Disjecta Membra: Clement Greenberg’s “Counter-Avant-Garde,” 1971
Clement Greenberg’s historical writings have the quality of diagnostic analysis. Academicism, avant-garde, and kitsch are nothing but symptoms of modern society’s terminal state. The creative endeavors of modern urban man, whose main occupation is industry and commerce, had just wrested themselves from every extra-artistic shackle when they faced a crisis of meaning. Different from its ancient counterpart — whose feeling depended on tradition and faith — modern art is based exclusively on imaginative experience, the possibility of freely exercising our creative faculties and objectifying that which in reality prefigures utopia, our promise of happiness. By and by society became increasingly incapable of nurturing and justifying its own dynamism, and art resolved itself into a motionless corpse “in which the really important issues are left untouched...creative activity dwindles... [and] all larger questions [are] decided by the precedent of the old masters.” (“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939)
Modern society’s state of decay, its Alexandrianism, is expressed equally by a desire for stasis and death — kitsch’s passion for the eternal and the same in everything new — and the avant-garde’s aspiration of keeping abreast: the necessity of newness and originality while holding up the task of aesthetic experience. The superior consciousness of history that marked the avant-garde was art’s curse, the historical responsibility of pursuing its promised happiness even when it meant turning against reality itself. For in its search for wholeness, the avant-garde indicted a society where historically every available happiness had become false. The counter-avant-garde, avant-gardism, thus came to the rescue. The counter-avant-garde was the conscious abandonment of art’s happiness in favor of the satisfaction of belonging to the present. Its sense of newness is that of the latest fashion tailor-made for the showcase of our spiritual hopelessness. Yet, if problematic at the level of production, avant-gardism is a weightier burden as its rhetoric has come to define the limits of the present imagination regarding what experiencing art is, what it could and should be. The artistic byproduct of a century of counterrevolution, avantgardism was and remains an unwarranted historical misadventure and a symbol of failure that new pursuits of artistic freedom would need to overcome.
— Gabriel Almeida
The case of what passes nowadays for advanced-advanced art has its fascination. This isn’t owed to the quality of the art; rather it has to do with its very lack of quality. The fascination is more historical, cultural, theoretical than it is aesthetic. Not that no advanced art of superior quality is being produced at this time. It is, in the usual relatively small quantities. But it’s not that kind of art that I call advanced-advanced art. Nor does superior art, in any case, have the kind of fascination I’m speaking of, which offers far more challenge to understanding than to taste. Here, understanding requires going to origins.
As we know, the production of art in the West divided itself over a century ago into advanced or avant-garde on one side and academic, conservative, or official on the other. All along there had been the few artists who innovated and the many who didn’t. And all along the highest qualities of art had depended in crucial part on the factor of newness or originality. But never before the 1860s in France had the difference between decided newness and everything else shown itself so strikingly in high art. Nor had innovation ever before been resisted so stubbornly by the cultivated art public.
With avant-gardism, the shocking, scandalizing, startling, the mystifying and confounding, became embraced as ends in themselves and no longer regretted as initial side effects of artistic newness that would wear off with familiarity. Now these side effects were to be built in. The first bewildered reaction to innovative art was to be the sole and appropriate one; the avant-gardist work — or act or gesture — was to hold nothing latent, but deliver itself immediately. And the impact, more often than not, was to be on cultural habits and expectations, social ones too, rather than on taste. At the same time newness, innovation, originality itself was to be standardized as a category into which work, an act, a gesture, or an attitude could insert itself by displaying readily recognizable and generally identifiable characteristics or stimuli. And while the conception of the new in art was narrowed on one side to what was obviously, ordinarily, or only ostensibly startling, it was expanded on the other to include the startling in general, the startling as sheer phenomenon or sheer occurrence.
All along the avant-garde had been accused of seeking originality for its own sake. And all along this had been a meaningless charge. As if genuine originality in art could be envisaged in advance, and could ever be attained by mere dint of willing. As if originality had not always surprised the original artist himself by exceeding his conscious intentions. It’s as though Duchamp and avant-gardism set out, however, deliberately to confirm this accusation. Conscious volition, deliberateness, plays a principal part in avant-gardist art: that is, resorting to ingenuity instead of inspiration, contrivance instead of creation, “fancy” instead of “imagination”; in effect, to the known rather than the unknown. The “new” as known beforehand — the general look of the “new” as made recognizable by the avant-garde past — is what is aimed at, and because known and recognizable, it can be willed. Opposites, as we know, have a way of meeting. By being converted into the idea and notion of itself, and established as a fixed category, the avant-garde is turned into its own negation. The exceptional enterprise of artistic innovation, by being converted into an affair of standardized categories, of a set of “looks,” is put within reach of uninspired calculation.
Installation view of Duchamp’s His Twine at the “First Papers of Surrealism” exhibition, 1942. Tate
Yayoi Kusama, ‘Anatomic Explosion', 1968. Anothermag.
Almost all new manifestations of art get misunderstood in the first attempts to explain them, and usually they stay misunderstood for a good while after. This was so long before the avant-garde appeared, but it has become ever so much more so since then. With avant-gardism, however, there has come forced misunderstanding — aggressive, inflated, pretentious misunderstanding. Avant-gardism, even today, is planted deeper and more broadly in the talk and writing about art than in its practice… The palaver of the 1950s about absolute spontaneity, about the liberation from all formal constraints, and about breaking with the whole past of art — all this wasn’t just part of the ordinary muddlement that has affected talk about art ever since people first tried to account for it. It emerged, as applause, only with avant-gardist rhetoric. Maybe the most constant topic of avant-gardist rhetoric is the claim made with each new phase of avant-garde, or seemingly avant-garde, art that the past is now being finally closed out and a radical mutation in the nature of art is taking place, after which art will no longer behave as it has heretofore. As it happens, this was already said more or less about impressionism in its time, but it was also said about every next step of modernist art — but it was said then only in condemnation and opposition. Not till around 1910 did the same thing begin to be said in praise and welcome. Again — as with the business of pursuing originality for its own sake — it was as though avantgardism were trying deliberately to confirm a standard charge against the avant-garde.
The conclusions avant-gardist artists of the 1960s drew from their inability to grasp the art in Pollock got acted on in much the same way as those which Duchamp had drawn almost fifty years earlier from his inability to recognize the whole of the art in cubism. He would seem to have attributed the impact of cubism — and particularly of Picasso’s first collage constructions — to what he saw as its startling difficulty; and it’s as though the bicycle wheel mounted upside down on a stool and the storebought bottle rack he produced in 1913 were designed to go Picasso one better in this direction. Young artists in the 1960s, reasoning in a similar way from their misconception of Pollock’s art, likewise concluded that the main thing was to look difficult, and that the startlingly difficult was sure to look new, and that by looking newer and newer you were sure to make art history. To repeat: it wasn’t abstract expressionist art as such that helped bring on the great resurgence of avant-gardism in the 1960s, but the misconceptions of it propagated by avant-gardist rhetoric and welcomed and maintained by younger artists of retarded, academic taste.
Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Splatter, 1966. Art Institute of Chicago
“Academic” is an unhelpful term unless constantly redefined and relocated… Yet when we look back it seems that it used to be easier to do so than it is now, when so many sheep have taken to wearing wolf’s clothing. In the 1950s, old-time, self-evident academic art began to be pushed from the current foreground of the larger art public’s attention by abstract expressionism and art informel. It was left to pop art, however, to finish the job, in the early 1960s... The current foreground was the natural habitat of academic art, and it was a habitat, moreover, that would not tolerate any other kind of art. Having been thrust from that habitat in all its old guises, academic art rushed back in new ones…
Academic sensibility has taken to cavorting in ways that seem to defy and deny all past notions of the academic. Doesn’t the academic depend, always, on the tried and proven, and isn’t every sort of untried and unproven thing being adventured with here? Well, just as there’s almost nothing that can’t (under sufficient pressure of both taste and inspiration) be turned into high and original art, so there's almost nothing that can’t be turned immediately into academic (or less than academic) art: nothing that can’t be conventionalized on the spot, including unconventionality itself...
But you can still wonder exactly why it is that all the phenomenal, configurational, and physical newness that abounds in art today should evince so little genuinely artistic or aesthetic newness — why most of it comes out so banal, so empty, so unchallenging to taste…
Among the many things that highly original art has always done is convert into art what seems to be nonart. Avant-garde art called attention to this supposed conversion in more obvious and striking ways than any art before it had — at least any urban art. It was as though the line between art and supposed nonart receded faster for the avant-garde, and that at the same time the latter had to push harder and harder against that line. As I’ve already said: to most people at the time, the first full-blown impressionist paintings seemed to break with everything previously considered pictorial art and to remain “nonart” objects; this, the “nonart” reaction, was provoked by every subsequent move of modernist art and, like other such standard reactions to it, was finally adopted by avant-gardism as something to be welcomed.
William Eggleston, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973. Getty
But Duchamp’s readymades already showed that the difference between art and nonart was a conventionalized, not a securely experienced, difference… Since then it has become clearer, too, that anything that can be experienced at all can be experienced aesthetically; and that anything that can be experienced aesthetically can also be experienced as art. In short, art and the aesthetic don’t just overlap, they coincide... The notion of art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skillful making (as the ancients defined it), but an act of mental distancing — an act that can be performed even without the help of sense perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such distancing, and thereby converted into something that takes effect as art. There turns out, accordingly, to be such a thing as art at large, art that is realized or realizable everywhere, even if for the most part inadvertently, momentarily, and solipsistically: art that is private, “raw,” and unformalized (which doesn’t mean “formless,” of which there is no such thing)...
This “raw,” ubiquitous art doesn’t as a rule move anybody more than minimally on the aesthetic level, however much it might do so on the level of consolation or therapy or even of the “sublime.” It’s literally and truly minimal art. And it’s able to remain that because in its usual privacy it is sheltered from the pressure of expectations and demands. Art starts from expectation and satisfaction, but only under the pressure of heightened expectation — expectation as schooled and heightened by sufficient aesthetic experience — does art lift itself out of its “raw” state, make itself communicable, and become what society considers to be art proper, public art.
Duchamp’s “theoretical” feat was to show that “raw” art could be formalized, made public, simply by setting it in a formalized art situation, and without trying to satisfy expectations — at least not in principle. Since Duchamp this formalizing of “raw” art by fiat has become a stereotype of avant-gardist practice, with the claim being made, always, that new areas of nonart art being won for art thereby. All this has actually amounted to, however, is that public attention is called to something that was art to begin with, and banal as that, and which is made no more intrinsically interesting by being put into a recognized art context. New areas are thereby won, not for art, but only for bad formalized art. The aesthetic expectations to which art by fiat is directed are usually rudimentary. Surprise, which is an essential factor in the satisfaction of more than minimal aesthetic expectations, is here conceived of in relation mainly to nonaesthetic ones, and derives only from the act of offering something as formalized art that’s otherwise taken to be, and expected to be, anything but art... (Or else the surprise comes from reproducing or representing objects in incongruous materials or sizes, or from affixing incongruous objects to pictures, or from offering reproductions of photographs as paintings, and so on, with the stress being always put on incongruity in the “material mode.” And though there’s nothing that says that stressed incongruity can’t be an integral aesthetic factor, it has hardly ever managed to be that so far except in literature.)
The issue for art is not merely to extend the limits of what’s considered art, but to increase the store of what’s experienced as “good and better” art. This is what extending the “limits” of art meant for the classic avant-garde. The issue remains quality: that is, to endow art with greater capacity to move you. Formalization by itself — putting a thing in a public art context — does not do this, or does it only exceptionally. Nor does surprise for the sake of surprise do this. Art, as I’ve said, depends on expectation and its satisfaction. It moves and satisfies you in a heightened way by surprising expectation; but it does not do so by surprising expectation in general; it does what it does best by surprising expectations that are of a certain order. By conforming to these even as it jars them, artistic surprise not only enhances aesthetic satisfaction but also becomes a self-renewing and more or less permanent surprise — as all superior art shows.
George Maciunas, Fluxpost (Smiles), 1978. MoMa
Superior art comes, almost always, out of a tradition — even the superior art that comes early — and a tradition is created by the interplay of expectation and satisfaction through surprise as this interplay operates not only within individual works of art, but between them. Taste develops as a context of expectations based on experience of previously surprised expectations. The fuller the experience of this kind, the higher, the more truly sophisticated the taste. At any given moment the most sophisticated, the best taste with regard to the new art of that moment is the taste which implicitly asks for new surprises, and is ready to have its expectations revised and expanded by the enhanced satisfactions which these may bring. Only the superior artist responds to this kind of challenge, and major art proceeds as one frame of expectations evolves out of, and includes, another. (Need I remind anyone that this evolution, for all its cumulativeness, does not necessarily mean “progress” — any more than the word evolution itself does?)
The superior artist acquires his ambition from, among other things, the experience of his taste, his own taste. No artist is known — at least not where the evidence is clear enough — to have arrived at important art without having effectively assimilated the best new art of the moment, or moments, just before his own. Only as he grasps the expanded expectations created by this best new art does he become able to surprise and challenge them in his own tum. But his new surprises — his innovations — can never be totally, utterly disconcerting; if they were, the expectations of taste would receive no satisfaction at all. To repeat in different words what I’ve already said: surprise demands a context. According to the record, new and surprising ways of satisfying in art have always been connected closely with immediately previous ways, no matter how much in opposition to these ways they may look or actually have been. There have been no great vaults “forward,” no innovations out of the blue, no ruptures of continuity in the high art of the past — nor have any such been witnessed in our day. Ups and downs of quality, yes, but no gaps in stylistic evolution or nonevolution. (Continuity seems to belong to the human case in general, not just to the artistic one.)
Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907. MoMA
The academic artist tends, in the less frequent case, to be one who grasps the expanded expectations of his time, but complies with these too patly. Far more often, however, he is one who is puzzled by them, and who therefore orients his art to expectations formed by an earlier phase of art. The unique historical interest of Duchamp’s case lies in his refusal, as an academic artist of the second kind, to follow this second way, and in his deciding, instead, to wreak his frustration on artistic expectations in general...
Art that realizes — and formalizes — itself in disregard of artistic expectations of any kind, or in response only to rudimentary ones, sinks to the level of that unformalized and infinitely realizable, sub academic, sub-kitschig art — that subart which is yet art — whose ubiquitousness I called attention to earlier. This kind of art barely makes itself felt, barely differentiates itself, as art because it has so little capacity to move and elate you. Nor can any amount of phenomenal or configurational novelty increase this capacity in the absence of the control of informed expectations. Ironically enough, this very incapacity to move, or even interest you — except as a momentary apparition — has become the most prized, the most definitive feature of up-to-date art in the eyes of many art followers...
But to adapt that saying of Horace’s again: you may throw taste out by the most modern devices, but it will still come right back in. Tastefulness — abject good taste, academic taste, “good design” — leaks back constantly into the furthest-out as well as furthest-in reaches of the vacuum of taste. The break in continuity gets steadily repaired. Finally it turns out that there has not really been a break, only the illusion of one… The vacuum of taste collapses.
The inexorability with which taste pursues is what avant-gardist art in its very latest phase is reacting to. It’s as though conceptualist art in all its varieties were making a last desperate attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of taste by plumbing remoter and remoter depths of subart — as though taste might not be able to follow that far down. And also as though boredom did not constitute an aesthetic judgment. //
Nicole Eisenman, Morning Studio, 2016. kottke.org
From Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, Late Writings. Edited by Robert C. Morgan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
