Avant-garde art and American pop culture have had an intriguing relationship from the time of the art form's inception in America to the current day. The art form, which began in the early half of the nineteenth century in Europe, started to rise slowly in America under the guise of Dadaism in 1915. While originally formed under a group of artists in New York City who wanted to counter pop culture with their art, music, and literature the art form began to grow into prominence with American pop culture due to a variety of factors between the 1940s to the 1970s. However, from many factors that arose in the late 1970s, avant-garde began to both lessen in prominence and began to blend with the pop culture to the point in which most art critics considered the art form extinct.
Avant Garde and Kitsch Though his first published essays dealt mainly with literature and theatre, art still held a powerful attraction for Clement Greenberg, so in 1939, he made a sudden name as a visual art writer with possibly his most well-known and oft-quoted essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", first published in the journal Partisan Review. In this Marxist-influenced essay, Greenberg claimed that true avant-garde art is a product of the Enlightenment's revolution of critical thinking, and as such resists and recoils from the degradation of culture in both mainstream capitalist and communist society, while acknowledging the paradox that, at the same time, the artist, dependent on the market or the state, remains inexorably attached "by an umbilical cord of gold". Kitsch, on the other hand, was the product of industrialization and the urbanization of the working class, a filler made for the consumption of the working class: a populace hungry for culture, but without the resources and education to enjoy cutting edge avant garde culture. Greenberg writes,
"Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time."Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review. 6:5 (1939) 34–49
For Greenberg, avant garde art was too "innocent" to be effectively used as propaganda or bent to a cause, while kitsch was ideal for stirring up false sentiment.
Greenberg appropriated the German word "kitsch" to describe this low, concocted form of "culture", though its connotations have since been recast to a more affirmative acceptance of nostalgic materials of capitalist/communist culture. "Avant Garde and Kitsch" is clearly a politically motivated essay, in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and represents a denouncement of the growing totalitarian threat in Europe and the "retrogression" of fascism.
Further definition Avant-garde, as sociologist Diana Crane states, "was an art-form that had started in Europe that had started in the early nineteenth century." While the art form has survived for this long, she states that the concept of the art form is "highly ambiguous" and it has been through many phases throughout its existence, including Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and pop art. Socially, however, each form of avant-garde is united with the idea that it is part of the definition of high culture, although this in itself is defined in a variety of fashions.
Ways to determine avant-garde Due to the ambiguity of the term, Crane gives a few considerations on what could be considered avant-garde and what is not. She states that avant-garde can be determined in its approach to the aesthetic, through the social content of the artwork, and through the production and distribution of the artwork.
Aesthetics Through aesthetic, a piece of artwork can be determined avant-garde if it does any of the following: If the artwork redefines artistic conventions. If it utilizes new artistic tools and techniques. And if it redefines the nature of the art objects.
An example of the aesthetic used in Avant-garde can include the artwork of Marcel Duchamp. For Duchamp's Fountain, he simply took a urinal and defined this as a ready-made art form. In this, he redefined artistic conventions by taking an item that was already made and employing the item for an artistic purpose. By doing this, he also employed a new technique in the production of art by taking something that was already produced and redefined the object he was using by taking a urinal and using it for art.
Through Social Content Through social content, a piece of artwork can be determined avant-garde if it does one of the following: If the artwork incorporates in its artworks social or political values that are critical of or different from the majority culture. For example, in The Art of Humanism: Art in a Time of Change, Barry Schwartz states that one of the roles of avant-garde art was to provide a counter-cultural force in the art world. If it redefines the relationship between high and popular culture Like pop artists using images from advertisements and comic strips to employ a different meaning to those images And if it adopts a critical attitude toward artistic institutions This is seen by the Dadaist attack on the legitimacy of art
Through production and distribution Through its production and distribution, an artwork can be described as avant-garde if it redefines the social context for the production of art, in terms of critics, role models, and the audience; if it does one of the following:
The artwork redefines the organizational context for the production, display, and distribution of art A good example of this is the usage of alternative spaces in order to make the art appear unsellable. The artwork redefines the nature of the artistic role or the extent to which the artist participates in other social institutions, which provides a good niche of avant-garde artists in the middle class.
Differences with Post-Modernism While the two terms are used interchangeably today, some argue that the difference between the two lie in their approach to innovating art. According to Jochen Schulte-Sasse, the two differ in the fact that Post-modernism wants to destroy old conceptions of art to replace them with new (without any reference to the social impact of the art). According to Diana Crane, post-modernists do this through a variety of ways, namely through creating effects of polysemy, ambiguity, and parody. Post-modernists also only focused on the technique of their art rather than the social impacts of their art. However, avant-garde wants to innovate art and also communicate social issues within it. It could also be defined that post-modernism uses their art with the intent to shock the person viewing the art while avant-garde, while it also often shocks the viewer, uses their art to communicate a message through the art while also using the art to shock the viewer.
Subgenres of the avant-garde While avant-garde is a solitary art form, it has had a variety of subgenres attached to the art form throughout its history, with each communicating their own distinct messages. Some of them, like Dadaism and Pop Art, use the art to provide a social commentary. Others, like Abstract Expressionism, use outer-worldly figures and colors to evoke an emotional response.Abstract Expressionism." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 14 Nov. 2010 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1963/Abstract-Expressionism>. Finally, there are some like Minimalism"minimalism." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 14 Nov. 2010 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/384056/minimalism>. which use their art for the sake of making art without any emotional or social meanings behind them. While there are myriad different avant-garde subgenres that came about during its popularity in America, the four subgenres that played the biggest roles in American Popular Culture are Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art.
Dadaism
Dadaism was the first major subgenre of avant-garde art to cross over into America. Dadaist artists, in many ways, wanted to contrast from the typical artist at the time from their idea of being against typical artistic conventions at the time and being anti-art. A good example of their anti-art approach came through what Dadaists call the "ready-mades," the most notable being Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which was a porcelain urinal. Ready-mades such as this caused great debate in the art community concerning the definition of art and how Dadaists should play in this definition.
Commonalities Between Pieces While Dadaist pieces cannot be determined through a particular artistic form, many Dadaist artists collaborated in groups with each other in order to create their art, united on either to create art based on social issues (particularly in Europe) or to mock the art world in general (mostly in America). In America, the center of this movement came from two locations in the New York-area: at Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery "291," and at the studio of Walter Arensberg. In addition to group collaboration, artists of the Dada movement depended more on spontaneity and chance than following other established artists. They focused on rejecting the ideas formed by established artists and art creation and used methods such as collage, photomontage, and found-object construction to create their art. While this art form started strong in 1916 in Germany, it eventually faded out by 1922 in both Europe and America. However, despite its decline, Dada would play a major influence on other avant-garde and nihilistic art-forms in the future, including the Punk movement in the '1970s.
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was another major avant-garde genre that, unlike Dadaism, was born in and popular in the United States. A number of artists that were practitioners of this art form include Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Much like Dadaism in America, the center of the movement was in New York City.
Commonalities Also, much like Dadaism, although many of the artists worked together in creating their art, the art pieces cannot be determined through one particular art form. Pieces often varied differently between painting styles from both the techniques that were used in the piece and quality of expression of the pieces. Despite the drastic differences between pieces, Abstract Expressionism shares several broad characteristics. These characteristics includes:
Each piece depicts forms that are not found in the visible world Each emphasize free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expressionism They exercise a freedom of technique with emphasis on exploitation of the physical character of the paint to evoke expressive qualities (violence, lyricism, etc.) They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with a similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display the abandonment of conventionally structured composition built up out of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Finally, the paintings fill large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.