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The intertemporal avant-garde

Conventional art history sees the avant-garde as a series of historical movements occurring mainly in Europe just before, during, and just after World War I. However, I propose that it is more useful to see it as a series of separate spacetime events joined intertemporally by a transdimensional avant-garde thought virus.

Although each historical manifestation of the avant-garde has specific characteristics peculiar to its particular circumstances, they all share certain common aspects:

• alienation from bourgeois capitalist society
• activism and antagonism towards the public and public institutions, especially official and academic art
• a fundamental break with the past in favour of revolutionary utopianism
• self-consciousness as an elite vanguard of the future.

What, you may ask, about novelty and experimentation? Aren’t these core elements of avant-garde art? We must beware the romantic myth of the artist as a lone genius who creates works of art out of nothing. We are more inclined to see both the production and reception of art in terms of game theory. In these terms, players (artists, viewers) have certain competencies in the rules of the game (aesthetic canons). They use these competencies to process information from the environment. In the case of the artist, the product of that information processing then becomes part of the environment, creating a feedback loop.

Avant-garde art adapts the rules of the game to its own revolutionary utopian purposes. Historically, the most effective means it has had to do this has been novelty and experimentation, but this need not always be the case. For example, in our recent past the YBAs have exhausted the classic avant-garde tactic of using sensations to shock the public. There is nothing to be gained by merely coming up with new sensations. The particular circumstances of each manifestation of the intertemporal avant-garde determine the artistic strategies of that manifestation.

The avant-garde can only flourish in a bourgeois capitalist society. The experience of the Russian avant-garde after the Revolution shows us that. The members of the avant-garde tend to come from the educated middle class and are alienated from both class and society. Comparing the revolutionary potential of modern technological progress with the actual uses it is put to by advanced consumer capitalism, it is not hard to see where the avant-garde programme comes from.

The relations between avant-garde art and advanced capitalist society are complex and paradoxical. Although avant-garde art is opposed to the dominant beliefs and values of capitalism, it needs the capitalist art market in order to exist. This is one way in which the avant-garde is like a virus: like the ’flu, it can’t get so successful it completely kills off its hosts. This has been the downfall of all the historical avant-garde art movements.

This alienation from advanced capitalism -– in which everyday life is ‘redefined as the pleasurable consumption of material goods within a system of corporate hegemony and male supremacy’ – is what leads to both the avant-garde’s activism and its antagonism. An avant-garde movement is by definition activist. It rejects the dominant society outright and agitates for the future revolutionary utopia of which it is the precursor. For this reason, the avant-garde can’t be funded by, or associated with, public institutions. The avant-garde stands in opposition to official art.

Avant-garde art will have nothing to do with official art until, in the words of Leon Trotsky, there is:

...a gigantic expansion in the scope and artistic quality of industry, and we understand here, under industry, the entire field without exception of the industrial activity of man ... It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music, and architecture – will lend this process beautiful form ... Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonised, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will be dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will form.

This is the future society that avant-garde art is the vanguard of, where there is no distinction between art and everyday life. Avant-garde art rejects current official and academic aesthetic canons in favour of those of the revolutionary utopian society evoked by Trotsky.

The historical assumption that this society is in the future could be a result of a failure to think four-dimensionally. Certain solutions to some of Einstein’s relavistic equations enable not only travel along closed timelike curves (that is, into the past) but also into alternate spacetimes. If there are, as the many-worlds solution in quantum physics proposes, an infinite number of possible worlds, then every possibility exists somewhere. Therefore, if it is possible for humans to develop an avant-garde revolutionary utopian society, there is an alternate world in which they have. In fact, there will be a multitude of such worlds, from those where a species of the Homo genus evolved that is so much more advanced than us that it has never developed anything other than anarchist societies to those that are closer to our own world but where the Revolution succeeded. Through transdimensional quantum entanglement, it should be possible to communicate telepathically with these worlds. Experimental results so far have proved inconclusive, but it is thought that this is the main vector for the transmission of the virus.

What is known is that there have been at least two major outbreaks of the transdimensional avant-garde thought virus in the recent historical past: in northern Italy during the early 15th century and in Europe during the early 20th century. Conditions in our current spacetime co-ordinates are ripe for another outbreak. Our analysis of the main symptoms allows us to make some predictions.

A contemporary manifestation of intertemporal avant-garde art will probably not use media officially sanctioned by major institutions, such as video, photography, and installation. It will more likely use those media that have proved most effective historically: paintings, drawings, and manifestos. It will be found mostly in sympathetic dealer galleries, online, and in short-run publications. It will denounce the absurdities and hypocrisies of our time. It will reject irony. It will have clearly defined revolutionary utopian aims and strategies informed by a deep historical consciousness.

Why science fiction is the only legitimate art form of the 20th and 21st centuries

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to begin with a quote by Philip K Dick from 1974:

How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitutude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this right in front of the enemy?

Not through the old-fashioned ways of writing while you’re in the bathroom, but how does one do this in a truly future technological state? Is it possible for freedom and independence to arise in new ways under new conditions? That is, will new tyrannies abolish these protests? Or will there be new responses by the spirit that we can’t anticipate?

By only legitimate art form, I mean that which exemplifies the culture, the place and time in which the artwork is made -– the zeitgeist if you will, the spirit of the times. For example, in the 15th century, Western culture’s sudden new access to Arab maths and Greek science caused deep societal and cultural change. New continents were discovered and double-entry bookkeeping was invented.

’Man is the measure of all things’ was the new credo, as exemplified by perspective painting, where the average height of a man was literally the measure used to create pictorial space. If we compare a 15th century painting that’s still in the International Gothic style...

...with Piero della Franscesca’s Flagellation...

...it should be obvious which is the legitimate 15th century artwork.

We live in an advanced capitalist society, one that is only made possible through perpetual advances in technology. We need technology to advance simply to maintain the society that we have. This is an incredible thing. The industrial revolution represents a radical break with the past. Previously, every generation basically lived the same kind of lives as their parents and grandparents. Change happened on a much longer timescale. Let’s watch our first film. As well as being a nice illustration of how science fiction exemplifies our culture, it also shows how much things have changed in just half a lifetime. [Caltex ad]

We live radically different lives than practically all of our ancestors, pretty much mostly cos we have artificial lighting and regular clocks. Modern cities never sleep. There’s always someone up doing something. We are taller and we live much longer and easier lives than most people who have ever lived. Of course, all this comes at a cost. Two hundred years of industrialisation has stripped out virtually all of the readily accessible minerals and oil, wiped out a significant proportion of the world’s species, and fucked the climate for at least the next few thousand years.

By advanced capitalist society, I mean of course that we are now a consumer-driven post-industrial capitalist society. As the avant-garde art political group the Situationist International identified in the mid-50s:

The project of the postwar West is to redefine everyday life to mean the pleasurable consumption of material goods in a system of male supremacy and corporate hegemony.

This is the 50s future that we inhabit.

Like the revolution, the science fiction future – jet packs and holidays on Mars, an end to poverty and disease and work, and our descendents spreading out among the stars – was never going to happen.

Science fiction has always been about using metaphors of a technological future to talk about modern life now. Although it originated in the European avant-garde, as I will shortly demonstrate, it really came into its own in mass-produced pulp fiction and film – two media that couldn’t exist without industrial capitalism – so that with science fiction you get that magic marriage between form and content that produces great art. As Philip K Dick said in 1969:

[I]t embodies some of the most subtle, ancient, and far-reaching dreams, ideas, and aspirations of which thinking man is capable. In essence, it’s the broadest field ... permitting the most far-ranging and advanced concepts of every possible type; no variety of idea can be excluded from SF; everything is its property.

Let’s watch our second film, by Dunedin animator Fred O’Neill. [Fred O’Neill]

Some recurring science fiction images – robots and spaceships, pocket communicators and computer terminals that can access all of human knowledge – are now a part of our everyday life. In a lot of ways, science fiction has formed our world. Take the rocket ship, the ultimate metaphor for the American love affair with the motorcar, itself a quintessential modern thing. The visual metaphor of the rocket informed the design of 50s cars, huge things that were all fins and swooping lines, creating a feedback loop that’s continued to the present day. Just look at my Star Trek communicator! [Wave cellphone around.]

As I mentioned before, all this had its origin in the avant-garde art movement of the early 20th century. In 1904, while still an art school student, Francis Picabia, who would go on to paint the world’s first ever abstract painting five years later, declared:

One day all of us young painters ... will be the masters of Paris and turn the Champ Elysees into an immense playground. In circles, in serried rows, delimited by geometrical figures, we will set up all the plaster casts of the schools, all the marbles of the Louvre, the statues of the gardens and museums. And then the astonished bourgeoisie will see something unique. With a fusillade of stones we will demolish the Discobulous, the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus de Milo, and the Venus de Medici.

As usual, artists were the first to see the way things were. For the first time ever, the Golden Age moved from the past into the future. Rather than being dispensed by gods, we would use technology to transform ourselves into gods.

In 1909, the Italian poet Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto and went on a highly successful speaking tour of Europe. The Futurists glorified speed and technology – Marinetti wrote ecstatically about crashing his car, prefiguring J.G. Ballard – and, just like the student Picabia, wanted to destroy the art of the past and start afresh, create a modern art for a modern society.

In Moscow in 1913, the only performance of the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the sun ended in riots. In it:

[T]he sun, representative of the decadent past, is torn down from the sky, locked in a concrete box, and given a funeral by the Strong Men of the Future. The Traveller in Time appears to declare the future is masculine and that all people will look happy, although happiness itself will no longer exist. Meanwhile, the Man with Bad Intentions wages war and the terrified Fat Man finds himself unable to understand the modern world. The opera ends as an aeroplane crashes into the stage.

Kasimir Malevich, most famous for his one-man Suprematist art movement, designed the costumes and backdrops for the opera.

In 1919, he wrote:

One needs but to find the mutual relationships of two bodies moving in space; the earth and the moon; between these two, there may be constructed a new Suprematist satellite, equipped with all the elements, which will move in orbit, shaping its new path. In analysing Suprematist form in motion, we come to the conclusion that movement along a straight line towards any planet may be conquered in no other way than by circular movement of interstitial Suprematist satellites that form a straight line of circles from satellite to satellite.

Of course, between 1913 and 1919, technological progress reached its logical conclusion in the horrific mass murder that is industrialised warfare, something else never before seen on the face of the earth. As a result, the cyborg was born.

The Dada movement was a response to this madness. In Berlin, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch invented photomontage, a new visual medium that transformed the dominant society’s industrially produced propaganda and advertising into art.

George Grosz incorporated the technique into his paintings, explicitly portraying the plight of modern man using the metaphor of an android.

In New York, which he described as ‘the cubist, the futurist city’, Francis Picabia had worked through abstraction to a new mechanomorphic style.

Here he portrays the human condition as machines that fail to connect, endlessly repeating the same hopeless motions, going and getting nowhere, just like in a Philip K Dick novel.

People generally consider Dada to be a precursor of Surrealism, but that’s bollocks. Its true successor was Constructivism. The Constructivists also wanted to transform society into a technological utopia. They made no distinction between advanced art and everyday objects, such as chairs and tables. Here’s Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, a true science fiction extravaganza.


Tatlin’s Monument was:

...to be built from industrial materials: iron, glass and steel. In materials, shape, and function, it was envisioned as a towering symbol of modernity. It would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The tower's main form was a twin helix which spiraled up to 400 m in height, which visitors would be transported around with the aid of various mechanical devices. The main framework would contain three enormous rotating geometric structures. At the base of the structure was a cube which was designed as a venue for lectures, conferences and congress meetings, and would complete a rotation in the span of one year. In the centre of the structure was a cone, housing executive activities and completing a rotation once a month. The topmost one, a cylinder, was to house an information centre, issuing news bulletins and manifestos via telegraph, radio and loudspeaker, and would complete a rotation once a day. There were also plans to install a gigantic open-air screen on the cylinder, and a further projector which would be able to cast messages across the clouds on any overcast day.

After World War II, which brought its own delightful technological innovations, modern art got hijacked by the CIA, which kind of fucked it for a while.

However, rather than dwelling on that, let’s have a look at Len Lye’s Birth of the Robot, which has a really nice juxtaposition of classical and modern motifs and which sums everything up nicely. [Len Lye]

Okay, I’ll finish with a new generation of NZ artists who are using science fiction forms to talk about their interests and concerns, and then, if we’ve got time, I’ll answer any questions.

First, we have Andrew McLeod.

This is by Brendon Wilkinson [slide 11]. When I was researching this talk, I came across this quote by Brendon: ‘For me, surrealism and science fiction are the only interesting things to come out of the 20th century, in terms of art.’

This is by Yvonne Todd.

Here we have Matt Hunt.

Here’s Paul Faris.

This one’s by Stephen Clover.

Finally, this is one of mine. It’s called Signs of a doomed civilisation.

Any questions?

[NB: These are the notes and slides from the talk that the Party Leader gave at the New Zealand Film Archive on 2 June at the instigation of Mark Willams. The Party Leader would like to acknowledge both Mark and Anna Dean of the Archive, without whom this would not have been possible.]