Group Seminar The Neo-Avant-Garde

Angela Rogers and Graham Whitham
25th March 2013


Avant-Garde - art generated from ideas and issues, as opposed to aesthetics.
Neo-Avant-Garde...
Dada- Neo/Avant-Garde - a postmodern Avant-Garde.
Art historical constructed idea.
Postwar circle of activities at odds with mainstream art.
Just aesthetic is a narrow way of looking at art.
Connects to Avant-Garde - critical, challenging
Differentiated by different postwar issues.
The polarity of modernism.

Georg Baselitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Baselitz

Barbara Kruger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Kruger

Nan Goldin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin

Beginning of / definition of postmodernism.

Hal Foster - art critic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Foster_(art_critic)
1980s
Art - signs and references which have meaning.
The purpose of art - Art not aesthetic.
Communicated in an oblique way

Jonathan Jones Guardian Blog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog

Neo is more multilayered that Avant-Garde.
Lucio Fontana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Fontana

Duchamp exhibition:
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=14075
http://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2013/02/17/exhibition-review-the-bride-and-the-bachelors-at-the-barbican-2/

Totally contemporary issues.
Challenging conventions of what art can even be.

Art continually moves on.
Art trying not to look like art
Art changes rather than progresses
Some artworks retain their elements of the Avant-Garde.

Revisiting critique.
Stages in artists lives.
Possibly find more subtle, considered, internal ways to say things.

Stuart Brisley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Brisley
Shift in practice away from performance towards painting, etc.


Reflection

This was an interesting discussion and a subject which remains completely relevant in contemporary art practice. We spent most of the seminar discussing what the terms might mean, and grasping the distinctions between Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde. Neo AG is postmodern in the sense that is has many more layers available. The ideas of Modernism, Postmodernism, the Avant-Garde, neo-Avant-Garde, added to Dada and Surrealism, are really the stuff of all artists work now. When we revisit and examine, we find that much has already been eloquently expressed before us. Some previous work is shockingly relevant and fresh, and could have been made today or tomorrow. But not everything has already been said, already been thought, done and made. Every generation always seems to record that they are at the end of progress and the end of knowledge, and ours will be the same, and knowledge and art will continue just the same - progressing? changing?

30th April 2013