Towards a Newer Avant-Garde

03/27/2020

𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 Platypus Affiliated Society 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 Week 1/10 begins this 𝘚𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 28𝘵𝘩, 11𝘢𝘮 𝘌𝘚𝘛 |10𝘢𝘮 𝘊𝘋𝘛 via Zoom, led by Platypus member Laurie Rojas.

Art and politics • required / + recommended reading Week 1. Art and politics after postmodernism [Artists'] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. [Critics' work] is to recognize it.-- Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996) • Susan Buck-Morss, ...

07/04/2019

Towards a Newer Avant-Garde came out of a dissatisfaction among young artists that the Contemporary Art education they received did not allow them to think about the meaning of art and the meaning of making art beyond the narrow concerns of more or less effective communication or the moral/ethical rectitude of a given idea. Artworks are overdetermined in the mind of Contemporary Art, but that the desire to make art persists is something it cannot conscience.

THE AVANT-GARDE WAS A MODERN THING. It came in the middle of the nineteenth century, circa 1848, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as the proletariat multiplied and the democratic spirit became enamored of the absolutist state under the bewitching spell of the antagonism of capital and labor...

04/18/2019

[...] The constrained possibilities embodied in modern art are, according to Benjamin’s formulation, approached by the subject with a combination of “desire and fear.” Modern artworks embody not only human but “inhuman” potentials—that is, the possibilities for the qualitative transformation of humanity, which we regard with desire and fear. They thus have simultaneously Utopian and dystopian aspects. Modern artworks are as ambivalent as the historical conditions they refract in themselves, “prismatically.” But it is in such ambivalence that art instantiates freedom. It is the task of theory, or critique, to register the non-conceptual while attempting to bring it within the range of concepts. As Adorno put it, the aspiration of modern art is to “produce something without knowing what it is.” In so doing, art acts not only on the future, but also on history.

- Chris Cutrone, The Relevance of Critical Theory to Art Today

The scholar of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s work, Susan Buck-Morss provided a pithy formulation for defin

03/20/2019

"Today as a term, ‘vanguardism’ more often refers to sectarian habits amongst the Left. This usage, Shandro suggests, became popular during the 1960s in reference to Maoist and Trotskyite organizations. This conception “insinuated that sect-like narcissism was implicit in the very notion of a vanguard party,” affirming objections toward any Leninist vanguard. In contrast, “the term ‘avant-garde’ has been applied to cutting-edge artists or works of art that take a critical stance vis-à-vis the conformism of mainstream art and culture.” The avant-garde is seen as capable of provoking the sleeping masses, but does not lead them. An avant-garde “acts out its critically innovative character not really as leadership at all but as a kind of internal exile from the stifling conformism of capitalist society.” Yet a distinction remains between the masses and so-called non-conformist critical thinkers comprising the avant-garde."

This is the first of a two-part article written by Alexander Riccio. The second part, “Towards a new vanguard theory,” will appear in PR #114 in March, 2019.

02/12/2019

We are now planning for Spring's edition of Towards a Newer Avant-Garde, ending in a Spring exhibition! Contact us today!

10/07/2018

Documentation of the show is now up on the main website!

Towards a Newer Avant-Garde presents: "To a Woman Passing By" Inaugural Exhibition, the first effort of SAIC Platypus' art project, "Towards a Newer Avant-Garde".

10/03/2018

JK: What has changed? What is composition today?

FR: It is not clear what music, what composition is today. We used to study counterpoint, but that is not the basic discipline anymore. You hardly find anyone studying counterpoint today, and if so, they do it badly, because their teachers have no idea of it. Maybe composition in that sense does not exist anymore, maybe it comes to an end and something new will come out of it. The same might apply to politics.

A letter from Frederic Rzewski published with permission as introduction to the edited transcript of an interview conducted by Jim Igor Kallenberg on August 22, 2018. Frederic Rzewski is an American composer and pianist.

09/22/2018

"For Buck-Morss, there is indeed a crisis — of (lack of) recognition. Criticism, and hence consciousness of aesthetic experience objectified in artistic practices, was in crisis in postmodernism. Critical theory ceased to be critical — and thus became affirmative, even if it was confused about this. This was the result, in Habermas’s terms, of the “postmodernist” turning away from the “incomplete project” of modern art’s critical response to social modernity: a conservative result, by default, even if under the “pretense” that it was progressive or even radical."

09/21/2018

"To a Woman Passing By"

Obst Friday 9/21, 7-10
Giron Books 2141 w 21st 9/28, 7-10