This past December, Red Wedge announced it was going to ask some new and not-so-new questions about the challenges facing art, human creativity, and the struggle for a better world. Foremost among these are questions related to the breaking down of stale, constructed barriers between “the art world” and revolutionary ideas. How can art be reinvigorated beyond the accepted conventions of the gallery and reestablish its connection with a genuine, human utopian urge? Can the “avant-garde,” with all its experimentalism, shed the pompous connotation of “weird for the sake of weird” and reconnect with the concerns of total, thoroughgoing liberation? This essay from editor Adam Turl is the first in a series of articles and blog posts exploring and debating just this notion: that of an urgent, connected, radically engaged “popular avant-garde.” – The Editors

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Just their fingers' prints / staining the cold glass, is sufficient / for commerce, and a proper ruling on / humanity... – Amiri Baraka, "The Politics of Rich Painters," 1964

We have reached the Hegelian endgame; the fusion of art and philosophy. Not quite, as Arthur Danto notes, a negation of art by philosophy but the fusion of both. [1] The art object has become, it is claimed, a philosophical argument in itself. But it is a pyrrhic victory – a Twilight Zone ending for art history, modernism and the avant-garde.

The zeros of painting, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, were long ago achieved. Echoing Joseph Beuys’ “famous axiom” that “everyone is an artist,” anything can be made into art. [2] But the world beyond the philosophical-art object remains stratified, full of prosaic wars, bigotries, and privations.

Anything can be made into art. But there is a small army of theorists dedicated to parsing out what is and isn’t art. Anyone can be an artist – if they aren’t too attached to the idea of eating dinner. Art and philosophy have fused but in the absence of the social revolution that was meant to accompany that fusion. The result is a philosophical-art object that is profoundly weak. If the present model of serious contemporary art is a weak avant-garde, the solution is a popular avant-garde: a rapprochement between artistic experimentation (as art) and mass emancipatory politics.

Boris Groys’ Weak Avant-Garde

In his 2010 essay, “The Weak Universalism,” Boris Groys points to (some of) the above contradictions, albeit divorced from any substantial materialist explanation. Groys observes an “academicized late avant-garde” defined primarily by its conditioning in art schools. Whereas the pre-avant-garde academy was focused on technical skill, according to Groys, the weak avant-garde is defined by its knowledge and conditioning in the avant-garde cannon. Here the “deprofessionalization” of art, a product of anti-elitist and other modernist gestures, becomes highly professional.

This weak avant-garde tends to produce weak visual signs. The basis of this weakness, for Groys, is in the constant change and churning novelty of modern life. “[K]knowledge of the end of the world as we know it,” Groys writes, “of contracting time, of the scarcity of time in which we live” produces a kind of “messianic knowledge.” The avant-garde becomes, according to Groys, “a secularized apostle… who brings to the world the message that time is contracting, that there is a scarcity of time.” Because we live in a “chronically messianic” or “apocalyptic” epoch in which “change is the status quo,” or “permanent change… our only constant,” the visual artist seeks intentionally weak visual signs. These weak signs are the artists’ attempt to produce “transtemporal” works of art; “art for all time.” [3]