Signals and noise: art, literature and the avant-garde
Abstract
One of the most consistent features of the diverse artistic movements that have flourished
throughout the twentieth century has been their willingness to experiment in diverse genres and
across alternative art forms. Avant-gardes such as Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism,
Fluxus and Pop were composed not only of painters but also dramatists, musicians, actors, singers,
dancers, sculptors, poets and architects. Their works represent a dramatic process of crossfertilization
between the arts, resulting in an array of hybrid forms that defy conventional
categorisation. This thesis investigates implications of this cross-disciplinary impulse and aims by
doing so to open out a site in which to reassess both the manner in which the avant-gardes have
been theorised and the impact their theorisation has had on contemporary aesthetics.
In the first part of this study, I revisit the work of the most influential theorists of the
avant-garde in order to ask what the term “avant-garde” has come to signify. I look at how
different theories of the avant-garde and of modernism relate to one another as well as asking what
effect these theories have had on attempts to evaluate the legacies of the avant-gardes. The work of
Theodor Adorno provides a connective tissue throughout the thesis. In Chapter One, I use it to
complicate Peter Bürger’s notion of the avant-garde as “anti-art” and to argue that the most
pressing challenge that the avant-gardes announce is to think through the cross-disciplinarity that
marks their work. In Chapter Two, I trace how painting has come to be considered as the
paradigmatic modernist art form and how, as a result, the avant-garde has been read as a
secondary, “literary” phenomenon to be grasped through its relation to painting. I argue that this
constitutes a systematic devaluation of literature and has resulted in an “art historical” model of the
avant-gardes which represses both their real radicality and implications of their work for these
kinds of disciplinary structures.
In the second part of this thesis, I explore works which examine and question the aesthetic
hierarchies and notions of aesthetic autonomy that the theories of modernism and the avant-garde
explored in the first part set up. In Chapter Three, I approach by way of two cross-disciplinary
works which employ literature and visual art: Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) and Andy
Warhol’s a; a novel (1968). Works such as these, which slip through the gaps between literary
and art history, have, I argue, important implications for literary and visual aesthetics but are often
overlooked in disciplinary histories. In my final chapter, I return to the theory of the avant-garde
as it emerges in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. I examine how his work reconfigures
Adorno’s aesthetics by performing the cross-disciplinary movement that it argues is characteristic
of avant-garde art works. Tracing his “post-aesthetic” response to Duchamp and Warhol, I explore
how Lyotard articulates a mode of practice that moves beyond the dichotomy of “art” and “antiart”
and opens out a site in which the importance of the twentieth century avant-gardes is made
visible.
I conclude by briefly considering the implications of the avant-garde, as I have presented it
in this thesis, for contemporary debates on the twenty-first century “digital avant-gardes” and
recent writing on aesthetics.