In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Jonathan P. Eburne (bio)

The idea of the avant-garde is embedded in a theory of history.

—Fred Moten, In the Break (2003)1

The term avant-garde bears explicit militaristic overtones, yet the question of how artistic vanguards bear out the martial strategies implied in the name is a fraught one. Does “avant-garde” refer to a set of cultural maneuvers with distinctly political effects or to experimental aesthetic practices whose political effects remain debatable, even contestable? The answer has, for the past two centuries, tended to be yes and yes, though hardly without equivocation or debate.2 In spite of the term’s express appeal to forwardness and advancement, the movements and imperatives we tend to designate as avant-garde are often saddled with concerns about political consequence. Beyond the question of what an avant-garde is, in other words, it remains no less pressing to investigate what an avant-garde does: what it might be, or what it will have been. To this end, scholars and historians of radical aesthetic and political groups of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries often invoke past or future moments of historical rupture as the basis for their judgments of exigency: the traumatic aftermath of a recent war, for instance, or the utopian promise of a revolution to come. Whether we look to discrete art movements such as Dada, futurism, constructivism, Malvo, and Fluxus; to broader sociopolitical and aesthetic tendencies such as magical realism and the Black Arts Movement; or to more diffuse forms of political and aesthetic radicalism around the world, the historical coordinates against which scholars and practitioners of experimental art gauge the stakes of this practice seem indefatigably to return to the militaristic inclinations of the term avant-garde itself. War—or violent conflict—becomes the [End Page 521] historical marker of an avant-garde’s historical purpose and limits, the ground against which its experiments can be measured and named as such. how does our understanding of the radical gestures of experimental groups change when the conditions of warfare instead take center stage? how do avant-garde groups function during times of war?

Marking the long centenary of the First World War, this special issue of Criticism addresses how modern experimental artistic movements respond to the experience of warfare, whether world wars, revolutions, civil wars, colonial invasions, Cold Wars, Dirty Wars, or anticolonial uprisings. Rather than rehearsing well-known tales about modern art or lamenting the tragic fate of avant-garde groups and artists after the rise of fascism, this issue explores new ways of thinking about the intellectual and artistic consequences of warfare and its concomitant experiences of historical rupture and ideological unrest. Even within the artificial framework of a centennial, the historical period spanning the years between 1914 and 2016 demonstrates the capacity for modern mechanized warfare to exceed its historical limits. The war once known, however ironically, as “Great” now stands as the implicit threshold of modern technological warfare, whereby the military recourse to mustard gas and aerial attacks now finds its technological complement in the drone strike, the large-scale mobilization of refugees, and the virtual perpetuation of warfare itself as a contemporary global condition. What had been eminently fearsome to Cold War nations at midcentury—namely, a war that could launch with the push of the button—is now a relative commonplace. To the extent that the so-called Great War of a century ago disclosed the technological horizon into which we now find ourselves receding, it also marks an epoch, a dividing line in our modernity. While hardly the first instance of multinational warfare, it tends to bracket our understanding of modernity as a global condition that consists not only of industrial capitalism but of industrialized conflict, deterritorialization, and the large-scale mobilization of national resources, as well.

As Timothy Youker proposes in his contribution to this issue, the periodizing logic that cites WWI as the dividing line for either mechanized warfare or the radical activity of avant-garde artistic movements is misleading, however. As Youker writes, “Evoking commonplace historical categories of prewar, avant-guerre, interwar, and postwar can, intentionally or not, amount to an act of semantic sleight...

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