Avant-garde

'', a Soviet avant-garde painting circa the Russian Revolution. The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. By the mid-19th century, avant-garde referred to art that used aesthetic innovation as a means of political and social change. Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the intelligentsia that comprises novelists, writers, artists, architects, et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge the cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society. In the U.S. of the 1960s, the post–WWII changes to American culture and society allowed avant-garde artists to produce works of art that addressed the matters of the day, usually in political and sociologic opposition to the cultural conformity inherent to popular culture and consumerism as a way of life and as a worldview. ==Theories==

In The Theory of the Avant-Garde (; 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde in art and as an artistic movement. In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for a dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art. ==Society and the avant-garde==

'' (1917) by Marcel Duchamp. (Alfred Stieglitz) Sociologically, as a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists, writers, architects, et al. produce artefacts – works of art, books, buildings – that intellectually and ideologically oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society. In the essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Clement Greenberg said that the artistic vanguard opposes high culture and rejects the artifice of mass culture, because the avant-garde functionally opposes the dumbing down of society – be it with low culture or with high culture. That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are kitsch, simulations and simulacra of art. Walter Benjamin in the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) said that the artifice of mass culture voids the artistic value (the aura) of a work of art. That the capitalist culture industry (publishing, music, radio, cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption, which is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of art-as-commodity determines its artistic value. Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), have said that Western culture entered a post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought-and-action and the production of art became redundant in a capitalist economy. Scholars have highlighted the troubling associations of avant-garde movements with authoritarian politics and right wing movements in Europe like Nazism and Fascism. Avant-garde figureheads like the American poet Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the Italian futurist F.T Marinetti and their alliances with twentieth century authoritarian politics have sparked controversy. Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1983), the critic Harold Rosenberg said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and the mediocrity of mass culture, which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]." Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to , which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard. The term was less frequently used than avant-garde in 20th-century art criticism. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic. The critic Charles Altieri argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde." ==Examples==

Music Avant-garde music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether. By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss (in his earliest work), Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Alban Berg, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in the jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. In rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". Post-punk artists from the late 1970s rejected traditional rock sensibilities in favor of an avant-garde aesthetic. Theatre The avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century music, although it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, often in conjunction with music and sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to the avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus, Happenings, and Neo-Dada. Architecture Brutalist architecture was greatly influenced by an avant-garde movement. Photography Avant-garde photography has often been associated with efforts to rethink what photographs could do beyond straightforward representation, including experiments with the medium’s material procedures, its modes of perception, and its channels of circulation. In early 20th-century modernism, photographers and teachers connected with the Bauhaus promoted open-ended experimentation with process, including cameraless techniques such as the photogram, which treated photographic paper and light as tools for making new abstract forms rather than merely reproducing the visible world. Related strands of avant-garde practice emphasized radical framing—unusual vantage points, sharp cropping, and close observation—as a way to estrange familiar subjects and to develop a “new vision” of everyday life. Such approaches were often intertwined with darkroom intervention (including montage and other constructed procedures) and with modern print culture, as photographic ideas and images circulated through illustrated magazines, photobooks, and international exhibitions. Figures such as László Moholy-Nagy became emblematic of Bauhaus-linked experimentation, while artists including Man Ray produced cameraless "rayographs" and related darkroom experiments. In the Soviet context, Constructivist photographers such as Aleksandr Rodchenko helped popularize dramatic high and low angles intended to make viewers see familiar things in new ways. Museum scholarship on Japan likewise describes an interwar movement of "avant-garde photography"—including what it terms Shinkō_shashin ("New Photography")—influenced by contact with Surrealism and abstraction, which developed through amateur groups and magazine culture; one such circle was the Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde, in which the poet-photographer Kansuke Yamamoto participated. ==Avant-garde types ==

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