Avant-garde began as a military word for scouts
Borrowed from French for an army's advance guard, avant-garde names artists whose new forms first look unacceptable to the establishment. Saint-Simon in 1824 already cast creators as society's moral vanguard; by the mid-nineteenth century the metaphor meant aesthetic shock enlisted for political change.
In French military usage the advance guard was the reconnaissance party sent to scout ground ahead of the main army. Nineteenth-century French politics borrowed the word for left-wing agitators, and Saint-Simon argued that art was the quickest route to reform. The cultural meaning settled on the modernist ruptures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and historians trace a line from Dada, active from 1915 into the 1920s, through the Situationist International of 1957 to 1972, to the American language poets of the 1960s and 1970s.
Theorists have spent decades asking whether the scouts can survive success. Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay set avant-garde seriousness against kitsch, the factory product of mass media. That same year Walter Benjamin, and in 1947 Adorno and Horkheimer, argued that mechanical reproduction and the culture industry drain art of its aura. Renato Poggioli's 1962 study found that vanguard artists shared the ideals of bohemians, while Peter Bürger in 1974 warned that once institutions embrace critical art they neutralise its politics.
The pessimism deepened. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle in 1967 doubted rebels could stay relevant once rebellion became a commodity, Harold Rosenberg in 1983 described the artist's job as a profession that pretends to overthrow itself, and Paul Mann in 1991 called the avant-garde a working part of the culture industry. Scholars also stress uncomfortable alliances: Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and the Futurist Marinetti courted fascist and authoritarian politics.
Every vanguard implies a rearguard. The arrière-garde, once the unit protecting the scouts, can describe artists who knowingly work with avant-garde legacies, and Charles Altieri argues the two depend on each other. In music the label stretches from Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Varèse to John Cage, Stockhausen, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson.
Source: Avant-garde
