The Idea of the Avant Garde—and What it Means Today, Volume 2 ed. by Marc James Léger (review)

To be up to date on the avant-garde is to be aware of the high volume and mutual incompatibility of the major arguments that have been made in its name. Whether you consider the avant-garde historical and dead, alive and kicking, “neo-” or “post-,” anti-capitalist or ultimate commodity, singular or multiple, white and patriarchal or available for anyone’s use, The Idea of the Avant Garde—And What It Means Today, Volume 2 offers something of value. These and other claims find various degrees of articulation in Marc James Léger’s compendium of texts and images by fifty thinkers and artists. The Idea of the Avant Garde’s plurality of opinions and approaches is its chief merit. Like its 2014 predecessor, the book seeks to portray how contested the avant-garde is, both conceptually and historically. That ambition shapes not only the number and selection of contributors, but also the design. Even the epigraph page is packed to the margins, visually stuffed with statements on the avant-garde ranging from Linda Nochlin’s comment on early Saint-Simon-derived definitions to Werner Herzog’s romantic declaration that “we are the creators, we should be the hornets that sting” (4).

That the last of the epigraphs is taken from Alain Badiou reveals Léger’s investment in the French philosopher’s writings on the avant-garde, and in his concept of “the Idea”—a source of intellectual illumination revealing not any particular political program or aesthetic practice, but rather the direction one might take in pursuit of the true. The introduction engages at length with Badiou’s Marxist thought as well as that of Slavoj Žižek, implying a familial relationship between Léger’s anthologies and Žižek’s The Idea of Communism series. This volume submits the avant-garde project to plenty of skepticism, as it should, yet it insists upon the permanent condition of possibility that Léger identifies with the Idea. Some contributors call that hope. None is naïve enough to ground that hope in the programs or practices of any one vanguard, least of all the predominantly white and male modernist groups who received so much critical attention for so long. Reproduced alongside Léger’s introduction is a poster he co-designed featuring an image of two Hollywood-style cowboys. In hand-drawn speech bubbles, one asks, “What ails you comrade?” The other replies with one of the volume’s many references to Guy Debord and the Situationist International: “The Spectacle.” Asked what could offer “hope things could get better,” the first responds: “The Idea of the avant-garde” (15). Léger insists that direct social action is necessary, and he takes heart in the host of movements—including Occupy Wall Street, Idle No More, people’s revolts in North Africa and the Middle East, the Ferguson uprising, Black Lives Matter—that have emerged to fight neoliberalism and neo-fascism. The poster is more humorous (and accessible) than Léger’s writing, but it too registers his claim that potentiality persists in art and action that “challenges the destructive and exploitative aspects of capitalist social relations” (9).

Not every contributor agrees with him. Music critic Massimo Ricci begins by stating that “the ‘avant garde’ is as good as dead” (56), and then goes on to rail, crankily, against the propensity of the unwashed masses to upload “sonic rubbish” to Bandcamp (58). World Socialist website editor David Walsh spends scare quote–peppered paragraphs attacking people on the Left who think critically about race, gender, and sexuality before offering his prescription to raise the avant-garde from its ostensible corpse-like state: basically, read more Trotsky. Much less surly and far more compelling is Martha Rosler’s grim assessment, grounded in a helpful historical survey, of “socio-critical” art’s chances for survival. Rosler, a still-vital veteran of what she calls 1970s “art...