Nine Observations on the Avant-Garde

Has it disappeared? Does anybody care? Should they?

Some time back, I was invited to attend a concert by an up-and-coming avant-garde band. These musicians were hellbent on disruption and mayhem, proving their transgressive credentials at every turn.

My companion that evening was a well-known jazz musician and, at the end of the concert, he turned to me and said:

“The future was then.”

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I laughed, because this was so true. The performance we had just experienced wanted to be cutting-edge and futuristic, but every note played reflected a notion of the avant-garde as it existed sixty years ago.

The future was then.

I thought of that concert recently when a magazine convened a group of artists and intellectuals and asked them a troubling question:

What happened to the avant-garde?

Few people paid attention to their hand-wringing. I didn’t even hear about this online colloquium until months had passed—and I try to stay on top of precisely these kinds of issues. Nobody I know mentioned it, and I stumbled upon it purely by chance.

But that only proves that there really is a crisis in the avant-garde. It’s a crisis of neglect. Of disinterest.

People once got worked up about cutting edge art and transgressive culture. They loved it or hated it, but they always had strong feelings. Nowadays they hardly notice.

Perhaps they are just deadened to it from over-exposure.

You can put up the strangest statue in the town square nowadays—let’s say Albert Einstein getting swallowed by a monster snail—and people just walk by it. They’ve seen it all before.

You have too.

Artists can make the most bizarre music, destroying instruments, shouting obscenities, and creating all sorts of noise. But—yawn!—somebody’s great-grandpa was doing all that three generations ago.

Photo from Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises (1913)

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In a previous career, I often visited factories.

I’ve been on the factory floor in at least 20 different countries, and even trained as an assembly line worker just to learn what it was like.

And here’s one thing I found out: People and food and customs are different all over the world, but factory noise is always the same.

Noise may be the universal language. But it doesn’t express much.

And that’s the curse of so many avant-garde musical projects—for example, the “future was then” band described above. The intensity is high, but the emotional range is narrow—very narrow.

But does it have to be that way? I don’t think so (as I’ll explain below).

Avant-garde music can do—and should do—so many things that it rarely even attempts. But like every other genre, it gets caught up in its own past.

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And what did the colloquium participants, invited to address the “crisis of the avant-garde,” have to say about all this?

Lucy Sante diagnosed the crisis in terms of time and money:

An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere.

Jamie Hood supported this idea that the rent s too damn high—at least for experimental artists in New York.

Nearly all the broke artists I loved or fucked or partied and collaborated with a decade ago have been priced out of New York, or they’ve been black-holed into waged labor that leaves little to no room for vibrant social or intimate lives, let alone for the making of art.

Dean Kissick instead blames the reactionary nature of the establishment:

Much of the art world is actively and outspokenly opposed to the idea of aesthetic progress or provocation, and has turned backwards.

There’s some truth to the last comment. I know a lot of people (including many readers here) who view the current crisis of the avant-garde as encouraging news. I can almost hear you muttering: About time those bastards got their comeuppance. 

I’m not quite so jaded, but I understand where these naysayers coming from. I’ve sat through some painful avant-garde performances in my day.

But my feeling about the avant-garde is more like Churchill’s quip about democracy. Democracy is the worst system, he admitted, except for all the others. My version would be: The only thing worse than the avant-garde is a world without the avant-garde.

That leads directly into the first of my nine observations:

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(1) Avant-garde experiences allow rule-breaking—which should feel fun and liberating. But that doesn’t happen often enough.

I’ve been involved in avant-garde situations that were mind-blowing and fun. The first time I saw Cecil Taylor in a solo piano recital, I was thrilled by what he did to the keyboard.

Frankly, I was surprised they let him play that expensive Steinway grand on stage—because it looked like he was trying to destroy it with his bare hands.

If I did that to a piano at a gig, I’d get in trouble, and probably fired on the spot. The owner might even call the police.

So when I saw Taylor do this, I felt like an accessory at a crime scene.

I’ve had a few similar experiences as a consumer of avant-garde art. Breaking the rules felt intoxicating. In those moments, experimental art revealed its kinship with intense rock concerts and wild parties, raves and riots, Dionysiac orgies.

It’s a music for outlaws and desperados.

Why can’t that happen more often? Well, the world doesn’t work that way. Everything gets turned into a formula, sooner or later. Life after the revolution starts to resemble the same tyranny we just toppled.

So avant-garde art becomes tedious. Even worse, it becomes pompous, filled with a smug sense of superiority.

Instead of breaking the rules, it tries to set itself up as the new ruler—spewing out dogmas, theories, compositional strategies, and all sorts of other baggage. Everything becomes heavy and burdensome.

How do we bring back the fun? (I’ll suggest some ways below.)

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(2) But the avant-garde still makes a vital contribution even when it is flawed.  

In my youth, I often went to artsy movie houses to see cutting edge films from Europe. These movies were rarely very good, and many were downright awful. But this was still a better use of my time than watching a brain-dead formula-driven Hollywood franchise film.

Even the bad avant-garde films forced me outside my comfort zone. They got me thinking and feeling. They stirred up ideas and emotions. Sometimes the best part of the experience was the heated discussion with my buddies, after the movie was done, on “why did that film suck so heinously?” I needed these experiences for my personal development, and would not trade them for a hundred superhero sequels.

And then, of course, was the encounter with real masterpieces of cutting edge art.  I would have never found these if I hadn’t kept exposing myself to creative works outside of the mainstream.

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(3) The avant-garde has lost its ability to disrupt the system, because it’s now entrenched inside the system.

The participants in the online colloquium on the crisis in the avant-garde kept talking about New York—they sounded like Wall Street lawyers. But that’s not so surprising because they are so embedded in the dominant cultural institutions, most of which operate inside the 23 square miles of Manhattan.

But it wasn’t always like this. Ornette Coleman first launched his musical revolution while playing in R&B bands in the southwest. James Joyce wrote Ulysses while working as an English instructor for Berlitz in Trieste. Gaugin found inspiration in French Polynesia. Robinson Jeffers lived in a stone house he built on the beach in Central California.

Robinson Jeffers lived in an isolated stone house he built himself

I will be so bold as to suggest that artists might benefit from living outside the NY echo chamber—where their audience is frequently each other.  

(By the way, one of the best steps I took as a music critic was to stop writing to please other music critics. That lesson can be applied in many other fields.)

Manhattan is especially treacherous as a barometer for creativity. With each passing year, it feels more monolithic and elitist, and less tolerant of the bohemianism and diversity that once were its greatest strengths. 

And, of course, artists nowadays can live anywhere and still be totally connected 24/7 with the centers of power.

But the bigger issue here is whether avant-garde artists should curry favor with institutional power brokers—in New York or anywhere else?

That leads to my next point.

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(4) The avant-garde today is too much about grant-writing, and cozy relationships with the wealthy. 

I still recall the shocking moment when I figured this out.

I had just purchased an avant-garde jazz album by Cecil Taylor (many years after the aforementioned concert) and I read this on the back cover:

 “This disc was made possible through grants from American Broadcast Companies; Armco Inc.; Capital Cities Communication; Dow Jones; Mr. Francis Goelet; Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Occidental Petroleum Corporation; the Rockefeller Foundation; Sony Corporation; Union Pacific Corporation; and the National Endowment for the Arts.”

At first, I thought this was parody.

Cecil Taylor had a biting sense of humor, so he could very well have made this up as a prank. I could also imagine Frank Zappa doing something like that. The pompous always invite mockery. But…

But then I realized that every word was true.

Even worse, the record label was proud of its connections—with Occidental Petroleum and the Rockefeller Foundation and all the rest.

I gradually came to learn that this was more than just one album. The avant-garde economy is not driven by ticket sales. It’s not driven by selling T-shirts and merchandise, or pleasing enthusiastic fans.

In fact, the financial underpinnings seem totally disconnected from an audience. It’s all about pleasing those ultra-rich foundations, entrenched institutions, and wealthy donors.

I’m told that the avant-garde art market depends largely on 300 wealthy people living in eight cities. Music and other idioms might be less centralized, but the same general tendency can be felt.

In other words, the experimental artists who are supposed to offer stinging rebukes to the system are actually on its payroll. The audience doesn’t always know this, but they can feel it in avant-garde art.

An entrenched, inward-looking, self-congratulatory tone permeates too many of these works, and that defeats the whole purpose of an avant-garde.

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(5) Cutting edge art can’t cut anything unless it resists the allure of insider money and power.

This should be obvious by now.

Cutting edge art really needs to cut something. Like salt, it needs it saltiness—or it’s worthless.

At its best, it cuts away at comfortable patterns and entrenched interests.

But there’s a lot of comfort in avant-garde art right now. Too much, by any measure. And nothing is more comfortable (or corrupting) than relying on the support of a few huge institutions and entrenched insiders.

It’s always better for an artist to connect with a flesh-and-blood audience, not an organizational power structure.

Let’s say that there really are 300 people who control the arts right now. A truly disruptive practice would make those people more anxious, not more comfortable. 

Which leads me to my next point.

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(6) Why did we stop worrying about artists selling out? That’s a legit concern.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the avant-garde started getting weaker during the same period when artists began flaunting corporate affiliations and branding deals.

I don’t blame the artists, at least not entirely. I’m more unhappy with the rest of us, who stopped caring who’s getting money under the table, or over the table. Even worse, some people seem to think that art is better if the artist wears a Rolex and hobnobs with CEOs.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m caught up in the ideals of the past.

But if the notion of selling out applies to anyone it has to be the avant-garde artist. I’ll let rappers flaunt their sports cars and movie stars pitch their tequila brands. But if you want to create a real revolution in art, I absolutely don’t want to see you bragging about your ties with Occidental Petroleum and flying on a private jet with the fat cats.

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(7) Disruptive movements in the arts still occur all the time—but they’re now coming from tech companies

Music genres really haven’t changed very much since the 1990s. But the technology of music is totally different. Everything from composing to distribution has been disrupted and revolutionized.

It’s odd that discussions about the avant-garde—which is supposed to specialize in disruption—rarely mention this. The artists have let Silicon Valley technocrats do all the disrupting.

Even worse, they have been passive and fatalistic as the most pathological changes have been imposed on the creative community—who have been turned into generic content creators.

You might even say that the technocrats have been the real avant-garde in the 21^st century. That sounds like an absurd claim, but really isn’t.

This suggests that artists need to reclaim their role as disruptors from the corporate world. That leads me to my next point.

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(8) A vital avant-garde community would fight against becoming content creators. In fact, this might be the true destiny of the avant-garde in our time.

The cultural ecosystem is dysfunctional right now. Art is being subjugated by outsiders—that is no exaggeration.

The avant-garde should be at the forefront of resisting these systematic abuses.

That’s what avant-garde artists are all about, no? They resist the system. And if any system needed resisting, it’s the monolithic, generic, platform-controlled beast that’s running the culture right now.

We face huge battles on every front, especially in asserting the individualism and uniqueness of the artist. An artist is NOT a content creator. If the great experimental artists of the past (James Joyce, Miles Davis, Pablo Picasso, etc.) were alive today, they would understand that immediately.

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(9) There so many ways art can transform the world—but we’re not even looking at the problem in the right way.

I’ve written previously about people I call visionaries of sound—for example, Hans Jenny and Charles Kellogg who used sound and music to transform physical reality. And I’ve written about Therese Schroeder-Sheker, who plays music for the dying. And I’ve celebrated Hermeto Pascoal who can turn everything he touches into unexpected and awe-inspiring music. And don’t forget Raymond Scott, who did things with music and technology we still can’t comprehend.

None of these people are consider legit card-carrying members of the avant-garde. But that’s ridiculous.

Three of my heroes: Hermeto Pascoal, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, Charles Kellogg

These visionaries really change the world, which is far more revolutionary than making noise on your horn or creating a statue of Einstein getting swallowed by a huge shelled gastropod. How can the avant-garde community talk so much about shaking things up with their art, and then ignore the people who actually do that.

So maybe the avant-garde isn’t really in crisis. It’s just our way of defining the avant-garde that is broken.

If we started embracing the rule-breaking creative spirits who are actually using their talents in these transformative ways, we might do more than just revitalize the avant-garde. We could actually contribute to revitalizing our communities and larger society.

That’s the vision I nurture and support, and I invite others to join me. If that doesn’t fit the prevailing institutional definition of the avant-garde, so much the worse for those institutions.