Amfiteater, letn. 13, št. 1, 2025
UDK 7.037  
DOI 10.51937/Amfiteater-2025-1/350-366
Abstract
The article starts from the understanding of the concepts of the centre and the periphery 
as a symbiosis, touching on the schizoid understanding of autonomy in the field of art and 
highlighting its involvement in globalist colonisation operations. It deals with the ideological 
difference between the affirmation of the past (which is asserted by consolidating the 
conceptual emptiness of the “historical avant-garde”) and the declaration in the present 
– a creative presence in a community context. With the awareness of this difference, the 
recognition of the avant-garde narrative as an embellishment of the hegemonism of the 
field begins. The presence affirmed in an artistic act defines avant-gardeness as an attitude 
that cannot be assimilated. The author defines avant-gardeness and substantiates the 
following axiom: Avant-gardeness is not a matter of exoticism nor an excess in the real. 
It is the real-poetic in the excess state of the biopolitical simulacrum. He aims to show 
that avant-gardeness implies an achieved and affirmed Infinity that is impossible to be 
exhibited within the finiteness of presentation formats. The article concludes with the 
thesis that the essence of the aesthetics of avant-gardeness lies in the constant invention 
of a poetic definition of its own meaning, always related to the structuralities of the 
situations in which this meaning arises. 
Keywords: situation, displacement, outer, field, inversion, Impossible, poetry, factual
Multimedia artist Nenad Jelesijević is a researcher of performance art, stage arts and 
film, a writer, an architect/designer, the artistic director of the Kitch Institute based 
in Ljubljana and the coordinator of its long-term programme Performance Theory and 
Practice. His artistic work and writings often intertwine the phenomena of spectacle and 
pop. He regularly publishes on Performans.si, which also provides an extensive collection 
of his texts on performativity, film and related topical phenomena. More than 250 of his 
contributions have been published in books, journals, dailies, theatre playbills, various web 
and project publications, as well as broadcast on radio.
nenad.jelesijevic@guest.arnes.si 
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The Avant­Garde Exotics
Nenad Jelesijević
This essay opens by introducing an understanding of the concepts of the centre 
and the periphery as symbiotic, which is different from the usual dichotomous 
perspective of their relationship. Whilst touching on the schizoid understanding 
of autonomy in the field of art, we highlight the involvement of the field in imperial 
colonisation operations. Here we are actually dealing with the ideological difference 
between the affirmation of the past and the declaration of oneself in the present. With 
the awareness of this difference, the recognition of the avant-garde narrative as an 
embellishment of the hegemonism of the field begins. Precisely presence – a creative 
presence in a community context – that could be affirmed in an artistic act defines 
avant-gardeness as an attitude that cannot be assimilated. 
The definition of avant-gardeness that follows is substantiated in the axiom: Avant-
gardeness is not a matter of exoticism nor an excess in the real. It is the real-poetic in 
the excess state of the biopolitical simulacrum. 
This axiom is derived from these four postulates: 
1) The “acceptance of otherness” is conceived as a model of business that is intended 
to cover up and justify the inequality on which the field is based. In it, all exoticism – 
understood as authenticity, particularity, originality, inimitability, as an exemption of 
ποίησις from simulacra – is transferred from the level of the sensual to the level of the 
self-sufficient performative; is therefore processed, tamed, removed from interactions, 
so to speak, from life, and sent to the “culture of acceptance”. Avant-gardeness is not a 
part of the “culture of acceptance” because it is situated in itself and the common, which 
arises from the intelligence of the tribe in motion – as the constant mutual coordination 
of spirits, as creativity at the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical. 
2) Presence is what makes the difference between production in the field and 
creation in the Beyond. The characteristic of the Beyond is immeasurability, the non-
countableness. Its aesthetics are embodied and also disembodied in ways that cannot 
be commodified. The presence, realised in artistic creation with awareness of the core 
of a concrete situation, determines avant-gardeness as a specific attitude that cannot 
be assimilated. 
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3) Scholastic treatments of the avant-garde do not take into account the paradigms 
of presence and situation, so they are stuck in the permissible – non-factual – history. 
They are irrelevant from the point of view of situating life, just like the past itself. Avant-
gardeness cannot be dealt with, it can only really be contemplated when we are involved 
in it experientially – with our tactile, motoric and vocal senses – when, therefore, our 
cognitive perception is sensorially embedded in the generic place of its emergence. 
4) Unlike the canonised “contemporary art”, avant-gardeness is not a matter of self-
sufficient pranking, a bare distraction, but a matter of a structural paradigm, a generic 
place. It is a poetic structure that creates an original and inimitable attraction.
We will see that avant-gardeness implies an achieved and affirmed Infinity that is 
impossible to be exhibited within the finiteness of presentation formats. The essay 
concludes with the thesis that the essence of the aesthetics of avant-gardeness lies in 
the constant invention of a poetic definition of its own meaning, always related to the 
structuralities of the situations in which this meaning arises.
In light of the developed axiom, the essay opens the view to the Impossible. Namely, we 
can speak of the avant-garde as something definite only as long as we refer in some way 
to the simulacrum of finiteness. However, when we abandon this reference, the notion 
of definiteness becomes superfluous, which also means that we are not engaged in any 
interpretation. However, through active observation, we are merely consolidating our 
presence. This decision and the act itself are aligned with the position:
Avant-garde is not possible in the field, but the Impossible is its axiom, which determines 
it as embedded in the factual – explicit, consciously exempt from the seemingly real 
– as something permanent, epic, something immanent to an unregulated creation, to 
the realisation of the Law.
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