avant garde, darling

Merriam-Webster

an intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts especially in the arts

exists only in the past. What's past is perhaps that particular label for a perennial activity, and particular experiments whose outcomes are now known.

If that's so, what do we now call people developing new or experimental concepts?

and serious answer here__________________________________

Now I certainly wouldn't call him or the software designers who made Radiosity 'avant garde', because I agree with Mark that the term smacks more of Modernism than modernity. But I have no problem calling them an intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts especially in the arts.

'I know the subtlety of the lyrics is lost in front of this mostly non-English speaking audience who've come, essentially, to hear people making sexy avant noise with Max/MSP.'

Interesting that here too I associate 'avant' with a software program rather than an artist or movement. So maybe, to answer my own question upthread, it's software designers who best incarnate our idea of 'the avant garde' now.

This is about as insightful as the NME thinking the word intellectual must always have the prefix 'pseudo-'. And if Jel really is 'the avenger' for passing such a daring comment, who exactly is having their disparagement vanquished, their honour salvaged? People who fail to develop new or experimental concepts, especially in the arts, don't think they're particularly cool and clever, and aren't really?

Man, the thing is, I'm tired of creativity being so po-faced and worthy. It should be encouraged, but it's this whole approval from 'creative peers' thing that annoyes me.

for a guy who bangs on about how important it is to celebrate being ahead of the curve, you sure get crotchety when you're the one who's out of the loop, don't you?

This is a problem we have in our culture, and it relates to a perceived incompatibility between the concept of universal equality of worth (everybody is equal) with the concept of difference of ability (some people are better at some things). Oddly enough, people don't have a problem with this when it comes to approving sportspersons, perhaps because sports performances are quantifiable in a way avant garde performances aren't.

is 'avant-garde' necessarily intellegentsia led? can it be led from elsewhere? or does this have a different name?

is there an argument that the intellegentsia, or what could be called the traditional/conservative avant garde (or just plain 'avant garde' if we accept original dictionary definition), are second wave 'developers'/'distributors'/'presenters' rather than first wave originators/initiators?

( though i think it always was fairly complex, in that Dada and Surrealism etc were generally co-opting and exploring techniques and buried ideas already abroad in the mass culture of their day: it's just that we have less excuse for trying to squeeze the omnipresent stuff of creativity back into the toothpaste tube of mere bohemian self-regard, and pretending it's where it all came from ever...)

(i love it when momus justifies himself by appealing to marx: "putting themselves at the disposal of the proletariat" = exactly what he is RESISTING on this and every other thread he's ever posted to about this topic, and EXACTLY THE ISSUE I TOOK UP WITH HIM ON THE VICE THREAD: that a great deal of his (written) time seems to taken up with policing the boundary between bohemian zones and the rest of the world in order to ensure that the word "creative" etc, is only Ever Used Correctly, by the self-selected elite, of itself.... )

Arf arf, while you were writing that I was posting to the Style Labs thread about how my excitement about Berlin Mitte was like that of a glass blower arriving in Venice and seeing the glassworks there!

(Still reading your post...)

Jel, the contemporary art world is always laughing at itself (something I like) but obv. on its own terms.

Momus, these 'art worlds' you've known which 'put themselves at the service of the proletariat', could you tell me a bit more about them please?

Gareth I think your point about the intelligensia being filters / re-presenters is right when it comes to fashion and probably pop, but not necessarily art or lit. (not sure about this but it seems OK).

I've been at pains on both threads to say that's not my position, in case you're saying it is.

RE: who uses the word 'creative'. Fuck, anyone can use it of anyone. All I notice in the context ilxOr is that people hate it and disown it. Why has nobody addressed my point about the double standard between the 'sports avant garde' and the art avant garde?

No, I said the art worlds I've known are remarkably fluid socially. As a musician / artist I've worked with a lot of declassee people, and consider myself that too. As for being 'at the service of the proletariat', I don't think we can claim to have met Marx's criteria yet. Unless me doing Pizza Hut jingles counts!

Joke or not, I get really annoyed with the 'oh, you think you're SO COOL' brigade. Here is why. Thinking you're doing something worthwhile, interesting and important is one of the ways you keep yourself warm inside. Anytime you create something it feels good, it's not about some woolly worthiness. Being the first/only person to think of things WHERE YOU ARE is really stressful, you've got to have such a thick skin and a disposition that doesn't register abuse from the thick-skulled. If we reflexively stopped worthwhile, interesting and important activities the minute some heckler says 'oh, you're just trying to act cool, ner, aren't you special' people would still be living in caves and some fucker would have aborted Lascaux because someone else surely came up and said (in Gaul Cave-person lingo) 'Ooh, you think you're just so clever.'

There is only one appropriate response to hecklers like this. And it is, 'Got any bright ideas of your own, or are you just going to stand there criticising mine?' It is not 'oh well, rumbled, why do I bother?' Maybe five per cent of the time you'll get a useful response if you challenge your critic. But the other 95% is always TUMBLEWEEDS as the 'critic' thinks of nothing further to say, because they have nothing further to say.

I just dislike the use of a "you don't get/like the concept" as a defence mechanism.

momus, i have never seen anyone on ilx hate or disown the concept of creativity, although i have seen some people dislike the appropriation of the term as something that only some people do, and only in certain areas of certain cities in certain countries

People love the word 'creative' here: DJ Martian to thread!

What about sports? What about sports? Liverpool for the cup! Nah, Chelsea are the better team!

*I* just don't happen to think you find all (or even most of) the people with the greatest creative talent in easy-to-consume little bohemian areas of cities.

what do you think of the boy Baros, momus?

tim is OTM abt snobbery.

(also the washing machine mending man hasn't turned up yet grrr)

(on the other hand my mum is sounding a bit better on the phone just now)

oh, i see how you've misread my post now, momus. looking at it, its unclear what i mean. obviously only some people are creative, but the way you put it it sounds like only people who live in certain areas can be counted as creative. this kind of thinking excludes Marc Acardipane and Jonny L, this makes me sad:(

i am a dopplereffekt fan. it would be pushing it to say they are objectively going to influence/outsell/be more important than fischerspooner, but i still bought their album, i still prefer them

shoreditch/wburg dons go out onto the streets and pinch their clothing ideas and style and repackage it as fashion, hastening its appearance in the magazines and clothing stores, ultimately to be sold back to its creators are inflated prices

the comparison to sports is bullshit because you can see that player x is better y or z because you can see the contributions on the pitch (and things are measured in winners medals) whereas a piece of music is far harder to judge because you've got to look at the concept and the end result and be able to judge whether its all 'worth' something.

Of course, we have the Turner Prize, Mercury Prize, Booker Prize etc. People seem to want the arts to be 'measured in winners' medals' too.

"i am the only person here who uses binaries" vs "some people want the arts to be quantifiable"

also: quantity becomes quality (hegel)

the interesting thing abt the quantification of athletics is it throws up a whole contested area abt "level playing fields", eg taking drugs is unacceptable but you can research and apply diets and no one fusses — also no one says country [y] is a big old cheat for being rich enough to hire sports coaches and pay for training facilities

(dirty crossword = avant garde sport)

40 is divisible by 2. I get there in the end, pulling up my ladder behind me. 'I've got 40 versions all dying to get the part / And so with a change of mind comes a change of heart'.

What about avant gardening?

mark s, could you explain how the avant garde are stopped from breaking rules, and how sport is delineated by breakable rules?? i must be missing yr point

Panthers broke into the temple and drank the ceremonial wine. This happened at the same time each year. Eventually it was incorporated into the ceremony.

Franz Kafka

There are occassionally radical innovations and paradigm shifts within sports, but they are directed toward the end of improving the historically recognized and quantifiable result, such as landing a higher pole vault or increasing the number of strikeouts.

Anyway, Momus' original question was not whether there is an avant-garde in sports but why it seems more difficult to accept that there might be differently-abled people in the arts, as people seem to accept in sport. There are plenty of interesting hypotheses for this premise, but the premise itself is open to question. There is plenty of jealously and second-guessing in sports. How about the obssession with Lance Armstrong's supposed doping? The Olympic Committe's constant variance on the professional/amateur status of eligible athletes? College sports recruiting and eligibility violations?

heh mark I bet you got right up to saying 'non-art' instead of 'apres-garde' there, then realised that wasn't allowed.......
(more worryingly, you are plainly a man obsessed ref. Eddie The Eagle)

Cricket Riots! haha it's an interesting 'lap of the gods' aesthetic that prevails there - they also allow weather to decide matches. Why bother with players, just have 2 teams of meteorologists armed with seaweed, rulers and jam jars in a prediction competition.

Can't quite buy this 'avant-garde sports' thing - keep visualising the 'upper-class twit of the year' 100m race.
(Then again, isn't rugby = avant-garde football, since it was invented by a rule-breaking (crap) footballer who decided to just 'pick it up and run with it' - also thus inventing a futire management cliché?)

but developing new or experimental concepts != creativity in the artistic sense

I once took a college course on "scientific creativity" which was basically an apology for science. Trying to equate science and art is very DUD.

Oh, I think there's plenty of this kind of reactionary thought on ILX

developing new concepts is exactly what many artists are doing today, but there are other forms of creativity. i think i would prefer it if a lot of conceptual art wasn't actually executed, but they just wrote down the concept. "hey, how about if we had a large balloon dog that filled the room" "that would be great. let's not though, eh"

(Is not really getting too in-depth into the theory of creativity a burden or a blessing?)

josh suggested to me last night that the moderators need to post a sign saying "feed the momus at your own risk." that risk, being of course, mostly wasted time.

i don't think ilx is anti-creativity at all. i can't think of a single person on ilx who doesn't do something "Creative", even if only for themselves. i think the problem is that jel's "home truths"-style creativity (which is what i assume we could call ilx/freaky trigger as a whole since it done out of love and [necessary?] self-exclusion) clashes with momus' "style labs" out-and-about creativity, to the point where both (with momus being more voiciferous obv) attempt to negate the other. (momus' beloved binaries.) maybe because - as tom pointed out - momus is a closet cottage industry/home truthser.

amusingly jess, you may be the only person on ilx that actually made momus drop his guard!

Gareth posted while I was writing the above... I think part of momus inflexibility might come from the fact that he treats this as more of an open internet forum than many here, who treat it more as a circle of friends. Of I don't know him (or any ILXers) personally so I can;t say for sure...

(if you don't feel included in ilx, why post here? not ilm so much as ile.)

Visual art at its most avant-garde seemed to translate into concept art. I remember reading a Joseph Kosuth essay with a title like "Art 101" and he said something along the lines of, "That art is best which most questions what art is." I think this sounded exciting at some point, but eventually I decided I didn't really like the idea. It seemed to imply the potential for an endless one-up-manship. (I think of the contest of Zen patriarchs here to. The dust on the mirror blah blah blah beat by "What dust and what mirror?" or something like that.)

I don't think I can imagine a more radical reconsidering of what music is than Cage's, but ultimately I can't get with his program.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry was the most current poetic avant-garde I was aware of, and in some of its most extreme statements (e.g. those of Steve McCaffery) it seemed to be asking for the Jonathan Swift treatment, except that no parody could really go any further. This might be the next step, or the next several steps, but I found the vast bulk of it so dreary. When I was in college I dutifully sat through readings by Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein, among others, but I was not won over.

Of course, this doesn't mean I never like art that was or is currently presented as avant-garde, and maybe I just bet on the wrong avant-garde horses; but the avant-garde tendency to try to complete the equation and find the next most radical thing to do has gotten old for me.

so why is it acceptable to demand outsiders make the effort for Established Artists A, B and C, but not for jel?

not to get into all this again, but an open internet forum doesnt necessarily mean inflexibility. its the to-ing and fro-ing of ideas, the give and take, the interesting new perspectives, the "ahh, i see" that makes an internet forum - otherwise it becomes a manifesto comparison club. i like the idea that people bring stuff here, but take away things too.

(i often think the discussions with momus are more about presentation that content - ie there is more commonality than would immediately appear, but the rather austere presentation can be offputting sometimes - strangely unplayful in delivery actually momus!)

*

I don't think momus is a troll. (This is another thread about Momus.)

(on the if... thread he shifted position between posts, and when i called him on it, he said — correctly — "it's called thinking", but he didn't announce the change w."oh wait you made me change my mind") (i mean, not that there's a rule that you have to, but if yr gnna say YAY dialectics then it's maybe helpful to signal that you can distinguish the analysis from the synthesis etc)

Today has involved his poverty-stricken understanding of racial issues and football, mind. The big ol' plank.

Whoops - wrote this while Tim was replying.

To tell the truth I was a bit peeved at Momus for a time for his unilateral movement of alt.fan.momus traffic to these boards - everyone who followed him here is great and adds a lot to ILE/M, but for a while it distorted the 'just-another-poster' vibe, where everyone scraps around together. I think the distortion has long since been absorbed, but sometimes there's this "Momus against the world" attitude, where really Momus is just one of our more combatative regulars, he's just one people off-board might have heard of.

I agree with Tim, too - I'd be sad if Momus stopped posting. In return I'd also say that I like the fact that ILM and ILE very rarely (in my eyes) takes cheap shots at Momus' music, or kowtows before him for making it. A lot of these discussions about creativity could very easily get nasty along those lines, and generally they don't.

"not to get into all this again, but an open internet forum doesnt necessarily mean inflexibility. its the to-ing and fro-ing of ideas, the give and take, the interesting new perspectives, the "ahh, i see" that makes an internet forum" -- sure, but I still think you need a thicker shell in general when engaged in internet dialogue.

"(This is another thread about Momus.)" I'm sure he wishes all the publicity would translate to selling some CDs at least...

for the record i did not come from alt.fan.momus

Yes, you guys do make me change my mind. No, I don't come here to scratch your backs. But neither do I come here to put your backs up. I believe in some things passionately, that's all. To say threads I've been involved in have led nowhere is ridiculous. To say I use binaries when you all do, or make straw men when you all do is also ridiculous. My position on this very thread got strawed up as 'momus's position — as you're defending it, g — is that avant-gardism is "creative" (for want of a better word) as long it doesn't exclude him'. Honestly!

This fear of trolls is hard for me to understand. What if I actually were a 'troll'? As long as I was a coherent and intelligent one, what matter? Is it outsiders you fear? Do you only earn the right to post by first picking fleas off the big monkey's back?

I post to points, not to personalities. I go to meets occasionally, but I don't come here for phatic / tribal reasons. I've been insulted here ten times more than I insult. 'Feed the Momus at your own risk' is pretty patronising to posters. Better advice would be 'you get the Momus you deserve'.

New thread 'The real Momus Lambert'. NOT! (But some here would love it more than threads addressing actual issues offboard.)

I called you a Utopian Troll, Momus, because I wish all Trolls behaved like you: provoke but remain civil etc. Other Trolls (here and elsewhere) have been a much less pleasant experience. So, uh, thanks.

"Troll" in the intentionally insulting to get a reaction sense = dud.

Momus has maybe occasionally qualified as the former and never AFAIK as the latter.

In terms of the personal, Momus is quite right here (and I've once or twice said things I shouldn't have -- having met him several times now, I find him a very friendly and thoughtful person every time).

But I think more than one person here thinks that while you are not insulting the particular most of the time -- I know Jess will have different feelings -- your general considerations and sometimes condemnations of wider things and 'peoples,' if you like, can really annoy. My own example of feeling this way was when you condemned suburbia outright and I had my own response of 'well, wait, I live in suburbia and I'm not doing all these things you're accusing me of based on where I live.'

But perhaps all the answers just posted address this already...

i know there's a diff'rence between ilx "jess" and Jess.

I should bloody well hope so!

Tim, I was questioning Momus' premise, not validating it.

One of my main quarrels with Momus is his consistant misreading of Marx. "intelligentsia" is not a classless class but rather an element of the petty-bourgiouse. some intellectuals declass themselves and put themselves at the service of the proletariat, but this the exception rather than the norm -- and the declassing is a conscious rather than innate act.

As I recall, Marx said of intellectuals that while the proletariat sells itself hour by hour, intellectuals are forced to sell their very thought to the services of the capitalists.

A better reading of Marx comes from Benjamin's loverly little essay "The Author As Producer" which Momus might actually dig, manifesto-wise.

Sterling, that's all very well and good, but is there one correct reading of Marx? I certainly hope not. Interpretations mutate, especially considering the Marx mothership flew off over 100 years ago:

"Intelligentsia" can come from ANYWHERE - even the son of mill owners - and as soon as this group starts to hail from one kind of background really the potency of their presence starts to taper off. People I would assign to that category are about as likely to have poor parents who can't read as they are to have bourgeois/wealthy/academic backgrounds, just from an 'unscientific' inventory of people I know.

The throwing around of terms like petit-bourgeoisie (which I take to mean the dead middle of middle class, not an elite in the slightest)doesn't help clarify matters. Especially in Britain, you've always got some fucker trying to assign 'class' to you, as if once this is defined, that's it, that explains who you are and what you'll like/think/want. Americans' responses to class are different and muddled in with race. When Nick defines the intelligentsia as a 'classless' class I know what he means: it's not where you're from, it's where you're at (and he has always been extremely utopian, often to his cost, by the way). This is wrong how, exactly?

And declassing as a 'conscious' act? Also depends. Some people I know are borne of a certain background, but no matter how they might try, there's no way they can conform to it and all attempts to do so look silly. On that basis I'd say selection is still 50/50 - yes, you do it to yourself, but don't forget there's a group of people that can do it to you just as easily.

If the statement "Marx says [x]" doesn't allow the response "no he didn't", then the original statemennt is valueless.

That said, I've never claimed to be terribly academic! What I can claim is a wide range of experiences and access to a multitude of viewpoints, a sense of 'divorce' or alienation from many of the class ties that bind so many of us, and a teeny weeny Cassandra complex.

i don't think anyone's actually denying that a bohemian space can allow those within it tremendous freedom from routine prejudice and the encouragement of self-chosen community, and yes, the dream that this space could somehow expand to liberate the whole world — which is the indie vision also, in a somewhat different context, tho also of culty religions and sectarian-schismatic radical parties — *is* utopian... but it's an idea Marx specifically and fairly relentlessly criticised (his anti-Owenite polemic, for example)

It would also seem rather to fall down at another point, which is i think where Momus often runs into trouble: that these zones are often just as aggressively policed from within than from without (in other words, the judgment "where you're at" is also — by definition — exclusionary, so that the Designated Where-You're-At-Zone CAN'T just grow to include everyone and make the world a better less judgmental place...).

I plainly didn't say that there's no room for interpretation. But you will admit that it's possible for people to get things wrong, yes? So if someone comes up with a duff interpretation (or understanmding) of Marx, it's totally legit for someone else to say "you're wrong, and this is why." The proper response to *that*, in turn is either "oh OK" "no I'm not and this is why" NOT "oh well it's all just interpretation".

Opinion through experience is just fine, saying it accords with one particular thinker's ideas requires something more.

Against what standard is utility measured? (Can't tell if you mean useful in an academic sense i.e. moves a discussion in an interesting way, or in a Marxist sense i.e. lends itself to the struggle etc.)

Either way, it's surely fair to argue that Marx specifically and at length provided a critique of the position Momus on the whole espouses, esp.when Momus wz the first person actually to mention Marx.

(When you lift each other
to your mouth and kiss -: drink to drink:
oh how the drinker strangely escapes from the act.
- 'The Second Elegy')

Of course there's no such thing as 'classless' which is why I felt like throwing bread rolls at the television throughout Question Time broadcasts in the 1990s; it's just that the markers have changed. All I'm saying is that my relationship to the mode of production is far too ambivalent to be very easily characterised as a class placement of any kind (a subject I'm admittedly touchy about, there's nothing worse than people thinking you're 'rich' in the classic sense when the reality of my bank balance says otherwise), and that Marx' response to life in an industrial age (fully laid out in his writings, natch) is simply that. I do wonder what he'd make of a post-industrial age where control of the means of production as a power indicator seems to have been replaced by control of access to information about a variety of things as power.

And yes, boho zones are policed, and very aggressively (as a joke, me and N once pretended, with a pad of receipts, to be the actual Fashion Police and handed out 'tickets' while dressed as ludicrously as possible to communicate some irony) but I hope not for superficial, lazy, arbitrary reasons.

It's totally fair enough to disagree with Marx because the world's changed, but to gloss that opinion with "according to Marx" (which I know you didn't) would leave you open to challenge, wouldn't you say?

i think boho zones are policed for pretty good reasons — ie exactly the same reason there has to be a small amount of moderation and censorship on ilx — but the existence of this policing is what makes the utopian political generalisation unfeasible

Mark: he'd be a great contributor to a thread called 'My Scarily Academic Family: Classic or Derridud'. And I think also explains quite a lot about him (no offence Nicholas).

(Yup! Incedentally, I'm so broke I might go down to Shoreditch and fundraise in this manner).

You were very coy in the accompanying photo.

I agree, and that wasn't what I was doing. I was suggesting that there are 'people developing new and experimental concepts' in all sorts of intellectual endeavours, not just 'avant garde art' ones.
And I think the extent to which 'avant garde' art actually develops any 'concepts' outside its own frames of formality and self-reference is pretty limited anyway, in my experience.....but then so is my experience. (Maybe it's not allowed to by the brouhaha generated by the 'massmeejah' whenever it strays from 'proper' art. Or maybe it's just doing its job.)

Sure, science and art are different, and I think people would be a lot better off with taking in parts of both of them. The scientist who relies totally on fact and ignores any creativity gets no where in research or teaching, and the artists who ignores fact cannot do anything. (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance = good book)

http://www.deluxxe.com/futurism/f20foodp.gif

"The diner is served from the right with a plate containing some black olives, fennel hearts and kumquats. From the left he is served with a rectangle made of sandpaper, silk and velvet. The foods must be carried directly to the mouth with the right hand while the left hand lightly and repeatedly strokes the tactile rectangle. In the meantime the waiter sprays the napes of the diners' necks with a conprofumo of carnations while from the kitchen comes contemporaneously a violent conrumore of an aeroplane motor and some dismusica by Bach."

"Convinced that in the probable future conflagration those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win, we Futurists have injected agility into world literature with words-in-liberty and simultaneity. We have generated surprises with illogical syntheses and dramas of inanimate objects that have purged the theatre of boredom. Having enlarged sculptural possibility with anti-realism, having created geometric architectonic splendour without decorativism and made cinematography and photography abstract, we will now establish the way of eating best suited to an ever more high speed, airborne life.
[7]
Above all we believe necessary: a) The abolition of pastasciutta, an absurd Italian gastronomic religion. It may be that a diet of cod, roast beef and steamed pudding is beneficial to the English, cold cuts and cheese to the Dutch and sauerkraut, smoked [salt] pork and sausage to the Germans, but pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental scepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm."

g - yes, but I think they maybe even have fundamentally opposite criteria for 'successful' existence. (I scribbled some notes about this a few years ago, after being puzzled by a speech Eno gave before presenting the Turner Prize - I might dig them out for the big bad bears on ILE to tear apart or laugh at....)