Word: avante
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...early fifties, the avant-garde knew Jackson Pollock as a man who might come into his favorite East Hampton bar late one night, have a few drinks, and knock his fellow painter Franz Kline across the room. Folks at home knew him, thanks to Henry Luce's magazines, as "Jack the Dripper," the angry-looking young man who put canvas on the floor, slopped a little Duco paint around, added some sand and miscellaneous junk, and called the mess a painting. He seemed as full of chaos as his paintings. He smoked Camels, drank hard, then finally lost control...
...much of the 20th century, many leading avant-garde composers have arranged their notes, rhythms and timbres according to predetermined schemes or series. Such major works as Arnold Schoenberg's Serenade and, more recently, Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maître have been serial compositions. Indeed no one has championed serialism more than has Boulez, the onetime enfant terrible of French music who is now the 47-year-old conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony. Yet there was Boulez in Manhattan last week introducing his new 31-minute composition . . . explosante/fixe . . . and conceding...
...receptive to ideological liberation (or even struggle) as the Harvard Board of Overseers. It should be clear that the Signet Society is only slightly more qualified to judge radical poetry than is Dean Dunlop to judge the "competence" of Professor Guinier, yet apparently Rich expected something more advanced, more avant-grade--or, at least, more subtle--from the guardians of upper-class culture, Well, even angles fart, and so must the sweet Signet subtlety occasionally sour. The elegant left (left of Eliot and Pound, that is) revealed its imperial purple this time, exposing itself as actually being scarred...
These matters do not afflict body art to the same degree, even though the atmosphere of suspension and privilege peculiar to the recent avant-garde remains. But the trouble with most body pieces is that they are either so small in conception as to be negligible-for instance, Dennis Oppenheim slowly tearing off a section of his fingernail-or so grotesque in their implications, as with poor Schwarzkogler, that they amount to overkill. Triviality or threat: take your choice...
...faced with the choice between amateur therapy and finicky, arid footnotes to Duchamp, the mind recoils. In fact, the term avant-garde has outlived its usefulness. The hard thing to face is not that the emperor has no clothes; it is that beneath the raiment, there is no emperor...