Theoretical Frameworks 2

I was particularly interested in the writings this week by Glissant and Ranciere and how they related to our discussion about the piece by Bürger. If I understood correctly, Burger was arguing that the avant-garde failed in its attempt to cause positive change in our socio-political world.

Glissant posits that there are different ways for communities to forge identities in their varying methods of survival through nomadism (or rather conquering) and then methods of regaining identity after the destruction caused by nomadic behaviors. He says, “Identity will be achieved when communities attempt to legitimate their right to possession of a territory through myth or the revealed world.” (72) I would argue that the avant-garde legitimated their possession of a territory through revealing. Admittedly, it is difficult to say exactly which territory this was. Additionally, the avant-garde artists had/ have a relatively high position in society. But, in a certain sense it is a possession of a socio-political non-geographic territory. It could be argued that Ranciere’s examples of critical artists who cross boarders between art and non-art or art and commodity culture such as Dadaist art that “ridiculed the pretension of an art cut off from life” also claimed possession of commodity or even political culture in order to comment on socio-political structures. Hannah Höch’s “Cut With A Kitchen Knife Dada...” is an example of a piece that forces political life through a crossing of borders into the realm of art and provokes thought and response.

While it is arguable whether this piece resulted in direct socio-political change it is important to point out that there is more that his direct change to the function of avant-garde art. To the future viewers and historians, art of any kind provides a means by which to dissect and interpret the thought perspectives of the past.

Additionally, art may indeed not directly change things, but its presence is a means of saturating discourse with that which is problematic. It underscores the problems and makes it more difficult to ignore. When these avant-garde practices are reflected upon later they act as other recordings of history do. They illustrate past behaviors and implore us not to repeat them. The failure is not in the art, but in the difficulty of those “who must bear the world’s injustice” to mobilize in such a way that their identity is not that of “the other.”