Note: This article appeared in the Village Voice Sept. 16, 1998 and can be
viewed on their website at:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9838/carr.php
On Edge
by C. Carr
The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments
A Brief History of Outrage
his has been the summer of the Hundred
Greatests—those lists of books and films
intended to goad consumers into asking the
question, "Citizen Kane? Is that out on DVD?"
Admittedly, the lists are fun to ridicule, since all
but your own are so obviously wrong.
Still, I feel challenged to prepare a truly
important list: of avant-garde manifestations
that changed the world because they
stretched the boundaries of what art can be.
Note that the list is chronological, and that
space constraints kept me from reaching the
magic number of 100. (Which probably explains
your absence.) Besides, in keeping with the
avant-garde spirit of subversion, it behooves
me to challenge the power of 10.
1. 1863: Artists assume the task of épater le
bourgeois, when early modernists challenge
academic painting at a Salon des Refusés.
Many spectators are offended by Manet's Le
Déjeuner sur l'herbe, now a French national
treasure. Harold Rosenberg's observation about
this moment applies to most of those that
follow: "Vanguard art must be synonymous with
rejected art—not because advanced art desires
to fail but for the deeper reason that only art
officially cast aside can arouse in the spectator
authentic feelings
uncoerced by vested authority."
2. 1873: Arthur Rimbaud stops writing poetry at the age of
19.
3. 1896: Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi opens with the word "merdre"
introducing obscenity to the stage and prompting a riot at
Paris's
Théâtre Nouveau.
4. 1897: While serving a sentence of two year's hard labor
for the
crime of homosexuality, Oscar Wilde writes De Profundis
for his callow
lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
5. 1907: Picasso's first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon,
distresses even his biggest fans.
6. 1909: The first Futurist manifesto promises to destroy
all museums,
moralisms, and cowardice.
7. 1910: Wassily Kandinsky creates the first completely
nonrepresentational painting.
8. 1913: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring provokes such an
outcry during its
first performance that the dancers onstage cannot hear the
orchestra.
9. 1914: Marcel Duchamp buys a bottle rack and signs it as
an artwork,
thus becoming the first conceptualist.
10. 1916: Hugo Ball recites phonetic poems (no real words)
while
dressed in a cardboard costume at his Cabaret Voltaire.
11. 1916: Dadaists proudly embrace nonsense and negation,
attacking
all art, past, present, and future. Their tracts announce
that Dada is "a
tomato," "soft-boiled happiness," and "nothing, nothing,
nothing."
12. 1929: André Breton asserts that the ultimate
Surrealist act is
someone firing a pistol into a crowd.
13. 1930: Spectators throw stink bombs at the screen
during the
premiere of the Luis Buñuel/Salvador Dali film L'Age d'Or.
14. 1934: Hitler rages against Dada in a speech,
threatening the artists
with arrest. (Three years later, the Nazis organize a show
called
Degenerate Art, hoping to arouse disgust against modernism.)
Here a gap occurs due to the ultimate atrocity exhibition:
World War
II.
15. 1947: Jackson Pollock begins the drip paintings that
will come to be
understood (inaccurately) as spontaneous emotional
outpourings.
16. 1952: John Cage composes 4' 33", in which the musician
sits in
silence for that length of time.
17. 1953: Merce Cunningham removes emotion and narrative from
modern dance.
18. 1955: Allen Ginsberg gives the first public reading of
"Howl" at the
Six Gallery in San Francisco, with the audience yelling,
"Go!" at the end
of each line.
19. 1957: Soon after Kerouac publishes On the Road, a
journalist
invents the word "beatnik."
20. 1957: The Situationist International declares itself
"the last
avant-garde." Instead of critiquing earlier art
traditions, they critique
"the spectacle," a world ruled by images and consumerism.
21. 1959: Allan Kaprow creates the first "happening" in an
environment
where the audience participates to an unprecedented degree.
22. 1960: Yves Klein makes his "leap into the void" from a
Paris
wall—the most influential art event that never happened.
(It was
manipulated in the darkroom.)
23. 1961: Piero Manzoni cans his own shit and sells it for
its weight in
gold.
24. 1962: Warhol exhibits portraits of soup cans at his
first one-man
show.
25. 1962: In what would later become SoHo, Fluxus artists
make art
from picnic garbage, play soccer on stilts, and create a
musical score
with a machine gun.
26. 1963: Nam June Paik exhibits "prepared" televisions,
inventing video
art.
27. 1964: Police break up a screening of Jack Smith's Flaming
Creatures and arrest Jonas Mekas for programming the film.
28. 1965: The Viennese Actionists bring self-mutilation,
blood rituals,
and orgies into the art realm.
29. 1966: At London's Destruction in Art symposium, Yoko
Ono performs
Cut Piece, inviting spectators to cut her clothing off.
30. 1967: Charlotte Moorman is convicted of indecent
exposure for
playing the cello topless during a performance of Nam June
Paik's Opera
Sextronique.
31. 1971: Chris Burden performs Shoot, in which he has a
friend shoot
him in the arm with a rifle.
32. 1972: Vito Acconci performs Seedbed, in which he
masturbates
under a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery.
33. 1974: In I Like America and America Likes Me, Joseph
Beuys lives in
a gallery with a coyote for four days.
34. 1975: In Interior Scroll, a naked Carolee Schneemann
pulls a paper
scroll from her vagina and reads its text on "vulvic space."
35. 1975: Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader attempts to cross the
Atlantic in a
small yacht as part of an art project—and disappears at sea.
36. 1977: Through the imperfect vessel of the Sex Pistols,
Dada's
negation passes into pop.
37. 1980: Schizoculture emerges from the alternating
currents of
postmodern theory and nightclub energy, manifesting in
antispaces
from Fashion Moda to the Mudd Club.
38. 1984: Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh cut the
eight-foot rope
that has tied them together at the waist for a full year;
during that
time, they had never touched each other.
39. 1984: To illustrate "the obsolescence of the body,"
Stelarc
suspends himself over East 11th Street by 18 fish hooks
stuck through
his skin.
40. 1984: Holly Hughes puts lesbian desire onstage in her
first dyke noir
play, The Well of Horniness.
41. 1986: Karen Finley's scabrous and hilarious monologues
like I'm an
Ass Man are obscenity in its purest form—never just a
litany of
four-letter expletives but an attempt to express emotions
for which
there are no words.
42. 1986: James Luna (Luiseño/Diegueño) displays himself
as a relic at
the Museum of Man—near the Indian exhibits.
43. 1986: Adrian Piper, an African American artist
sometimes mistaken
for white, makes calling cards that read: "Dear Friend, I
am black. I am
sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed
at/agreed with
that racist remark..."
44. 1988: Artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay cross the
Great Wall of
China on foot, starting at opposite ends and meeting in
the middle.
45. 1988: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Border Brujo begins to
shape the
multicultural debate.
46. 1989: Annie Sprinkle inserts a speculum onstage and
invites
spectators to look at her cervix.
47. 1990: Mexican, Chicano, and Anglo artists from the
Border Arts
Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo travel from the Gulf
to the Pacific
in a bus, "suturing the border wound" by planting steel
staples with one
prong in Mexico, one in the U.S.
48. 1990: Robbie McCauley travels the country to turn
remembrances
of racial trouble (busing in Boston, voting rights in
Mississippi, rioting
in Buffalo) into "performance dialogues" between local
black and white
actors.
49. 1994: Nina Sobell and Emily Hartzell do the first live
performance in
the history of the World Wide Web.
50. 1996: Mel Chin directs a team of artists inserting
vanguard art into
the set of television's Melrose Place.
