INTRODUCTION: THIRD-GENERATION AVANT-GARDE?

When Peter Bürger published his seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde in 1974, it was met with well-deserved praise – and some strong criticism. One of the most controversial ideas in the book concerned the relation between the historical avant-garde (1910s–1930s) and the neo-avant-garde (1950s–1960s). Bürger understood the relation along the lines of the famous Marxian statement about how history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce: the neoavant- garde was a travesty of the historical avant-garde. In the historical avant-garde, Bürger found a radical desire for emancipation; he emphasised the avant-garde's attempt ‘to do away with the distance between art and life’ (Bürger 1984: 50), and thereby allow a reordering of the real in which man would finally be reconciled with the world. Admittedly, the historical avantgarde did not succeed in its ambitions (therefore it was a tragedy), but the revolt against ‘the institution of art’ was nevertheless sufficiently successful to make visible many of the ideological structures that dominated society and the art world. In this way the ‘tragedy’ of the historical avant-garde could be seen as a productive failure allowing a critical interrogation of both art and society.

By the 1950–1960s, Bürger argued, things had changed. The revolutionary and anti-institutional ambitions of the historical avant-garde were now being repeated in movements such as pop art and Fluxus. Via these repetitions, ‘the neo-avant-garde institutionalize[d] the avant-garde as art and thus negate[d] genuinely avant-gardiste intentions’ (Bürger [1974] 1984: 58). This paved the way for the cooptation of the avant-garde by the culture industry, with transgressions now eagerly awaited by the art market (and therefore pre-empted). The desire for the new was subsumed into a capitalist logic of fashion and the marketable.

One of the best-known responses to this narrative of decline was delivered by Hal Foster in a 1994 article reprinted in 1996 as ‘Who's Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?’ (in The Return of the Real). Foster's argument was that ‘rather than cancel[ling] the historical avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde enacts its project for the first time’ (Foster 1996: 20). According to Foster, the somewhat intuitive anti-institutional outbursts of the historical avant-garde were now being worked through and comprehended in the works of the neoavant- garde, and in this process of creative reflection (a ‘return in the radical sense’; Foster 1996: 3) more subtle and efficient logics of resistance and critique were being invented.