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THE EXISTENCE OR NON-EXISTENCE

OF A CONTEMPORARY

AVANT-GARDE

A comparative research on historical avant-garde, neo avant-garde and contemporary art practices.

Student: Claire Hoogakker Student number: 10246703 Supervisor: Dr. Gregor Langfeld

Second reader: Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen Date: 13 July 2016

Amount of words: 21.313

MA Thesis Art History: Modern and Contemporary Art University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam

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Art always was, and is, a force of protest of the humane

against the pressure of domineering institutions …

no less than it reflects their substance.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

3

Introduction

4 - 6

Theoretical Framework 6 - 7

Chapter 1: The Praxis of Life

8 - 23

The Historical Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life 10 - 13 The Neo Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life 13 - 17 Contemporary Artists and The Praxis of Life 18 - 23

Chapter 2: Medium Specificity

24 - 35 The Historical Avant-Garde and Medium Specificity 26 - 29 The Neo Avant-Garde and Medium Specificity 29 - 32 Contemporary Artists and Medium Specificity 32 - 35

Chapter 3: Institutional Critique

36 - 51

The Historical Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique 38 - 41 Neo Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique 41 - 46 Contemporary Artists and Institutional Critique 46 - 51

Conclusion

52 - 55

Bibliography

56 - 61

Lists of Images

62 - 106

Chapter 1: List of Images 62 - 77

Chapter 2: List of Images 78 - 93

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Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor Dr. Gregor Langfeld for his time, his generous feedback and advice but most of all, for his trust in me and in this thesis. Besides, his course Thinking Modern Art: Modernism and Its Institutions and other courses given by Dr. Gregor Langfeld have proven to be of key importance for this research.

Secondly, I very much appreciate Dr. Johan Hartle’s way of teaching. His interesting course Art as Institution and Its Critique inspired me to write a paper on the subject of the possible

existence of a contemporary avant-garde, which I eventually used as a starting point for this thesis.

Thirdly, I would like to thank Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen for taking the time to be the second reader of this thesis and for expressing her interest in the subject of this thesis.

Last but certainly not least, I want to express my gratitude towards my family, with in particular my grandparents Els and Willem Schrader, my mother Saskia Schrader, my uncle and aunt Reinier and Annemieke Schrader and my brothers Steyn and Lars Hoogakker, for always supporting me in my choice of study and for making my academic career possible.

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Introduction

The avant-garde1 can be defined as ‘a group active in the invention and application of new techniques in a given field, especially in the arts, whose works are unorthodox and

experimental’.2 If the avant-garde is defined in these terms, the logical conclusion would be to assume that at any given place and time, there would have been and there would be an avant-garde in some way. Since the emergence of the historical avant-avant-garde3 at the beginning of the 20th century, there has always been a certain artist or movement that has strived to break boundaries and extend the limits of the institution of art and experimented with new techniques; all characteristics of ‘the avant-garde’. However, art historians, writers and critics mostly refer to the historical avant-garde and the neo avant-garde when speaking of a certain avant-garde, as if there has never been a subsequent avant-garde. But is this really the case?4

As the German literary scholar Peter Bürger states in his Theory of the Avant-garde, the historical avant-garde movements that emerged in the beginning of the 20th century in Europe can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated by these movements is art as an institution that is dissociated with the praxis of life. The aim of these movements was to intermingle art and the praxis of life.5 The historical avant-gardes wanted a certain ‘sublation’, or ‘Aufhebung’ in Hegelian terms, of art, roughly translated as ‘elevation’ or ‘detachment’ of art. The historical avant-garde did not want to destroy art, but rather, detach art from its seclusion in bourgeois society and transfer art to the praxis of life.

Subsequently, after the Second World War, neo avant-garde movements emerged. Hal Foster defines the neo avant-garde as a “loose grouping of North American and Western

European artists of the 1950s and ‘60s who reprised and revised such avant-garde devices of the 1910s and ‘20s as collage and assemblage, the readymade and the grid, monochrome painting and constructed sculpture”.6 As Foster states, “In post-war art, to pose the question of repetition is to pose the question of the neo avant-garde”.7 In other words, the neo avant-garde repeated previous historical avant-garde practices. In this case, the definition of the avant-garde as a group active in the invention and application of new techniques is not applicable to the neo avant-garde. However, the movement was still described as (neo) avant-garde. Why and how did the neo avant-garde get defined as avant-garde, when they were sometimes solely repeating historical avant-garde practices? Why are contemporary artists who are repeating historical or

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1 In French, avant-garde means front- or advance guard or vanguard.

2 ‘Avant-garde’. The Free Dictionary. 2011. 13 December 2014 <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/avant-garde> 3 The historical avant-gardes are considered to be the first avant-garde movements in history that emerged during and

after World War I. Peter Bürger takes Dada and Surrealism in particular as paradigmatic of the historical avant-garde.

4 Hoogakker, Claire. Unpublished paper ‘The Existence or Non-Existence of a Certain Contemporary Avant-Garde’

for the course Art as Institution and Its Critique. Amsterdam: The University of Amsterdam, 2014: 6.

5 Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984: 49-50. 6 Foster, Hal. “What’s Neo About The Neo Avant-garde?”. October. Vol. 70. (Autumn, 1994): 5. 7 Ibid.

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neo avant-garde practices, or inventing and applying new techniques in a given field, rarely referred to as avant-garde?8

In contemporary art, many artists and artist groups have been engaged with

intermingling their art with the praxis of life and breaking and challenging the boundaries of the institution of art. These artists may have used existing historical avant-garde or neo avant-garde practices to accomplish this goal, but they also experimented and broke boundaries. The

practices and means may have changed, but their main aims often have not. So, how did it come then, that there is not such a term as a ‘contemporary avant-garde’? Are all kinds of art accepted nowadays and sometimes even included in the institution of art, which could mean that

therefore, this art no longer challenges or questions the boundaries of the institution of art? If one of the preconditions for a movement to be called ‘avant-garde’ is to challenge and question the institution of art rather than being included in these institutions, all avant-garde movements have failed in the end. After all, the historical avant-garde as well as the neo avant-garde movements have been institutionalised eventually.9 Contemporary art is also often perceived as shocking or provoking when it is first exhibited. However, the institution of art is ever changing and adapting to the art that is being made at the time. There is an interplay between the

institution of art and the artists in this field. It seems as if there are no fixed boundaries and rules in the contemporary world of art.10

Each chapter of this thesis corresponds to a different avant-garde practice, technique and/or approach. In each chapter, I will compare the historical avant-garde, neo avant-garde and contemporary art practices to determine how avant-garde movements have developed over the last century, and speculate if there is such a thing as a ‘contemporary avant-garde’. Due to the complexity and broadness of this subject, I have chosen to limit this research to western artists, working and living in Europe and the United States. I will make a few exceptions for artists who have been living and working in Europe and the United States for a long time and who take part in the international discourse of the western art world.

In the first chapter, I will focus on artists who were or are intermingling art and the praxis of life in order to make art more accessible for the average public and to detach art from its seclusion in bourgeois society. As explained before, this was prevalent in historical avant-garde practices and an important motivation and aim for these artists. However, intermingling art and the praxis of life was still significantly present in neo avant-garde practices. Is it still an important and recurring theme in contemporary art? I will examine the ways in which the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists dealt with or are dealing with

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8 Hoogakker, Claire. Unpublished paper ‘The Existence or Non-Existence of a Certain Contemporary Avant-Garde’

for the course Art as Institution and Its Critique. Amsterdam: The University of Amsterdam, 2014: 6.

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

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intermingling art and the praxis of life.

In chapter two, I will examine the subject of the interrogation of medium specificity, a term invented and popularised by the American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994). In order to critique the institution of art, the relationship between the artist and their medium is interrogated.11 This is a common, recurring theme in historical and neo avant-garde practices. Further on in this chapter, I will explore if medium specificity is a common, recurring theme in contemporary art practices as well.

Finally, in the last chapter, I will examine in which ways the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists have used or are using institutional critique in their work. Institutional critique is an artistic practice that critically reflects upon its own place in the institution of art and the social function and concept of art itself. Institutional critique and such concerns have always been present and important in avant-garde practices, but it only emerged as a term in the 1970s. Then, artists started to critically reflect upon their work and their place within the institution and started writing about these issues. Is the use of institutional critique still relevant and present in contemporary art practices?

Theoretical Framework

My research is art historically relevant in the way that the subject of the possible existence of a contemporary avant-garde has not been fully explored so far, as far as I am aware of. However, scholars and philosophers such as Peter Bürger, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh and Arthur Danto have written a lot on the historical and neo avant-gardes, which I will use as a guideline. The German literary scholar Peter Bürger is of importance to my research with his Theory of the Avant-garde (1974), which is a fully elaborated theory of the avant-garde and the institution of art. Bürger’s concept of the institution of art is a framework within which a work of art is both produced and received. With his theory, Bürger argues that the connection between an individual artwork and history is dependent on the social status of art, its prestige and function in society.12 He has done thorough and focused research on mainly the historical avant-gardes. Therefore, I will use his writings in my sections on the historical avant-gardes. Hal Foster (b. 1955), an American art critic and art historian, has written many articles on mainly the neo avant-gardes, including The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996), in which he reorders the relation between the pre- and post-war avant-gardes. In What’s Neo About The Neo Avant-Garde? (1994), Foster proposes against Bürger that the neo avant-garde has produced new aesthetic experiences, political interventions and

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11 Greenberg, Clement. ‘Modernist Painting’ In: Frascina, Francis and Charles Harrison. Modern Art and Modernism:

A Critical Anthology. London: Harper & Row Ltd, 1982.

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cognitive connections.13 These writings on the neo avant-garde by Hal Foster will act as guidance in my sections on the neo avant-gardes.

The German art historian Benjamin Buchloh (b. 1941) also responded to Bürger’s statements in Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art (1982). He asked critical questions about these statements, such as, “Was Dalí really planning to destroy the institution of art in the early 1930s?”14 Foster also redefined the avant-garde in other terms than Bürger and criticised the way Bürger left out the neo avant-garde in his theories. These disagreements are useful for my research.

Arthur Danto (1924 – 2013), an American art critic and philosopher, is important for my research because of his writings The Art World (1964) and The End Of Art (1998). In The Art World, Danto explains what the art world entails, a “cultural context” or “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art”15. The end of art refers to the beginning of modern art, in which the imitation theory plays no role and there are no longer stylistic or philosophical constraints, but serves a new purpose. In this post-historical period, art has become philosophy, according to Danto.

Additionally, many articles have been written on institutional critique recently, which is a recurring theme in contemporary writings. For example, Andrea Fraser (b. 1965), has, in my opinion, an interesting perspective on what is happening at the moment in the contemporary art world. She has written From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique in 2005, in which she explores and discusses the fact that practices now associated with institutional critique have become institutionalised.16

The main aim of this thesis is to compare contemporary art practices, their aims and results to those of former avant-garde movements, in order to examine if there could be such a thing as a contemporary avant-garde movement. I will compare case studies by the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists. In the end, were these movements institutionalised? If so, does this mean that they failed in their first attempts to criticise and change the institution of art? And most importantly, if you compare these historical and neo avant-garde practices with contemporary art, what has changed and what does this make clear about the ever-changing institution of art? I will give a final conclusion formed with all my results drawn from the previous chapters, and I will subsequently answer my research question. After having said all this, the main question of this thesis will be: Is there a contemporary avant-garde according to the preconditions of the avant-garde movements, and if so, what would it entail?

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13 Foster, Hal. “What’s Neo about the Neo Avant-garde?”. October, Vol. 70. (Autumn, 1994): 5.

14 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art”. Artforum

(1982): 43-57.

15 Danto, Arthur C. “The Art World”. The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 61, issue 19 (15 October 1964): 477. 16 Fraser, Andrea. “Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”. Artforum. (September 2005): 287.

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Chapter 1

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Intermingling art and the praxis of life will be explored in this chapter. For the historical avant-gardes, one important way to reach this aim was to detach art from its seclusion in bourgeois society. According to Peter Bürger, the goal of the bourgeois was to maintain the autonomous status of art, art stripped of any social function and thereby, marginalising the artist.17 This autonomy coincided with the loss of social content. As Bürger explained, “The apartness from the praxis of life that had always constituted the institutional status of art in bourgeois society now becomes the content of works.”18 In other words, the more disengaged art became from the social world, the less it represented anything other than its own “apartness”.19 The historical avant-garde wanted to prevent this meaninglessness of autonomous art by bringing art back into the praxis of life with its social functions. This way, art became more accessible for a broader, less elitist and bourgeois public.

While trying to achieve this fusion of art and life, the autonomous status of art and thus, art devoid of any practical or instrumental value20, is often negated. Besides, the concept of the artist as genius is destroyed if art is no longer autonomous and elevated, irreproducible and authentic. If this is the case and if artists and their art are thus not elevated or sublime, art can more easily become part of the praxis of life. Life and art can exist together in a symbiosis, in this sense. However, if art is a part of the praxis of life, art can be anything and anything can be art. Like Arthur Danto stated in The End Of Art: after the linear story of western art has now finished, “anything goes”.21 To summarise this concept, Danto did not mean that art is not being made anymore or that no good art is being made anymore. He solely claimed that a certain linear story of western art has come to an end in the way that the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) had predicted would happen. Danto explained it clearly in the following paragraph:

“[...] the master narrative of the history of art - in the West but by the end not in the West alone - is that there is an era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes […] In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its

competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story.”22

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17 Rabaté, Jean-Michel. A Handbook of Modernism Studies. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Limited, 2013. 18 Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984: 27.

19 Rabaté, Jean-Michel. A Handbook of Modernism Studies. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Limited, 2013. 20 Haskins, Casey. “Kant and The Autonomy of Art”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 47, No. 1

(Winter, 1989): 43.

21 Danto, Arthur C. ‘The End of Art. In: After The End of Art: Contemporary Art and The Pale of History. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1998: 47.

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This given of an era in which anything goes, with no special way works of art have to be, can be problematic for art historians and particularly challenging for art critics. How can you still criticise something and make a clear distinction between art and non-art, if anything goes? This difficult issue is still prevalent in the contemporary art world. It is something art critics, curators and other art professionals must deal with.

Firstly, I will look at how the historical avant-garde dealt with intermingling art and the praxis of life. Following this, I will examine how the neo avant-garde coped with this issue and then, if and how contemporary artists are dealing with this.

The Historical Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life

The historical avant-garde artists were the first to incorporate art into the praxis of life. Naturally, previous religious and realist art was also connected to and based on the praxis of life, but these aims were different from the historical avant-gardes. The difference is that religious artists strived to reach a broad audience for religious purposes and the realists strived to capture real life as realistic as possible.

The historical avant-garde tried to reach this aim of the fusion of art and life with a variation of practices. This went from incorporating everyday objects into their works, to extending this even further by presenting everyday objects as art – like the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) did with his Fountain (1917) (fig. 1.1). As the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903 – 1969) stated in his Marxist aesthetic theories, “Today the only works which really count are those which are no longer works at all.”23 With this, he claimed that the only works that really count are no longer works in the traditional sense, but rather, artistic ‘projects’. These projects change the process of art’s reproduction and mediation in a critical manner. It is no longer about the authenticity or irreproducibility of an artwork, but about the ‘project’ and ideas behind it.

Beginning around 1910, artists began demanding that true art would go beyond the intellectual and transform daily life. These ideas were merged with demands in the industrial marketplace, mass media and urban popular culture. Artists like the Dutch Piet Zwart (1885 – 1977), the Czech Karel Teige (1900 – 1951), the Czech Ladislav Sutnar (1897 – 1976), the Latvian Gustav Klutsis (1895 – 1938) and German artist John Heartfield (1891 – 1968) started using everyday materials such as newspapers and photographs to create collages and

photomontages.24

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23 Adorno, Theodor W. The Philosophy of Modern Music. London: Sheed and Ward, 1973: 30.

24 Witkovsky, Matthew. S. Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life: Early Twentieth-Century European Modernism.

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Photomontage is a technique that allows artists to use, rip and reassemble existing materials such as photographs, newspapers, and propaganda material to create a new, often surreal, image. We tend to think of collage as a modern technique, but there is nothing very new about this technique. A highly developed collage technique can be traced back to tenth century Japan, but it has only re-emerged in the first decade of the 19th century. These practices were often being used as instruments of propaganda, not necessarily as artworks. Using everyday materials such as newspapers and photographs that the masses are familiar with makes it easier to win over a mass audience. Creating new entities out of existing, everyday materials became one of many new common ways of integrating the praxis of life into the art world.

As an art practice, photomontage revived with the advent of Cubism under leading figures like the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) and the French artist George Braque (1882 – 1963). The collage technique also has its roots in European Dadaism and Surrealism. The technique blossomed in Surrealist painting, sculpture and photomontage with artists such as the German artist Max Ernst (1891 – 1976), German artist Hans Bellmer (1902 – 1975) and American artist Man Ray (1890 – 1976).25

Secondly, as previously mentioned, the historical avant-garde artists started to

incorporate everyday objects into their works and even present everyday objects as art works. In doing so, they wanted to blur the boundaries between an elitist, bourgeois fixed art world and the praxis of life. If anything can be art, anyone can be an artist. These works were named ready-mades: ordinary, everyday manufactured objects that an artist has selected and sometimes modified before putting it up for display. The term was originally founded to distinguish

handmade objects from manufactured ones. Marcel Duchamp, the founder of the readymade, first introduced the readymade to the art world and appropriated the term. He started presenting these ordinary, everyday objects as art works with carefully chosen titles while seeking an alternative way for painting. By doing this, Duchamp was undermining the role of the artist as genius. Duchamp argued, “An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”26 However, he made clear that he did not intend to make a work of art out of it. As he said about his first readymade Bicycle Wheel (1913) (fig. 1.2), “When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'readymade,' or anything else. It was just a distraction."27 Additionally, the readymade defies the notion that art must be aesthetically pleasing. Duchamp selected everyday objects “based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste.”28 In doing so, Duchamp paved the way for conceptual art — works that are “in the service of the mind,”as

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25 Wolfram, Eddie. History of Collage: An Anthology of Collage, Assemblage and Event Structures. London:

MacMillan Publishing Company, 1976.

26 Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York: Viking, 1971: 47. 27 Ibid.

28 ‘Dada’. Museum of Modern Art. 19 February 2016

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opposed to a purely “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye.29

Artists like André Breton (1896 – 1966), a French poet, writer, anarchist and founder of Surrealism and Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963), a Romanian poet, writer and performance artist and also a founder of the Dada movement, made lists of instructions on how to make art. This is an attack on the notion that art is made by an artist who is a genius and the only one who could make that individual, irreproducible work of art. Tasks like these can be executed by anyone and although the outcome may differ, the process is the same, and that is what counts with these kinds of works. The notion that any individual is able to make art implies that the artist is simply a workingman – not a genius or an elevated person at all.

An example of one of these instructed works is making a cut up poem from an arbitrary newspaper.30 Tristan Tzara instructs the recipients to make a Dadaist poem in his Dada

manifesto On Feeble Love and Bitter Love (1920) as follows, To make a Dadaist poem

Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors.

Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article.

Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. Shake it gently.

Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag. Copy conscientiously.

The poem will be like you.

And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.31

Another way the historical avant-garde established an art world integrated with the praxis of life, is by providing no fixed meaning or content to works of art. The focus lies on the process and outcome of the art making. As Peter Bürger states in his Theory of the Avant-garde, “This refusal to provide meaning is experienced as shock by the recipient. And this is the intention of the avant-gardiste artist, who hopes that such withdrawal of meaning will direct the reader’s attention to the fact that the conduct of one’s life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it. Shock is aimed for as a stimulus to change one’s conduct of life; it is the means to

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29 Ibid.

30 ‘Notes on Peter Burgers Theory of the Avant-garde’. Other Room. 20 February 2016

<http://otherroom.org/2010/05/24/notes-on-peter-burgers-theory-of-the-avant-garde/>

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break through aesthetic immanence and to usher in (initiate) a change in the recipient’s life praxis.”32 Bürger explains that the intention to shock the recipient in this way is problematic, since it is generally nonspecific. This does not ensure that the recipient’s behaviour will move in any particular direction. Another difficulty with the ‘non-specificity of the reaction’ as Bürger calls it is that nothing is as transitory as shock. Shock is by its very nature a unique, unexpected experience and is thus extremely difficult to make permanent.33

The Neo Avant-Garde and The Praxis of Life

As stated before, the neo avant-garde has repeated multiple historical avant-garde practices and often for the same aims, in this case: the negation of aesthetic autonomy and the fusion of art and life. The neo avant-gardes revisited historical avant-garde practices such as Dada, Surrealism and Constructivism practices including Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades and Alexander Rodchenko’s (1891 – 1956) monochromes. However, according to Peter Bürger, the real successors of the historical avant-gardes were the neo avant-gardes that were trying to create mass culture’s union of art and commerce and a ‘false sublation’ of the commodity form.34 This means elevating an everyday commodity object and ascribing this object an art status, which is by definition a false status. As Mark Freed explains, “False sublation refers to the process by which cultural artifacts, instead of challenging dominant life praxes, contribute to their circulation and thereby their normalisation.”35 Therefore, ‘false sublation’ can be seen as the failed outcome of the avant-gardes to counteract aesthetic autonomy by destroying the distinction between art and life. The result is the loss of a critical function for art.36

When thinking of a neo avant-garde artist who used these practices, the first artist that comes to mind is the American Pop artist Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987). Warhol was trying to create a union of art and commerce. Pop Art is a reference to popular culture and was challenging the conventions of the traditional fine art movements by drawing recognisable imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects.37 The main aim of the Pop Art movement was to fuse art and life by using popular, everyday imagery opposed to elitist cultural elements. This aim was often taken even further by highlighting kitsch or banal elements through the use of irony. Due to Pop Art’s use of found materials and imagery, the movement is often compared to Dada. Pablo Picasso, Marcel

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32 Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984: 81. 33 Ibid.

34 ‘The Death and Life of the Avant-Garde: Or, Modernism and Biopolitis’. Mediations Journal. 3 March 2016 <

http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/the-death-and-life-of-the-avant-garde#end_22>

35 Freed, Mark M. Robert Musil and the NonModern. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group,

2011: 49-50.

36 Ibid.

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Duchamp, Man Ray, the French artist Francis Picabia (1879 -1953), the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887 -1948) and the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927) are regarded as the European forefathers of American Pop Art.38

In 1961 in London, the Young Contemporaries exhibition called attention to the fact that a new movement of artists was bringing a ‘Pop’ consciousness into the art world. These artists included British artists David Hockey (b. 1937), Allen Jones (b. 1937), Peter Phillips (b. 1939), Patrick Caulfield (b. 1936 – 2005) and others. The attention to the use of popular and mass production and culture in art grew, especially in the United States of America. The following year, shows by American artists Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), Jim Dine (b. 1935), James Rosenquist (b. 1933), Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997), George Segal (b. 1934), Robert Indiana (b. 1928), Peter Blake (b. 1932), Tom Wesselmann (1931 – 2004), Wayne Thibaud (b. 1920) and Andy Warhol arose.39

Because of the clear resemblance in style, aims and the use of existing materials, the American Pop-Artists Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008), Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Allan Kaprow (1927 – 2006) are often classified as ‘Neo-Dada’. The term Neo-Dada was applied to artists who initiated a radical shift in the focus of modern art in the 1950s. These artists felt that there was too much focus on the paintings of the abstract expressionists at the time, which they found too emotionally charged, overly personal, excessively symbolic and too loose in painting style.40

The paintings of Robert Rauschenberg have often been compared to the works of Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists due to the similarities in style and methods. In his work,

Rauschenberg was mainly dealing with social issues. He used ephemeral, transient materials to emphasise the transience of life and mass production and culture itself. He used topics of everyday life in America, which were immediately recognisable and understandable for the American population, such as politics. For his work Retroactive 1 (fig. 1.3), he placed ex-president John F. Kennedy in the centre with surrounding elements referring to current news topics such as Apollo 11 and the Cuban crisis.41 As Rauschenberg himself said, "My work exists in the space between art and life"42 and “I do not want a picture to look like something it is not. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.”43

The American artist Jasper Johns started making bronze painted sculptures in the 1960s, such as Two Beer Cans (1960) (fig. 1.4), with which he also made Neo-Dadaist statements

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38 Piper, David. The Illustrated History of Art. London: Chancellor Press, 2000: 486-487. 39 Shane, Eric. Pop Art (Art of Century). New York: Parkstone International, 2009: 30. 40 Hapgood, Susan. Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-62. New York: Universe Books, 1994.

41 Sandler, Irving H. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. New York: Harper & Row,

1978: 174–195.

42 ‘Movement Neo Dada’. The Art Story. 3 March 2016 < http://www.theartstory.org/movement-neo-dada.htm> 43 ‘Robert Rauschenberg’. Warhol. 10 March 2016

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about art and life, art capitalism and mass culture.44 His most known paintings are his Flag series (1954-1955) (fig. 1.5), for which he mounted three canvases, strips of newspaper and paint on plywood. There was no big concept behind it as he said, “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.”45 By integrating everyday materials like strips of newspaper with a widely known and recognisable image as the American flag, it serves well to the Pop Art and Neo-Dada tradition. As Johns said himself, “Using the design of the American flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets - things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels."46 However, its execution demands close inspection. As an art critic of that time was wondering, “Is it a flag or a painting?”47 This ambivalence and blurred distinction between an artwork and an everyday common object fits right in with other Pop Art and Neo-Dada works.

American artist Allan Kaprow wrote The Legacy of Jackson Pollock in 1958, in which he demands a ‘concrete art’ made of everyday materials such as "paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies”, as is written in the exhibition text for Untitled Environment at the Hansa Gallery in New York. The new subjects he wrote down were: “unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies, seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odour of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano [...].”48 These staged, incoherent events that were in unusual settings involved spectators who became part of these happenings. The outcome is dependent upon the actions of these spectators and always differs, which undermines the notion that art should be autonomous. Allan Kaprow’s aim was to create pieces that were “as open and fluid as … everyday experience.”49 In doing so, he blurred the distinction between everyday life and art. As he himself explained and admitted, he was “not so sure” whether what he was doing was “art” or “something not quite art”.50

A common practice used to integrate art and life is to exhibit outside of the institutions of art in more accessible public places. The American artist Claes Oldenburg was one of the first artists who started doing this in America with his Two Store (1961-1962) exhibitions (fig. 1.6). For these exhibitions, he rented a shop in downtown Manhattan and filled it with everyday, mundane objects. This included emulations of consumer objects, such as a larger-than-life size hamburger, a gigantic ice cream cone and a huge slice of chocolate cake. By enlarging these

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44 Shane, Eric. Pop Art (Art of Century). New York: Parkstone International, 2009: 30. 45 Lanchner, Carolyn. Jasper Johns. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010: 5. 46 ‘Flag’. Jasper Johns. 3 March 2016 <http://www.jasper-johns.org/flag.jsp> 47 Ruhrberg, Karl. Art of the 20th Century Part 1. Cologne: Taschen, 2000: 311. 48 ‘Allan Kaprow’. Web.Archive. 3 March 2016 <

http://web.archive.org/web/20100608100416/http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/flux_files/kaprow_chronology.html >

49 Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993: 21. 50 Ibid.

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everyday objects and by making them out of different materials, they are removed from their original context. Therefore, they can make a statement about mass-consumption and comment upon the materialism of that time. In this way, he has given them a new meaning and new measure of cultural life.51

The Factory was the studio where Andy Warhol worked and literally produced his art works almost as if they were commodities. The process of art making was quick and his works were being produced in large numbers at once. His work inevitably brings to mind his large silk screens of iconic images such as Marilyn Monroe (1962) (fig. 1.7), Che Guevara (1968) and Mao (1972), his stacked up Brillo Boxes (1964) (fig. 1.8), his Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961) (fig. 1.9) and his Coca Cola Bottles (1962) (fig. 1.10). In all these works, he combined

sophisticated painting techniques with mundane, everyday, popular advertising images.52 These practices immediately bring to mind Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. This is not surprising, since Duchamp inspired Warhol tremendously. Warhol even owned several works by Duchamp. At first, Warhol replicated real Brillo boxes, soda cans and glass bottles and hand-painted them himself. Later on, he simply exhibited 500 manufactured cardboard Brillo boxes without modifying them at all. As previously stated, Marcel Duchamp depicted the works by many of his successors as merely ‘retinal’ art intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to “put art back in the service of the mind”. In 1964, Duchamp said about Warhol’s work the following praising words:

Pop Art is a return to ‘conceptual’ painting… If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is that concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.53

Other neo avant-garde artists known for their use of popular culture in their work are Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist and the British artist Richard Hamilton (1922 – 2011).

Roy Lichtenstein is best known for his comic book series, for which he appropriated imagery from popular comic books. The topics he explored were mostly romance and war. One of his most famous works is Whaam! (1966) (fig. 1.11), which is a reference to aerial combat during the Second World War, when he was serving in the United States Army.

Tom Wesselmann made collages from imagery he cut out from magazines, in which he combined art and popular culture. An example is Still Life #30 (1965) (fig. 1.12), in which he

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51 Shane, Eric. Pop Art (Art of Century). New York: Parkstone International, 2009: 30.

52 Fowlkes, Irene. Americana Style a la Mode Retro: Postmodern Pastiche Between Culture and Commodity.

Munich: Grin Verlag, 2009.

53 ‘The Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Andy Warhol’. Artre Public. 21 March 2013. 3 March 2016

<http://www.artrepublic.com/articles/405-the-influence-of-marcel-duchamp-on-andy-warhol-richard-hamilton-peter-blake.html/#sthash.BRC1jwmq.dpuf>

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put together a kitchen scene with everyday objects. For example, he depicted a pink refrigerator and popular food and drinks such as 7-Up and Rice Krispies.

James Rosenquist explored political, environmental and commercial themes in his large-scale silk-screens. Recurring images are presidents and cars (for example in President Elect [1961-1962] [fig. 1.13]) and everyday objects like food and lipsticks.

Richard Hamilton is known for one of the first Pop-Art works ever made, his collage titled Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) (fig. 1.14). It is a collage of a domestic, everyday scene filled with popular objects such as a tape-recorder, a telephone, a Hoover and a comic strip book. It is a reference to the many ways of

communicating and shows his interest in popular culture and modern technology. All these examples have themes referring to everyday life.

One of the artists who built upon the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades is the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945). In his text Art After Philosophy (1969), he credited Duchamp’s work with the following praising words, “giving art its own identity [as with] the unassisted readymade, art changed its focus from the form of language to what was being said.”54 In his work, he plays with linguistics and the visual. He has been examining how words relate to objects and thereby, he explores the role of meaning in art. His work One and Three Chairs (1965) (fig. 1.15) consists of a wooden chair, a photograph of a chair and a fragment from the dictionary with the definition of the word chair. He explores three

representations of a chair and turns a simple chair into a debate and an object of reflection about our own conceptions. He assembled three existing objects and gave it new meaning by ordering and presenting it this way. He did the same with his work One and Three Shovels (1965) (fig. 1.16). He explains,

I used common, functional objects – such as a shovel – and to the left of the object would be a full-scale photograph of it and to the right of the object would be a Photostat of a definition of the object from the dictionary. Everything you saw when you looked at the object had to be the same that you saw in the photograph, so each time the work was exhibited the new installation necessitated a new photograph. I liked the fact that the work itself was something other than simply what you saw.55

One and Three Shovels recalls Marcel Duchamp’s work Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915) (fig. 1.17), which is nothing more than a snow shovel with ‘from Marcel Duchamp, 1915’ painted on the handle.

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54 Coghlan, Niamh. ‘Is The Readymade Still Revolutionary?’. Aesthetica Magazine. 15 March 2016

<http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/is-the-readymade-still-revolutionary/>

55 ‘Joseph Kosuth at Sean Kelly’. Contemporary Art Daily. 27 November 2008. 2 March 2016

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Contemporary Artists and The Praxis of Life

Nowadays, contemporary artists are still using practices that intermingle art with the praxis of life and with that, negate the autonomous status of art. They do so in similar ways as the historical avant-garde and the neo avant-garde. Their practices vary from exhibiting at public places and involving spectators in their work, to using everyday objects in or as their work, such as utensils and mass media products. These practices may have developed over the decades with (technological) progress and changes in society, as is only natural. But in the end, the practices of the historical and neo avant-garde and contemporary artists with the same aims, namely blurring the boundaries between art and life, are not so far removed from each other as would have been expected given all the time that has passed.

When you think of contemporary artists who have implemented these kinds of practices, the Young British Artists (YBAs) soon come to mind. This is a loose group of British artists that started exhibiting together in 1988 and soon after became known for their shock tactics,

entrepreneurial attitude and openness to materials and processes. This period is often designated as a new and excitingly distinctive phase in British art history. The term Young British Artists was first used to describe British artist Damien Hirst’s (b. 1965) work in Artforum in 1992. In 1996, Art Monthly magazine also used the term ‘Young British Artists’.56 Ever since, the term turned out to be a powerful marketing tool and a term that was recognised worldwide. Other members of the YBAs include British artists Tracey Emin (b. 1963), Sarah Lucas (b. 1962), Cornelia Parker (b. 1956), Michael Landy (b. 1963), Gary Hume (b. 1962), Christine Borland (b. 1965), Angus Fairhurst (1966 – 2008) and Michael Landy (b. 1963). Many YBAs members were previous Goldsmith College of Art students in London, where it all started. Teachers at Goldsmith, including Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941), were looking for new ways of art making while negating the traditional divisions between different media such as printmaking, painting and sculpture. There is not one YBA style or approach, but there are certain thematic and formal aspects that often recur in works by the YBAs. One of these recurring practices is the use of found imagery and materials, which is often perceived as shocking. The YBAs are open towards all kinds of materials, processes and forms with which art can be made and are exploiting and examining this to the fullest.57

Firstly, the British artist Damien Hirst is seen as one of the first and most celebrated and notorious members of the Young British Artists. He organised an exhibition titled Freeze in 1988 with fellow Goldsmith students such as Sarah Lucas, Michael Landy and Angus Fairhurst. Recurring themes in Hirst’s work are life and death. He takes elements from daily life,

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56 ‘Young British Artists’. Tate. 10 March 2016

<http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/y/young-british-artists>

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sometimes dissects or adapts them and then he arranges and exhibits them. He explores these themes of life and death by using dead animals such as carefully ordered butterflies and sheep, cows and sharks preserved in formaldehyde. The best-known example of these animals is the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) (fig. 1.18), a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a glass tank. For The Love of God (2008) (fig. 1.19) is an 18th century human skull inlaid with over 8000 diamonds. The skull reminds the viewer of (their) mortality, but in a glorified way. As art historian and old director of the Van

Abbemuseum and the Stedelijk Museum Rudi Fuchs (b. 1942) stated, “The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. It proclaims victory over decay. At the same time it represents death as something infinitely more relentless. Compared to the tearful sadness of a vanitas scene, the diamond skull is glory itself.”58

Another work by Damien Hirst that is close to life is Pharmacy (1992) (fig. 1.20), an installation of medicine cabinets filled with carefully ordered pills and pharmaceutical

packages. With this installation, Hirst explores the distinctions between art and life. He said, “I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and do not believe in art, without

questioning either.”59 Hirst is criticising and highlighting the amount of unquestionable faith we have in the pharmaceutical industry. He has added a fly killer and bowls of honey. He explains why,

I hope you’ll realise you’re like a metaphor for the fly. [You’re involved] because you’re one of the things milling around inside the environment. It is about a civilisation, the collapse of a civilisation. Something falling apart as it builds up. That’s how I read it, but if you walk in and think it is a chemist’s shop that is fine by me.60

This suggests that it does not matter to the artist if people are aware of the fact that they are visiting an (art) exhibition. The confusion that comes forth out of the great resemblance to a real pharmacy provokes a response from people. It makes them question their presence in the space and their mortality, which is the ultimate aim of the artist.

Tracey Emin is a British artist best known for her confessional, autobiographical and personal art works. She uses a wide variety of media including photography, drawing, sculpture, film, neon lights and sewing. She often integrates her own life with her art by using elements or fragments from her personal life, such as used tampons, worn panties and slept in sheets. However personal her works may be, they are always almost direct responses to vital issues in

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58 Sterling, Bruce. ‘For the Love of God, it's Damien Hirst’. Wired. 17 January 2011. 3 March 2016

<://www.wired.com/2011/01/for-the-love-of-god-its-damien-hirst/>

59 Hirst, Damien. I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever,

Now. London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2005: 24.

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contemporary society and culture.61 Her work Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) (fig. 1.21) consists of a tent embroidered with all the names of the people she has slept with between 1963 and 1995, as the title suggests. Another known work by Tracey Emin is My Bed (1998) (fig. 1.22), a work consisting of her own bed with slept in sheets, empty vodka bottles, tissues, stuffed animals, worn panties, cigarettes and condoms. She spent four days in this bed considering suicide after a painful breakup. By using these personal items from her private life, she is taking the fusion of art and life to an even further extent. Art critics have been wondering if this was the exact state of the scene when she left it after four days. However, the author Judith Flanders asked herself the question if any of those changes would make My Bed less real. She stated, “No, because it is not a piece of furniture, or even a story – it is a work of art.”62 So, even though this bed is taken from something as close to the artist’s own praxis of life as possible, the object is elevated and granted an art status now it has been exhibited and institutionalised. This often seems to be a problematic and recurring issue in relation to the avant-garde: at first, avant-garde artists are pushing against the conventional terms and established institutions, while eventually becoming part of that canon and get institutionalised themselves.

Sarah Lucas is known for her installations made out of existing, everyday materials with which she creates new meanings and associations. Recurring themes that are thoroughly

explored in her work are sexuality and gender. An example of this is Au Naturel (1994) (fig. 1.23) – an installation of everyday objects such as a mattress, melons, oranges, a cucumber and a bucket. These objects are references to male and female body parts. She does not modify these different elements; she simply rearranges them and creates new meaning by doing so. Lucas often reflects upon problems caused by gender inequality in life in general as well as in the art world. As author Amna Malik asks herself in the opening of her book Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel (Afterall): “Does art have a sex? And if so, what does it look like?”63 Malik argues that through much of Lucas’s work, the spectator is placed in a position to look at ‘sex’ in a dismantled way without any sense of morality or feelings of guilt, shame or embarrassment. She argues that with the satirical and derisive nature of Lucas’s observations, certain assumptions about what kind of art women make are violated.64

For Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) (fig. 1.24), Lucas placed two fried eggs and a kebab, as the title suggests, on a wooden table. The eggs are a reference to a woman’s breasts and the kebab to a woman’s genitals. Bitch (1995) (fig. 1.25) is an installation of a wooden table resembling a woman on all fours, with a white t-shirt folded over it, melons hanging in the chest

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61 Merck, Mandy et al. The Art of Tracey Emin. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

62 ‘Tracey Emin Made A Work of Art Not An Unmade Bed’. The Telegraph. 30 December 2014. 10 March 2016

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/11316847/Tracey-Emin-made-a-work-of-art-not-an-unmade-bed.html>

63 Malik, Amna. Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel (Afterall). London: Afterall Books, 2009. 64 Ibid.

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area, and a vacuum packed chicken breast fillet where her genitals should be. Both works make the viewer aware of the fact that these female body parts can be as disposable, cheap and undervalued as fast food.65

At the Venice Biennale in 2015, Sarah Lucas was invited to have a solo exhibition at the British Pavilion (fig. 1.26). For this, she cast lower cut-off body parts - legs and genitals in different positions - in plaster. Real cigarettes are poking out of female genitalia. She placed these plaster body parts on different everyday objects, for example a refrigerator. On the other side of the room she randomly placed a washing machine. Another installation was leaning on hundreds of Spam meat cans, which immediately reminds one of Andy Warhol’s tin Campbell’s soup cans. Lucas has made countless other installations, assemblages and sculptures out of toilets, cigarettes, food and other everyday materials and objects. She has also made many collages consisting of existing materials, such as newspaper cut outs and photographs. Lucas plays with distinctions between high and low art and culture in her work, and with this, she blurs the boundaries between life and art.

The Blain Southern gallery in London held an exhibition in 2013 titled Tell Me Whom You Haunt: Marcel Duchamp and the Contemporary Readymade. The directors invited ten contemporary artists to make works in dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades,

including the American artist Jimmie Durham (b. 1940) and the Kosovar-Albanian artist Sislej Xhafa (b. 1970). The exhibition examined in what ways artists today continue to respond to the phenomenon of ‘haunting’ and the activation of memory present in the art of Marcel Duchamp. The title of the exhibition refers to an old French proverb, “Tell me whom you haunt and I will tell you who you are”, which derives from André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja (1928). According to the gallery directors, the title refers to the idea that objects lose their function and meaning once they become recontextualised, “they cease to be one thing in order to become another”.66 As Mario Codognato, director of exhibitions and head curator stated, “Objects often have a multiplicity of meanings, dependent upon each individual’s experience of them. This exhibition seeks to explore the alternative meaning(s) bestowed upon objects through their placement in the gallery space, within which seemingly ordinary objects can be redefined as art.”67

One of these exhibited works was Rocket Ship (2011) (fig. 1.27) by Sislej Xhafa. The work consists of nothing more than a rusty wheelbarrow filled with chains of blue electric lights. However, by titling it ‘Rocket Ship’, the function and meaning shifts and changes. This practice is similar to what Marcel Duchamp did with his Fountain; he named a urinal

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65 ‘Sarah Lucas on Being as Provocative as Ever’. The Telegraph. 10 September 2013. 2 March 2016 <

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/10291955/Sarah-Lucas-on-being-as-provocative-as-ever.html>

66 ‘Tell Me Whom You Haunt: Marcel Duchamp and the Contemporary Readymade’. Blain Southern. 10 March 2016

<http://www.blainsouthern.com/exhibitions/2013/tell-me-whom-you-haunt:-marcel-duchamp-and-the-contemporary-readymade>

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‘Fountain’. Thereby, he changed the function and meaning of the object and the way people perceive the work. The title for Xhafa refers to the dream of a better existence – migrating to a better place. However, dislocating the work would destroy it, since the lights have to be plugged in.68 This tension is palpable.

American artist Jimmie Durham contributed the work Himmel und Erde Müssen Vergehen (2000) (fig. 1.28), which consists of a monumental, immense boulder crushing a lightweight, thin beige jacket. With this work, the title also plays with the spectator’s imagination and gives new meaning to these objects.

Another contemporary artist who draws on the readymade in his work is the American artist Jeff Koons (b. 1955). He is known for his use of popular culture and banal subjects. Examples of this are his large reproductions of imagery such as balloon shaped dogs and large, plastic stuffed animals. For his series The New (1979-1980) (fig. 1.29), he mounted everyday household objects such as vacuum cleaners in Perspex boxes. In 1985, Koons started making a series of tanks (glass vitrines on black steel stands) for his first solo exhibition Equilibrium (1985) (fig. 1.30). The tanks are filled with distilled water and basketballs. The basketballs may be a reference to nostalgia or unattainable ambition, since the vitrines are closed off.69 He casted a group of objects in bronze, like a lifeboat and an aqualung and he hung a Nike poster on the walls to complement the basketballs. Koons explains the meaning of these objects as follows, The tanks were an ultimate state of being ... The Nike posters were the Sirens – the great deceivers, saying “Go for it! I have achieved it. You can achieve it too!” And the bronzes were the tools for Equilibrium that would kill you if you used them. So the underlying theme, really, was that death is the ultimate state of being. What was paralleling this message was that white middle-class kids have been using art the same way that other ethnic groups have been using basketball – for social mobility. You could take one of those basketball stars, Dr. Dunkelstein, or the Secretary of Defense, and one could have been me, or Baselitz, or whoever.70

By saying that anyone could have been him, Koons undermines the notion of the artist as genius. Also, by comparing the use of art with the use of basketball in the way it is used for social mobility, undermines the autonomous and elevated status of art.

One of the most recent examples of an artist who intermingles life and art is the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957). He is known for his political statements and institutional critique. It

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68 ‘Sislej Xhafa’. Frieze Magazine. 2 March 2016 <http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kritik/sislej-xhafa/?lang=en> 69 ‘Koons Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank’. Tate. 3 March 2016

<http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/koons-three-ball-total-equilibrium-tank-two-dr-j-silver-series-spalding-nba-tip-off-t06991/text-summary>

70 Koons Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank’. Tate. 3 March 2016

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is possible to look at his work as a return to the historical avant-gardist concerns of the 1910s and 1920s in its connection between art and life.71 In February 2016, Ai Weiwei has made an installation of over 14.000 bright orange discarded life jackets (fig. 1.31) worn by Syrian refugees who arrived at the Greek island of Lesbos, where he set up a studio. He wrapped the life jackets around the five columns of the Concert hall in Berlin. Hereby, he comments on the humanitarian crisis and the European refugee policy. He demands for these issues to be seen and heard by putting it out there in the open air, in the midst of everyday life. He integrates these issues in daily life into art and uses art as a medium to try and change life. With these kinds of works, the boundaries between art and life become more and more blurred.

The practice of intermingling art and the praxis of life in order to make art more accessible to a broader public and a less elitist affair was the main aim of the historical avant-gardes. Marcel Duchamp was the first to put these ideas into practice with his ready-mades. Ever since, the notion of the artist as a genius was abolished to a certain extent, which changed the perception of the artist and art in general in a revolutionary manner. From then on, anything could be art. As Theodor W. Adorno has stated, it was no longer a matter of irreproducibility, authenticity or aesthetics. It became a matter of artistic projects, in other words: the notions and ideas behind an artwork. To reach the aim of commingling art and life, different elements from daily life were incorporated into their works – from the readymade to the collage and the écriture automatique to cut out poems. Ever since, neo avant-garde and contemporary artists have been elaborating on these principles. Think of Pop Art and Neo-Dada artists and contemporary artists who incorporated everyday objects into their work. Also, artists who executed performances and happenings or exhibited outside of the institutions of art strived to intermingle art and the praxis of life.

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71 Hindmarsch, Laura. ‘After the Neo Avant-Garde: Institutional Critique in the Works of Ai Weiwei’. Web.uwa.edu.

14 March 2016

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Chapter 2

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This chapter will focus on medium specificity, a principle mainly used in aesthetics and art criticism. The term derives from the writings of the American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994) and is most closely associated with modernism. Greenberg stated that “the unique and proper area of competence” for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are “unique to the nature” of a particular medium. According to him, the artist should use techniques that the media in question particularly lends itself to. Artists should manipulate materials to produce objects that correspond with the provided possibilities of the specific medium.72

The avant-garde demands a significant revision in and examination of the relationship between the artist and his medium, in order to be able to criticise art and artistic production and examine the nature and practice of art. In Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), Greenberg formulates the avant-garde’s aesthetics. He explains that the avant-garde does not so much “surrender to its medium”, but undermines and draws attention to the conventions of the medium’s customary usage. The avant-garde interrogates the principle of medium specificity itself, instead of solely handling her materials in a different manner than previous artistic movements.73

As Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781) puts it: “an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium.”74 Medium-specificity is based on the distinct materiality of artistic media. The artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material.75 For example, for painting this would mean

emphasising the flatness and abstraction of the medium, instead of making figurative or illusionist works.

Today, the term medium specificity is used both to analyse artworks as well as to describe artistic practices. The American art critic and post-modern literary critic N. Katherine Hayles (b. 1943), for example, speaks of "media specific analysis”.76 As discussed by the Canadian critic Marshall Soules, this media specific analysis and medium specificity play an important role in the emergence of new media art forms, such as Internet art.77 However, there has been and still is a lot of debate as to what exactly a medium lends itself to. Also, there has

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72 Greenberg, Clement. ‘Modernist Painting’ In: Frascina, Francis and Charles Harrison. Modern Art and Modernism:

A Critical Anthology. London: Harper & Row Ltd, 1982.

73 Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon”. Partisan Review 7 (July-August 1940): 296-310.

74 Schram, Suzanne. ‘Medium specificity: The Difference Between Analogue Literature and Electronic Literature’.

University of Amsterdam: Masters of Media. 1 November 2009. 1 April 2016

<http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2009/11/01/medium-specificity-the-difference-between-analogue-literature-and-electronic-literature/>

75 Bernstein, Emma B. ‘Medium Specificity’. The University of Chicago. 11 April 2016 <

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/specificity.htm>

76 Schram, Suzanne. ‘Medium specificity: The Difference Between Analogue Literature and Electronic Literature’.

University of Amsterdam: Masters of Media. 1 November 2009. 1 April 2016

<http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2009/11/01/medium-specificity-the-difference-between-analogue-literature-and-electronic-literature/>

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been critique concerning the restrictiveness and destructiveness of artistic freedom within these theories. Hence, many art critics in the post-modern period have tended to stay away from principles such as these.

These medium specificity and formalism principles arose along with the rise of modernism, with leading literary figures such as Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and Roger Fry. Although these theories are specifically developed for modernism, I will try to apply these principles to historical avant-garde practices and contemporary art practices as well.

Due to the multifaceted character and complexity of medium specificity, I have chosen to limit this research on medium specificity to painting and its modern equivalents.

The Historical Avant-Garde and Medium Specificity

In Arthur Danto’s The Art World, written in 1964, he is trying to explain what the art world entails and what art is in general. Danto makes distinctions between ‘real objects’ and ‘works of art’. As he stated, “We must be able to separate those objects which are works of art from those which are not, because […] we know how correctly to use the word 'art' and to apply the phrase 'work of art'."78 This goes back to Socrates’ notion that art is showing what we already know; artworks are like mirrors of nature.

The use of artistic theories helps us to discriminate art from non-art. Without this, the existence of art would not be possible. Hence, the necessary link between an artwork and a non-art work is the non-art world and the people who take pnon-art in that non-art world (e.g. curators, directors). Danto further explains the Imitation Theory, the oldest theory on art, which says that artworks, in order to be artworks, must be "mimetic" - they must be copies or representations of something. For example, a painting of a person is an artwork, because it represents the person, but a completely abstract painting could not be classified as an artwork, as it does not represent anything.

Danto speaks of Post-Impressionism, a movement that was not accepted as art when it first arose. At first, the art world labelled Post-Impressionist works as hoaxes,

self-advertisements and visual counterparts of madmen’s cravings. To be able to accept Post-Impressionist works as art, a revolution in taste and theory was necessary. As Danto states, this transition happened in the following way: “The artists in question were to be understood not as unsuccessfully imitating real forms, but as successfully creating new ones, quite as real as the forms which the older art had been thought, in its best examples, to be creditably imitating.”79 RT, although Danto never specifically explains what the R stands for, is presumed to be

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78 Danto, Arthur C. “The Art World”. The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 61, issue 19 (15 October 1964): 571-574. 79 Ibid.

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