Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero
How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art
by Morgan Falconer
W.W. Norton & Co.
February 2025, Hardcover, 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1-324-05142-8
What compelled art historian Morgan Falconer to write How to Be Avant-Garde was a kind of negative epiphany he experienced at Miami Beach’s Art Basel art fair, a major international exposition of new art. He was overcome by a “surfeit of art” that “didn’t add up to anything that made any sense.” It occurred to him that this was the symptom of something greater — the strange situation in which art is omnipresent in contemporary life, but somehow is superfluous. Disappointment with the art of the present led him to reconsider the work of the past, in the guise of the avant-gardes of the last century.
Falconer gives us a detail-rich survey of those movements, beginning with Futurism, announced in a 1909 manifesto on the front page of Paris’ Le Figaro, and running through Dadaism, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus, and ending with the post-WWII movement Situationism. The story he tells is of artists willing to break with art’s past and to reinvent its formal language, its materials, and above all, its relationship to life.
“Avant-garde” is a term that can mean many things and can be applied to many kinds of art. And to be sure, the movements Falconer focuses on featured diverse styles and objectives. But the Ariadne’s thread Falconer sees connecting them is the utopian notion of creating an art that would destroy art in favor of a world that no longer needs art. It’s a dream whose source Falconer locates in the 19th century French socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, the first to use the term “avant-garde” in relation to art. It is Saint-Simon’s vision of the artist as one of society’s elites – an elite of the imagination – that makes him the spiritual progenitor of much of the next century’s advanced art.
As Falconer notes, the precondition for the desire to change the relationship between art and life lay in the avant-garde artist’s alienation: from tradition, from society, and not least from the art market. We can see this alienation in Futurism founder F. T. Marinetti’s bombastic denunciations of Italy’s cultural history as “passéist,” in Surrealism’s rejection of Cartesian reason’s model of the lucid mind, and in Situationism’s critique of what it called the society of the spectacle. In these and other instances, the avant-garde set itself apart from the predominant values and assumptions of the social present and the cultural past, taking the side of invention against tradition, and of adventure against order. Falconer points out that the cause of avant-garde artists’ alienation was their precarious position within their societies; I would suggest that avant-gardists saw themselves as a Saint-Simonian spiritual vanguard occupying an unduly marginal position within the social hierarchy and that they were, in effect, frustrated elites.
For some avant-gardes, mainly in Western Europe, the quarrel with modern society was a quarrel with modernity itself. For these avant-gardes – among whom I would include the Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism – the tradition and order they rejected were epitomized by Enlightenment rationalism and industrial mass society, which they saw as culminating in the reduction of nature and human beings to so much inert material to be administered and used to impersonal ends. This was in large part a result of the First World War, which Falconer rightly identifies as “cataclysmic.” The war’s organized mass slaughter came to represent the undesirable, yet logical, denouement of industrial modernity and its instrumental reason. The avant-gardes set themselves against the irrational rationality that the war had exposed.
When avant-garde artists attempted to break down the barrier between art and life they set out at least in part, and knowingly or not, to restore the value of inner experience, whether through the elevation of the imagination over reason, the embrace of then-popular spiritual movements like Theosophy, the descent into the wilds of the unconscious, or the unleashing of the anarchic forces of desire. Although Falconer emphasizes Futurism’s fascination with advanced technology, it’s also true that although it may have taken its metaphors from the high technology of its time, many of its core ideas were adjacent to the occult. Surrealism, with its roots as much in German Romanticism as in a misreading of Freud sought, as Falconer shows, to find the point at which the contradiction between the dream and reality disappeared. In this attempt to reassert subjectivity in an objectifying world, it was a short step to conceiving of art as a way of going beyond art and becoming a way of being-in-the-world. Surrealism’s determination to defy dehumanization with the unspeakable visions of the individual, and its will to reimagine the everyday world as imbued with the marvelous, arguably represents this aspect of the historical avant-garde at its acme and even, at its most attractive.
But this is all history. Falconer appropriately asks whether something like the historical avant-garde could happen again – whether art could somehow recover its utopianism. But could it? His answer is equivocal. As he acknowledges, conditions now are very different from what they were in the first two or three decades of the last century. The first avant-gardes were reacting to the initial shocks of rapid industrialization and the unprecedented mechanized violence of the 1914-1918 war, which brought a breakdown of traditional mores. But such a shock and breakdown can only come once. By mid-century things had changed, as these shocks had been assimilated and (almost) normalized. Beyond that, in the 1950s, widespread affluence and a change to the US tax code made modern and contemporary art an attractive investment. Prices went up, the mass media took notice, and suddenly the new abstract painting – the vanguard art of the time, although Falconer does not consider it avant-garde – was being snapped up. Artists who had thought only about art suddenly became successful, and contemporary art became collectible. Conceptualism tried to evade the trend by dematerializing the object, but ultimately it failed. The avant-garde, previously defined by its alienation and its heeding of Rimbaud’s call to change life, had effectively been absorbed by the market, changed by life, and for all practical purposes ceased to exist. As Falconer remarks, the art market was art’s revenge on artists who would abolish art. It was only a matter of time before a banana duct-taped to the wall could sell for $6 million. With this work an avant-garde gesture which had first appeared as provocation was repeated as farce.
And yet even while conceding that an avant-garde like the historical avant-garde is no longer possible, Falconer offers a circumscribed optimism. Pointing to both Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and British artists Rufus Norris and Jeremy Deller’s “Project Octagon” deeply moving commemoration of the Battle of the Somme, he leaves open the possibility that contemporary artists can still create art able to insert itself into life. It just won’t be like what had come before.
Falconer’s conversational account provides an accessible and yet still substantive history of the historical avant-gardes. His primary focus is on the artists, whose biographies he skillfully weaves throughout his narrative. We get a clear sense of his respect for their achievements which, however imperfectly, offered a critical and expressive response to the destabilizing realities of their times. Falconer is right to see that with their passing, something of great value has been lost. But every lineage eventually comes to an end – sometimes a dead end. That doesn’t necessarily signal its failure, but rather the possibility that its animating spirit will find a new form to inhabit.
About the reviewer: Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, Word for/Word, Offcourse, Utriculi, Utsanga, Perfect Sound Forever, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press in 2021.