V
CULTURE
14
THE ABORTIVE INTEGRATION OF ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE :
THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE AND ITS FAILURES
Ales Debeljak1
Abstract The paper presents the historical avant-garde as a linchpin of modern art
and as a standard against which every succeeding art movement must define itself. It
further discusses the radical nature of avant-garde's critical negativity that hoped to
transcend the "institution of modern autonomous art" (Peter Burger). The avant-
garde's critique of art with extra-artistic means, e .g. an affiliation with radical po-
liticalparties, helped turn the style of (modern) art into the (postmodern) art of li fe-style. The avantgarde thus failed to integrate art into everyday life in the name of
social change. What followed was a dissolution of modern art into commercialized
aesthetic practice of postmodern art. In it, an individual could no longer se apromesse
de bonheur that was merely suspended in everyday life, as it was still possible in the
works ofautonomous modern art.
art, historical avant-garde, everyday life, autonomy, commercialization
In this paper, we will present the historical avant-garde as a standard against which every
succeeding art movement must define itself . The avant-garde marshalled a programme to
transcend the institution of autonomous art and integrate art into everyday life in the name
of Utopian social change . This attempt, however, failed insofar as it ended up collapsing the
aesthetic and practical dimensions without ensuing liberating effects . The desublimation of
meaning that stems from the destruction of autonomous art thus marked the dissolution of
art into the commercialized aesthetic practice which one is invited to witness in postmodern
art . In it, the bourgeois individual could no longer see a promesse de bonheur that was
merely suspended in everyday life, as was still possible in the works of autonomous modern
art . If the latter had an impact in shaping the identity of citizens as free and autonomous
persons, it was in terms of negative-critical distance from the marketplace .
The historical avant-garde (Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism, French Surrealism, Dadaism,
Vienna Secession, Jugendstil, the Bauhaus) that came into fully-fledged existence in the 1920s,
meant the first art movement 2 in the history of Western art to conceptually come to terms with the
separate social status of modern art . In doing so, the historical avant-garde responded
DRUŽBOSLOVNE RAZPRAVE, 1994, No.15-16
Ales Debeljak
" . . . to that discovery with its failed attempt to lead art back into life . Postmodernism, one could
argue, is that movement in the history of art that does not attempt to overcome the separateness os
art and life anymore ; it accepts the sact that the sunctional differentiation of society is irreversible by
allowing this insight to shape art's content" (Schulte-Sasse, 1987 : 7) .
The historical avant-garde thus opened up the possibility for a conception of art that would
be continuous with and participate in a social life-world rather than seeking an escape
from it. As such, its aesthetic programme was fundamentally directed against means-ends
rationality, a dominant mode of capitalism . Dadaism and Surrealism, for example, first
came into existence as an outcry against what was then widely understood as the rational-
ized madness of World War I. They attempted to challenge the bourgeois social order tout
court, since the avant-gardists believed that the ruling bourgeois class fanned the flames of
war because it profited from it economically . As a way of carrying out this challenge, the
avant-gardists turned to profoundly antirational means, stressing random choice, the logic
of chance, and the workings of the unconscious as privileged forms of human creativity that
would still have allowed for genuine artistic activity unchecked by instrumental reason.
Consequently, the avant-gardists radically questioned the received bourgeois understanding
of art as a creation that is meaningfully decipherable in terms of rational analysis . Contrary
to the traditional notions of symbolic and cultural meaning in art works, the historical
avant-garde deliberately explored odd places and personalities, prostitutes, flaneurs, and
other marginal urban professions which were of no immediate interest to bourgeois social
and economic concerns. In doing so, the avantgardists revealed their aesthetic agenda: to
discover a hidden truth behind ordinary, neglected, and useless reality .' It is thus safe to say
that the historical avant-garde basically drew its radicalism from its negative response to
the crisis engendered by the process of modern bureaucratization and capitalist develop-
ment. Its attack on inherited cultural structures of tradition was thus
" . . .dialectical in the sense that its destructive strategy is tied to the goal os emancipating
content from ossified forms : the avant-garde protests against the manner in which bourgeois
culture has insufficiently realized its own values, and it promises to carry out the bourgeois
project in general more successfully by jettisoning one particular feature (aesthetic autonomy)"
(Berman, 1989 : 47) .
We suggest that the subjectivization of autonomous art reached its peak in the ultimate
social isolation of autonomous modernist art (Schoenberg, Proust, Kafka, Joyce) . Its
oppositional attitude, that is, its negative-critical rejection of capitalist technologization
and social rationalization, was however contained within the institution of autonomous
art . Thus, aesthetic modernism must be distinguished from the historical avant-garde . The
artistic, social, and political programme of the latter, while stemming from the former, is
different from it . It is based on the radical rejection of both the preceding art styles within
the bourgeois institution of art, and the institution of art tout court. 4 While the historical
avant-garde should be construed as the radicalized excess of modernism, its uniqueness
reveals itself in its social and aesthetic effort
196
THE ABORTIVE INTEGRATION OF ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE :
THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE AND ITS FAILFAILURES
" . . .to attack the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (as
style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis os men . When the avant-
gardists demand art to become practical once again, they do not mean that the content of works of
art should be socially significant . The demand is not raised at the level os the content os individual
works. Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to
determine the effect that works have as does the particular content" (Burger, 1984 : 49) .
The historical avant-garde pushed the modernist negative-critical potential to its extreme
and radically subverted it . It liberated the Utopian aesthetic ideals (beauty, freedom, self-
realization) from inherited artistic categories (genre, form, material, discipline) in order to
translate them into social practice . In other words, radical social revolution was believed to
become possible by way of radical aesthetic innovation . Likewise, the avant-garde artists
searched for a way to re-introduce art into everyday life in order to emancipate the values of
beauty, autonomy, and truth from their "prison-house" of works of art and translate them
into the life praxis . 5
It is important, however, to keep in mind that in terms of social-historical conditions, these
movements would have been unthinkable without massive urbanization, World War I and
the ideas of social revolution and revolution and reform in Europe . Indeed, the crucial im-
petus for the avant-garde's radical disenchantment with bourgeois society was rooted in the
perception of the war as a strategy of bourgeois maximization of profit . Such a perception
was not conducive to the "production of art as usual". The avant-gardists had to radically
transform art if they were to transform the society they found appalling . The catastrophic
effects of the war had dramatically challenged their
" . . .faith in a rational and peaceful future . A civilization that had condoned such inhumanities
did not deserve the conciliations os art : it had lost its credibility . And so the public was baited
with meaningless, aggressively absurd objects : white-haired revolvers, Lesbian sardines, vac-
cinated bread, and flashes of lightning . . .The Dadaists and Surrealists wished to infiltrate a
disturbed world, in order to destroy all its existing patterns, all its accumulated truth, however
compulsive and authoritative" (Gablik, 1984: 115) .
The historical avant-garde thus posited the realization of an absolute aesthetic and social
change as a programmatic goal . However, instead of residing in the art forms of pure imagi-
nation, beauty, and subjectivity, as was the case in all of the previous art styles, the historical
avant-garde's absolute intention found its resonance on the social level . The historical avant-
garde attempted to translate the absolute totality of art works into the totality of everyday
life .
From the viewpoint of autonomous bourgeois art, the history of Western art since the middle of
the 17th century can best be conceptualized as the progressive elimination of heterogenous ele-
ments from art works which become increasingly self-referential and hermetic, ever more distant
from everyday life . The completion of the programme of the autonomy of an reached its para-
mount point in the l'art pour fart movements at the turn of the century (Symbolism, Aestheti-
cism, Neoromanticism), thus creating the conditions for an attack on autonomy by the avant-
197
Ales Debeljak
garde. A credible attack is possible only once the immanent possibilities of the existing model are
exhausted .
The institution of autonomous art is, as the common academic parlance has it, a product of
bourgeois society in which the work of art has become liberated from its subordination to
traditional ritualist legitimation . Moreover, artistic production has been transformed from
a collaborative practice into an individual one . Similarly, its public reception is individual-
ized, as opposed to the collective art consumption practiced at the medieval feudal court,
church, and monastery. As bourgeois domination became consolidated in the 19th century,
the institution of autonomous art came to be reflected in the subject-matter of the art works
themselves. Artistic content such as the relationship between the individual and society,
central to Realism, became replaced by an increasing concentration on the medium of ex-
pression itself . This tendency reaches its peak in the Aestheticism of the fin-de-siecle .
The artistic style of Aestheticism as practised by Stephane Mallarme and his circle has been
described in terms of negative theology, meaning the form of the idea of "pure" art which
not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject-matter
(Benjamin, 1969 : 226) . Modernist art, stemming from Aestheticist tenets, is in a certain
sense the result of the transformations of each individual's primary emotional investment
which came to be focused in the separate sphere of personal relations, while the public
sphere gradually lost its significance as a means of self-expression .
Modernist art, however, articulates a protest against capitalist society while remaining in
complex ways related to it . The most extreme version of this claim has been advanced by
Adorno :
The modernity os art lies in its mimetic relation to a petrified and alienated reality . This, and
not the denial of that reality, is what makes art speak . One consequence is that modern art
does not tolerate anything that smacks of innocuous compromise . Baudelaire. . .neither repro-
duced reification nor rallied against it . Instead, he protested against it indirectly through
experience of its archetypes, using artistic form as a medium of such an experience . It is this
that enables him to rise to a level of art hlgh above late-romantic sentimentalism . His strength
as a writer lies in the ability to syncopate the overwhelming objectivity of the commodity-
sorm, which absorbs into itself all human residues, with the objectivity of the work as such,
which is prior to the living subject . Here the absolute work of art merges with the absolute
commodity" (Adorno, 1984a: 31) .
For Adorno it is the "absoluteness" of the modernist work or art, its abstract, depersonalized,
visibly constructed as opposed to organically composed character which allows it to criticize
- by way of allusion and metaphor - a social world of commodity fetishism, that is, a world
in which relations between people are transformed into relations between things. Unlike
this indirect critical rejection, the historical avant-garde movements set out to directly at-
tack the autonomous status of art itself . What is negated is not an earlier form of art, as in
modernism, but art as an institution :
198
THE ABORTIVE INTEGRATION OF ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE :
THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE AND ITS FAILURES
"The avant-gardistes proposed the sublation of art . . . in the Hegelian sense: art was not to be simply
destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life, where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed
form. The avant-gardistes thus adopted an essential element of Aestheticism . Aestheticism had
made the distance srom the praxis of lise the content os works . The praxis of lise to which Aestheti
cism refers and which it negates is the means-end rationality os the bourgeois everyday. Now, it is
not the aim of the avant-gardistes to integrate art into this praxis . On the contrary, they assent to the
Aestheticists' rejection of the world and its means-end rationality . What distinguishes them from the
latter is the attempt to organize a new life-praxis srom a basis in art" (Burger, 1984 : 94) .
L'art pour fart and the historical avant-garde thus represent two different ways by which
modern art rejected bourgeois society, the former retreating into a reflexive exploration of
the institution of art itself, the latter seeking to restore art to the social world as part of the
struggle to socially change and aesthetically transform the world itself .
From this vantage point it can be seen that, in a certain sense, the historical avant-garde is
but an uneasy outcome of contradictions inherent in the bourgeois institution of autono-
mous art. Insofar as previous historical periods can only be fully understood when the present
period is on the brink of disintegration, it is precisely the historical avant-garde that needs
to be understood as the self-criticism of modern art . Witness Burger :
"The totality of the developmental process os art becomes clear only in the stage os self-criti
cism. Only after art has in sact wholly detached itself from everything that is the praxis of life
can two things be seen to make up the principle os development os art in bourgeois society :
the progressive detachment of art from real life contexts, and the correlative crystallization of
a distinctive sphere of experience, i .e . the aesthetic" (Burger, 1984 : 22-23) .
Burger is right to underscore the contrast between the model of "the total work of art",
characteristic of the autonomous institution of art from Goethe's Romanticism to Stefan
George's Aestheticism on the one hand, and the historical avant-garde which is fundamen-
tally hostile to the separation of life and art on the other . Such a distinction calls for the
following claim. The collapse of the traditional "total work of art", best embodied by
Mallarme's inability to realize this supreme Aestheticist ideal through his unfinished project
of the Absolute Book, therefore did not just usher in a resignation as was the case with
modernist artists . The latter tried, by way of abstraction, schizophrenic consciousness, and
antirepresentation, to express the fragmentation of social experience and individual con-
sciousness while remaining within the bounds of artistic work . In other words, the institu-
tion of art for modernist artists retained its validity as the ultimate domain within which
the succession of styles, artistic innovation, and the critical negation of art forms and con-
tents may legitimately take place . This is what separates modernist art from the historical
avantgarde, the former represented by "the holy trinity" of Joyce, Kafka, and Schoenberg, the
latter represented by collective art programs, manifestos, declarations, strict codes of be-
haviour, and incessant public epate le bourgeois .
A basic tension within modern autonomous art has always existed between a potentially explosive
open-ended content and the closed aesthetic form . After the mid-19th century, the form-content
199
Ales Debeljak
tension became increasingly resolved in favour of form . In other words, the Aestheticist preoccu-
pation with formal problems of expression suppressed the Realist focus on subject-matter . It took
over a conceptionion of art first developed by Romanticism. This conception presupposed the
aesthetic-symbolic experience to represent a higher form of consciousness than, for example, the
discursive cognition of scientific knowledge . In this regard, modernist art represents a rejection
of the means-end rationality of bourgeois society, and consequently embodies a retreat from the
capitalist world. Such a concept of art, however, has to limit its subject-matter to itself . Art that
wants to escape the fragmentation of capitalist social life is driven to focus on its own process of
creation because it appears to subliminally transcend this fragmentation of experience. By reflex-
ively taking itself as its own object, however,
" . . . modernism makes possible a critique os the isolated status of art, and the aspiration to
overcome the social alienation to which fart pour Part is a response by resolving art back into
a transsormed social lise : for example, the Surrealist attempt to synthesize Marx and Rimbaud .
By disassembling the organic work of art, by openly displaying their creations as agglomerations
of discrete fragments, the Cubists and the great literary Modernists sought to counter 'the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history' (Eliot)" (Callinicos,
1989: 56) .
This paradoxical turn has revealed the conditions that made the avant-garde revolution
possible . When the tension inherent within bourgeois art - art works released of social re-
sponsibility while ostensibly maintaining a (benign) social protest - was resolved through
the elimination of protest altogether, i .e. when art works retreated into a formal self-reflec-
tion of Aestheticism, the historical avant-garde found political justification for its dramatic
attack on the social uselessness of such bourgeois art . In demanding that art should once
more become relevant to the organization of social relations, it distinguished itself
". . . not so much by an attack on traditional works of art as by an attack on the ideal os works
of art per se as something separated from lifepraxis, i .e . as defined by the value of aesthetic
autonomy as established by the bourgeois institution of art . In no uncertain terms, it is the
principle of aesthetic autonomy itself that becomes insupportable to the historical avant-
garde, that is, the bourgeois affirmative ideal of culture as a sphere of beautiful illusion in
which the values denied in the realm of work and material life can be safely enjoyed" (Wollin,
1985 : 14) .
Despite the incontestable fact that the autonomous status of art has not ultimately been
shattered, the historical avant-garde has nevertheless had a revolutionary impact . This point
requires elucidation . Insofar as this revolution suspended social history in general and art
history in particular, the validity of the entire tradition of bourgeois autonomous art was
radically threatened, if not outright negated by the emergence of the historical avant-garde .
The emancipation of art from traditional forms articulated its emancipation from the
periodization of styles. Moreover, the stylistic strategies became, in the wake of the historical
avant-garde, freely available and at the disposal of the creative imagination . The avant-garde move-
ments therefore transformed the historical succession of art styles into a simultaneity of those
elements which were hitherto kept separate .
200
THE ABORTIVE INTEGRATION OFARTAND EVERYDAY LIFE .
THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE AND ITS FAILURES
Not only did the historical avant-garde free the artist from the constraints of engagement with a
particular style or from using a particular technique, it also developed a new concept of the art
work as such. Let us briefly explain this . If the concept of the work of art as a representation of
reality - the subjectively created work as a totality, the parts of which meaningfully relate to each
other - dominated artistic styles after the Enlightenment, the historical avant-garde prepared the
ground for the emergence of the concept of the non-organic, fragmentary, distorted work which
is produced as an assembly of parts independent of one another .' Its inner meaning no longer
flows from a hermeneutically coherent external totality . It has to be arrived at instead through the
construction principle which takes into account the fragmentary nature of its constitutent parts .
Only a fragmentary work of art can mirror fragmented bourgeois society and its conscience .
Understanding "the meaning" of such an art work presupposes the active participation of an
engaged public, thus rendering the passive traditional mode of reception obsolete and conse-
quently opening up a work of art to future interpretations .
From this vantage point, we argue that the possibility for the sublation (Aufhebung) of aes-
thetic autonomy is given within the very development of bourgeois art itself . Avant-garde art
would thus paradoxically appear as the successor to the bourgeois tradition. In this respect,
it is relevant
" . . . /that/ it is not the success of bourgeois culture which is addressed here but its falling into
routine. In Weberian terms, the bourgeois culture undergoes a process of bureaucratization,
its forms grow rigid and perfunctory, and the avant-garde emerges with a project of charismatic
renewal, the establishment of an aesthetic community in which the perpetual promises of
bourgeois art would be fulfilled as real happiness" (Berman, 1989: 46) .
The historical avant-garde attacks against autonomous bourgeois art opened up an impor-
tant avenue: they made it possible, for the first time in the history of Western art, for art to be
clearly perceived as an institution with its own ideological mode. Indeed, emphasizing the
necessity of aesthetic autonomy - as did Adorno and Habermas - in order to save the re-
demptive function of art in a bourgeois society that is bent on negating authentic values, is
to a large degree but a defensive and perhaps even misguided attitude . The other side of the
above-mentioned process needs to be stressed as well: art's emasculation of all protests
against social reality, its streamlining of aesthetic innovation within a humanist tradition .
The concept of the institution of autonomous art is designed to capture precisely the om-
nipotent, repressive role of this tradition . It refers to
. . . the productive and distributive apparatus and also to the ideas about art that prevail at a
given time and that determine the reception of works . The avant-garde turns against both : the
distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois
society as defined by the concept of autonomy" (Burger, 1984 : 22) .
While Habermas convincingly analyzed the social consequences of the colonization of the life-
world (Habermas, 1962), he failed to extend its analysis in any serious way to the aesthetic realm .
Habermas restricted himself to a definition of the aesthetic as a value-sphere above the social
struggle, where residual human needs find the expression that the rationalized, impoverished
201
Ales Debel jak
life-world denies them. In this argument, modernism, defined as an aesthetic-expressive rational-
ity, remains a part of the still unfulfilled Enlightenment project according to which each of the
three value-spheres (science, morality, aesthetics) must strive to contribute to the ultimate goal .
Habermas thus
. . acknowledges the sact that rationality and art cannot be reconciled on the level os their
institutionally difserentlated existence ; they rather become reconciled on the higher level of
societal organization which represents a rationality os the second order" (Schulte-Sasse, 1987 :
14) .
While this reconciliatory goal is articulated in aesthetic terms as Utopian promesse de bonheur,
its political implications reveal the basic tenets of the meaningful organization of social life
in terms of a just, free, and democratic praxis . From this viewpoint the radical break with
the modernist tradition - such as was ushered in by the historical avant-garde - must neces-
sarily, albeit erroneously appear as irrational and therefore threatening to the authentic
concern of bourgeois art . 7
In contrast, the historical avant-garde hoped that the way to absolute social freedom led
through the aesthetic creation of something "totally other" Was ganz Andere), that is, some-
thing totally different from the autonomous art work . In other words, the road to absolute
freedom and unalienated life was believed to lead through the social, political, and aesthetic
transformation of everyday praxis . This Utopia was based on the Romantic ideal of a higher
and better world . The destructive, negative, and anarchist dimensions of the avant-garde
movements therefore need to be viewed in the service of emancipation from everyday rou-
tine and expediency.*
The turning point in the development of the historical avant-garde's expressive style was the
invention of collage . This technique was designed by Cubist artists (Braque, Picasso) who
set out to consciously destroy the representational system that had dominated Western art .
The revolutionary character of Cubism was revealed in its strategies of composition of non-
harmonizable elements, and in the creation of collages which were characterized by incor-
porated elements drawn from mutually exclusive everyday sources . Collage, in which the
fragments of reality are inserted into the art work regardless of their natural origin and
compatibility, subjects the art work to a radical transformation :
'The artist not only renounces shaping a whole, but gives the painting a different status, since
parts os it no longer have the relationship to reality characteristic of the organic work of art .
They are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality" (Burger, 1984 : 78) .
By undermining the traditional view of the total work of art as a self-contained world which
mimetically mirrors the real world, Cubist collage .I ectively challenged the hitherto dominant
concept of art as a separate domain and the art work as rooted in the autonomous institution .
Artistic techniques analogous to collage can be discovered in the work of modernists who were
202
THE ABORTIVE INTEGRATION OF ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE .•
THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE AND ITS FAILURES
committed to the Aestheticist concept of art as a refuge from alienated social life (Joyce, Eliot,
Pound). Modernism therefore paved the way for its own excess : the historical avant-garde .
NOTES
1 . The author received his Ph .D . from Syracuse University, New York and now teaches sociology os
culture at the School of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana . This paper is a part of a longer study
on the modern vs postmodern institutions of art .
2 . This term is here used to distinguish the European avant-garde movements that emerged in the
1920s from their benign successors since the 1960s . In a relevant scholarship these movements are
referred to as neo-avant-garde movements which emerged under the conditions of advanced capital-
ism and postmodern pluralism (Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Body Art, Landscape
Art, etc .)
3 . However, this negation and radical critique, in which the bourgeois society was to be rejected tout
court, is fraught with difficulties. Pushed to the extreme, it undermines the very intention os the
avant-garde, i .e. to meaningfully present the "totally other" . For example, chance constellations of
objects or events were prominent in Surrealist art . They were supposed to replace the deterministic-
rational logic which guided the hitherto popular realist writing . The unconditional abstractness of the
concept os chance is based on a total opposltion to purposive rationality . However, " . . .since /the avant-
gardists/ do not see that a given degree of control over nature requires social organization, they run
the risk of expressing their protest against society as such ." (Burger, 1984: 66) . It can thus be assumed
that to see in random chance an objective meaning places meaning outside human communication
and transforms society into nature . Only at this price can avant-gardist chance become "a symbol of
freedom". (Sonolet, 1984 : 192) . This price has never been paid, as we will demonstrate later in this
chapter.
4. The historical avant-garde must not be understood simply as a constituent part of an ongoing
linguistic revolution dating back to some point in the 19th century, as is commonly claimed in liter-
ary studies. Compare, for example, a few os the most prominent analyses such as Renato Poggioli, The
Theory of the Avant-garde (Cambridge : Harvard University Press 1968), Julia Kristeva : La Revolution
du Langage Poetique (Paris : Seuil 1974), Frank Kermode : Continuities (New York: Random House
1968) .
5 . For example, the avant-garde school os architecture, known as the Bauhaus, was based on the
experience of the popular Arts and Crafts Society (Deutscher Werkbund) . From its start in 1907 at the
forefront of industrial progress, it set out to design art objects for industrial manufacture on a large
scale, Its intention was to radically improve living conditions, to humanize work environments, and
to functionally change the face of society. Its history is " . . .tied to the functionalist and constructivist
impulses of modern architecture and modern industrial design . At the same time, /it/ can also be
understood as a protest against the barbarity inherent in unleashed capitalistic mass production ." (Wellmer,
1983 : 53)
6. Indeed, one os the main avant-garde technical innovations was a tendency towards increasing abstrac-
tion, and the dynamical representation of a world transformed by humanity using machines (especially
Futurism) in order to conquer nature . These tendencies were made apparent in the years immediately prior
203
Ale Debejak
to and particularly during World War I . In this nexus, the major characteristic of an organic work of art is
that it " . . .seeks to make unrecognizable the fact that it has been made . The opposite is true of the avant-
gardist work : it proclaims itself an artificial construct, an artifact. To this extent, montage may be consid-
ered to be the sundamental principle of avant-gardist art. The 'fitted' work calls attention to the fact that it is
made up of reality-fragments ; it breaks through the appearance of totality. Paradoxically, the avant-gardist
intention to destroy art as an institution is thus realized in the work of art itself. The intention to revolution-
ize life by returning art to its praxis turns into a revolutionizing of art" (Burger, 1984: 72) .
7. Marcuse held a different view. He argued that as a bearer of forgotten truths, art protests against a
reality in which these truths have no validity. Yet these truths, couched in the medium of aesthetic
semblance, are detached srom reality and have no bearing on it . Therefore, art stabilizes the very
social conditions against which it protests . It is from Marcuse's exposure of the contradictory status of
art that Burger draws his concept os the institution of art . It is first and foremost an analytical model
that expressly refuses to relate to individual works of art . Instead, it was constructed to capture their
status as objects that are set apart from the struggle of everyday existence . The institution os art is,
then, the pivotal point sor connecting art works and larger social dynamics. Its characteristic is the
neutralization of impulses to change society, a neutralization that is bound up with the purely aesp
thetic, non-political character of art .
8 . This revolutionary vision was best articulated by the leading surrealist poet Andre Breton in his first
Surrealist Manifesto (1924) . From the standpoint of the ultimate goal or historical telos understood as
the condition of freedom and solution of all contradictions, however, the archetypal manifesto of the
avant-garde is not so much Breton's but Marx-Engels's Communist Manifesto (1848) . "'All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real
conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men . . .' . . . Marx is saying here that. . . we
cannot understand ourselves in the present until we confront what is absent . . . If we follow this mod-
ernist "melting" vision we will find it throughout Marx's works. It is especially vivid and striking in the
Communist Manifesto . Indeed, it opens up a whole new perspective on the Manifesto as the archetype
of a century of modernist manisestos and movements to come . The Manifesto expresses some os mod-
ernist culture's deepest insights and, at the same time, dramatizes some of its deepest inner contra-
dictions" (Berman, 1982 : 89) .
REFERENCES
Adorno, T. (1984), Aesthetic Theory, Routledge, London and New York
Benjamin, W. (1969), Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York
Berman, A. R . (1989), Modern Culture and Critical Theory, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison
Berman, M. (1982), All That is Solid is Melting Into the Air, Simon and Schuster, New York
Burger, E (1984), The Theory of Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Callinicos, A . 1989, Against Postmodernism, St . Martins's Press, New York
204
THE ABORTIVE INTEGRATION OF ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE :
THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE AND ITS FAILURES
Gablik, S . (1984), Has Modernism Failed?, Thames and Hudson, London
Schulte-Sasse, J . (1987), "Modernity and Modernism, Postmodernity and Postmodernism : Framing the
Issue", Cultural Critique, vol .2, no .5, Winter
Wollin, R . (1985), "Modernism vs . Postmodernism", Telos, vol .17, no .62, Winter
Wellmer, A. (1983), "Art and Industrial Revolution", Telos, vol .16, no . 57, Fall
205