Like Holding Sand in Your Fingers/Being a Kid and Watching Your Balloon Float Away: Defining the "Avant-garde"

If a definition for avant-garde could be reduced to gastronomy, I would liken it to trying sea urchin at a sushi restaurant.  The orangey-yellowish blob of mousse wrapped in seaweed looked a little funny, but when I put it into my mouth it blew my mind.  How do you describe something with the pungent smell of armpits that tastes like mucus and is as formless as melted marshmallows, salty as caviar, sticky as a jaw breaker all sucked up, and chewy as a piece of shoe leather?  Completely different and outside of anything in my previous culinary experience.  Did I “like” it, you ask?  Well, it doesn’t matter; the question of affinity did not translate into my body’s ability to digest and excrete.  It is strange indeed to reflect four years later that I still cannot comprehend or describe this slippery, undefinable texture.

--Yet, I remember it...not so much for the taste, but for the emotion elicited through the encounter. 

“Music was much more than an object of beauty; it was a mode of cognition, a discourse of ideas whose ‘truthfulness’ should be protected,” Jim Samson writes of the “avant-garde” in his Grove article.  The literal French translation means “vanguard,” an image of a leading militaristic group that clears the way for the troops following behind.  Artists and critics usurped the term in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and used it to encapsulate works of art that are radical in their medium, form, political and social agenda, and transformation of high and low cultural boundaries.  

In the nineteenth century, Saint-Simon established his own criteria to differentiate the avant-garde from time-specific terms such as ars nova or Wagner’s “music of the future.”  If we return to Saint-Simon’s criterion for avant-garde, he delineates two factors: a pretentiousness derived from assuming the apex of an intellectual specialization (the ability to recognize “greatness in art” that artists purposely cloak from the public-at-large through experimentalism), and the notion that this specialized culture actively antagonizes -- either through dissent or assimilation -- a larger social world from which it perceives itself to be detached. 

Isn’t it paradoxical to assert that the avant-garde, by its literal definition, occupies the preeminent position to “blaze new frontiers for the collective culture” while it has also evolved over the last fifty years into a valid contributer, but not a game-changing impetus, in an ever-increasingly pluralist society?  Samson describes the current avant-garde as “neither threatening, nor threatened, by the politics and aesthetics of mass culture.”  Furthermore, with the end of Modernism (deaths of the Second Viennese School) and emergence of Postmodernism, the avant-garde has somewhat ceased to dissent, but rather, according to Samson, has been “sanctioned.”  Perhaps the avant-garde can now be ascertained by examining the cutting edge and the edgy as they permeate equally through classical (aka “high culture”), commercial pop, and the avant-garde strains.  

Sources

Samson, Jim. “Avant garde.” Oxford Dictionary of Music.

Nicholls, David. “Avant-garde and Experimental Music.”