Assault on Autonomy

Following the theory of Peter Burger’s Theory Of The Avant-Garde, Menand and Rainey (Introduction to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism , 3-4) note that avant-gardism is (of course) an assault on bourgeois art, “an assaultaginst art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis ofmen.’ This attack takes place not at the level of contents or thematics inany particular work, but rather in how avant-garde works as a wholefunction, how they are produced, and how they are received.”

In part, this is an attack on the Romantic and post-Romantic notion of artistic creation, thought to be the product of an individual creative genius. Duchamp puts a urinal on the museum wall to “negate ‘the category of individual creation’” by “using arbitrarily chosen mass products.”

The authors finds support for this claim in Andreas Huyssen’s contrast of modernism and avant-gardism. Huyssen writes, “[i]n modernismart and literature retained their traditional 19th-century autonomy fromevery day life; . . . the traditional way in which art and literature wereproduced, disseminated, and received, is never challenged by modernismbut maintained intact.’ In sharp contrast, [t]he avant-garde . . . attemptedto subvert arts autonomy, its artificial separation from life, and its institutionalizationas high art.’”

So, I don’t want to see a urinal on a museum wall. But I have to admit that attacking the separation of life and art, and assaulting “autonomy” as expressed in art and aesthetics seems a useful project.