of society. The avant-gardists undertook an assault against such art precisely because they saw it as an institution set off from the praxis of life (86, 83).

Bürger identifies three areas that generally characterize autonomous art – purpose, production, and reception – and explains how the avant-garde sought to challenge them (50). Instead of disjoining the work from the praxis of life, the avant-gardist purpose is the sublation of art into the praxis of life.¹ In terms of production, whereas the individual artist (the creative genius) produces bourgeois art, the avant-garde act is the radical negation of the category of individual creation (51). For example, the ready-made: Duchamp’s signature on a mass-produced object mocks all claims to individual creativity (52). In terms of reception, the avant-garde seeks to erase the antithesis between producer and recipient (53). Bürger contends that, ultimately, the historical avant-garde failed in its attempt to do away with the distance between art and life while the culture industry has successfully promoted a false fusion between art and life (50). Nevertheless, I want to recuperate Bürger’s categories to talk about what I see as a current avant-garde ethic. I do not mean to undermine the established historical basis of the avant-garde, but instead argue for a historically informed continuation of avant-garde gestures that aim to engage the relationship between art and the praxis of life. Shortly, I will look at the categories of production and reception in the works of Bolaño and Ruiz to show the specific manifestations of avant-gardist gestures.

While Mann would agree with Bürger that the historical avant-gardes ultimately became institutionalized through the movement’s commodification, he also argues that the importance of the avant-garde is not so much its oppositional stance but its potential for discursive intervention: “the death of the avant-garde is one means by which this economy [of discourse] endures. Death is necessary so that everything can be repeated and...