OUGD401 - Defining the Avante Garde & Avante Garde Cinema Lecture notes

Defining the Avant Garde

What do we define as the Avant Garde? What is Avant Garde? The term is inappropriately used everywhere!
Doing/ producing innovative/ progressive art/ design. Or being part of an Avant Garde group/ scene. Avant Garde is a rebellious, challenging of conventions, weird and confrontational response to the current goings-on of the time. It has a different voice to the crowd.

What does the word Avant Garde mean?
the advance in garde/ guard. Or the 'van garde' which is the term given traditionally to the elitist group of superior army troops that are stronger and lead the rest of the pack.

Examples of an Avant Garde movement: 

• Fauvism 
• Romanticism - celebrates a unique style. Artists were a more special, creative genius than those who do not understand their work. Superior figures because of others lack of understanding of them.

We need to ask ourselves, although our institution, Leeds College of Art prospectus promotes the Avant Garde, is institutional curricular art/design genuine Avant Garde anyway?

'Nocturn in black & gold: the falling rocket', 1875, by Whistler is Avant Garde in it's aesthetics. Criticised as "art for art's sake".

By the end of the 19th/ early 20th century, there were 2 approaches to what people defined as the Avant Garde:

1. Socially committed artists
2. Crazy/ weird aesthetics

'Art & Significant Form', 1913, by Clive Bell, an art critic of the time wrote his opinions of the Avant Garde:

"It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that. It is certain, however, that about no subject with which I am acquainted has so little been said that is at all to the purpose. The explanation is discoverable. He who would elaborate a plausible theory of aesthetics must possess two qualities — artistic sensibility and a turn for clear thinking. Without sensibility a man can have no aesthetic experience, and, obviously, theories not based on broad and deep aesthetic experience are worthless."

'Mount St Victoire', 1900, Paul Cezanne

'Lavender mist', 1950, Jackson Pollock

Starling banned avant garde in Soviet Russia because the majority of people couldn't understand it. The problem with Avant Garde is it necessitates elitism.

Kitsch

What is Kitsch?

Commercial art that intentionally aims to be high culture but isn't equipped with the proper tools and materials to achieve this and so fails and is classed as 'tacky'. It was/is used by art critics to determine the differences between high and low culture. Everything that isn't Avant Garde was classed as Kitsch.

'Haywain', Constable is classed as high culture art. But when printed onto a dinner plate as a collectable, this is considered low culture as it turns the art into a cheap product.

'Praying hands', by Durer is a high culture piece of art but as a sculpture of this as decorative art is considered low culture.

However, there are some (postmodern) artists that celebrate the tackiness of Kitsch, and so are classed as Avant Garde Kitsch:

• Damien Hirst - doesn't make his own work, only comes up with the ideas.
• Jeff Koons
• 'Equivalent VIII' , Carl Andre
• the K foundation's award for the worst artist of all time

Avante Garde Cinema:

• In opposition to mainstream cinema
• non-linear/ non-figurative/ non-narrative plots
• open storyline rather than closed with questionable endings
• requires a different kind of spectatorship

Examples of Avante Garde Cinema:

• 'Un Chien Andalou', (1929) Dir Luis Bunuel - Very influential, perhaps 'the starting point'
• 'Cremaster Cyde', (2002) Matthew Barney 
• 'Spirals', (1926) Oscar Fischinger
• 'Lapis', (1966) James Whitney
• 'Black Ice', (1994) Stan Brakhage
• 'Mothlight', 1963 Stan Brakhage
• 'Window water baby moving', Stan Brakhage
• 'Empire', Andy Warhol - 10 & 1/2 hours of static film of the Empire state building from a window.