Word: avante
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...Margaret Thatcher did not exist, the British avant-garde might well have invented her. The Conservative landslide that extended her lease on 10 Downing Street has also renewed her reign as the favorite gargoyle of the London theater's left wing. In the suburban pubs and fringe theaters that form London's equivalent of off-Broadway, playwrights have been declaiming for months against Thatcherism and for the nuclear freeze. Two provocative British plays that recently made it to Manhattan, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Steven Berkoff s Greek, include oblique denunciations of the Tory leader...
Along with an assortment of German neoexpressionists and many others besides, the three Italians were packaged in a sonorous phrase by a Roman critic: la transavanguardia, or the "trans-avant-garde." This clot of art jargon, like "post-modernism," means nothing definable. It merely points to a mood of eclectic revivalism, the assumption being that since progress in art is a myth, painting must perforce go crabwise, with many nostalgic glances backward. Under such a vague rubric, Chia looks a very apposite painter. Granted, neither he nor his fellow transavanguardisti get anywhere near the best German art of this generation...
THOSE PEOPLE who think Boston is hopelessly behind the times culturally, that New York is the only place to experience the avant-garde in the visual and performing arts, clearly don't know about the Hub's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). For almost 50 years now, the ICA has been the setting for some of the most adventurous exhibitions in the country. And while the institute has had its share of flops over the decades, this last year has seen a phenomenal string of artistic and-popular successes at the ICA. And many in the arts community believe that...
...David Ross is not committed solely to performance and video art. "Art moves in all ways at all times," Ross says. "Art is not a single projection progression, that's a fallacy expounded by people who believe in dialectic progression in art. There is no single monolithic avant-garde. If there's a cutting edge in art, it's like a round razor--it cuts in all directions at once." Besides its spectacular "Art and Dance" performance series, and the popular series of video screenings, the ICA this year has offered several exhibitions of purely visual, stationary works...
...under Ross' direction, may well do much to dispel the myth that the avant-garde in art is nowhere to be found in Boston. "Reputations still have to be made or unmade in New York," says Sellars, "but the ICA is moving in very exciting directions. I saw a lot there that meant a great deal to me, and it's a great environment in which to work. And that's the important thing for an artist. The important thing for an artist is working in the media available, getting it done...