DRAFT: The Last Avant Garde
Only in dance can we find anything innovative and original today.
The twitchy spasmodic contortions of dancer Simon Bus are hard to watch. Out of context, on the street for example, it would be impossible to figure out what’s going on. We might enjoy coming upon a random moment of ballet or ballroom, swing or even break dancing, but this? Someone might call the police, or an ambulance.
Even in the context of art, which for dance is a stage or a studio (a venue with an invited audience) Bus’s movement pieces are difficult. From someone not initiated into the politesse and assumptions of cultural presentation, you might well hear a, “But that’s not dance!”1
What is avant garde?
Avant garde is per force something unexpected and challenging. It’s French and literally means something coming before something else, a main event as it were. In “olden times,” what was coming after was usually an army. In modern times, we have been taught that when we are presented with things we don’t quite understand, we are supposed to accept them as just the beginning, the harbinger of something larger and more profound, like wholesale technological, philosophical or social change.
You will find a fairly decent description of avant garde here. The most interesting thing they say in that short article is that the entirety of the 20th century, in art, was one avant garde after another, each outdoing its predecessor. That’s true for the most part, though it leans left, as it were, because it completely ignores all kinds of decent work that was not avant garde, that carried on various traditions throughout the 20th C. But the list of movements is fairly good; the sampling of artworks, not so much. Abramovic and Basquiat are not in the least avant garde imho.
What happened to the avant garde?
For me (or for the sake of argument) the last truly avant garde artwork was created by Eduardo Kac in 2000; it was a real, live, genetically-modified-to-be-fluorescent bunny named Alba. Kac basically presented science, detached from reason or purpose, as art. He did it because he thought of it and he could. Art for art’s sake.
Maybe science has been the end of art and any possibility of avant garde.
I blame science for most things these days. Half of it turns out not to be true, and the medical and pharmaceutical industries claims to infallibility are maddening. We wouldn’t live nearly as long as we do, but we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in either.
Maybe it is due to science and its unrelenting pursuit of possibilities that we have become inured to innovation. It is now routine to not understand what is coming next. There is no “shock of the new”2 before the full thing is upon us like a tsunami. We grumble and adapt. What choice do we have?
In such context, there is no possibility of mere art preparing us for new ways of thinking and doing things, which is what we used to think the avant garde was doing: cubism presaged the theory of relativity sort of thing.
There may also be some issue here around whether anything is actually new anymore. Technology continues to advance apace. Artificial intelligence seems to have taken even scientists by surprise. But it’s all a bit like making toasters to fit in a thimble; shiny new (and expensive) objects with ever greater capacity to do… what? samo samo,3 the things we always did, crunch numbers, and now language, to come up with better and better ways to control everything around us.
Base avant garde
If we were to establish a modern base line for avant garde, it would have to be the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose “urinal” (pic below) caused an outrage when it was presented as art at a public exhibition in New York in 1917.
The importance of the “urinal” is in the way you look at it. Duchamp invites you to look at it not as a piece of common industrial plumbing but as a sculptural object, as art. He dresses it up with a fancy title, “Fountain”, humorously referring to the stream that would be flowing from the body that would be standing before it urinating (anticipating performance art?) and tags it with a signature “R. Mutt” (anticipating graffiti?) to create another clever train of ironic associations: men peeing like dogs in public (are mutts), stinking up all of Paris to this day. (Duchamp was French and a Parisian.)
For me, Duchamp’s “urinal” represents nothing so much as a madonna, a veiled, demure feminine bust in porcelain as pure and white as Michelangelo’s marble.
I think it is interesting also that Duchamp did not hang the urinal on a wall the way you would normally see it, but is on a pedestal, laid flat, probably the way they would be sitting coming out of the industrial kiln in the factory. (The 90 degree rotation presages later Duchamp work that plays with optical inversion, upside down and backwards, of film in a camera.) But I digress.
In any event, the real beauty of this work is very much in the eye of the beholder.
My point is that this one work was so revolutionary that it has become the baseline against which anything purporting to be avant garde is measured even to this day.4 And really, nothing since comes even close.
The fake and the real avant garde
Determining whether there is any possibility of avant garde today is challenging. Politics is not helping. Many people are writing right now about left vs. right becoming something else. for instance, up vs. down, classes, elites vs. the rest of us. Up/down seems to be a better way to describe the conflicts around us, but even that doesn’t account for all the craziness.
Here on Substack, the algorithm fed me, and I would highly recommend, N.S. Lyons piece The Reality War. (It is terribly long but mercifully in plain English.) Lyons captures what’s going on very well I think. His insight, if I get him right, is that we have a generation of people who have come to religiously believe that if you have the right theory, reality will follow, and not only will follow, but “must” be made to follow. They are an angry bunch, militant about trans rights and many other “alt” niche causes they take to be… well, what is coming. They are, in their own minds perhaps, the avant garde.
In the context of the recent U.S. election, one can see how this gang might have seen Kamala Harris as an avatar for their revolution, convinced that once they got her elected,5 the flood gates would open to let them have their way obliterating every kind of difference as we understand it. To grossly over-simplify the theory: men and women, leaders and followers, bosses and employees, natives and immigrants, all these inconvenient “binary” differences must be “made fluid,” in order to obliterate power differentials. In the resulting brave new world,6 every living humanoid would be celebrated for its complete uniqueness, and provided for unconditionally so that it can realize its perfect selfhood.
It is impossible for me to imagine a new art movement that would trumpet in advance the arrival of such a perverted, dystopian revolution. Fortunately, we don’t have to because there is one already; it was called Surrealism, which came and went in the mid-20th C.
What’s left if there’s no avant garde?
If there’s no left vs. right anymore and quite possibly no up vs. down either, if we now experience change as a matter of (practically incomprehensible) routine, the concept of avant garde is obsolete, which leaves us with what for culture?
Perhaps the title of this essay is wrong. There can be no “last” avant garde, in dance or anywhere else, because there is no possibility of avant garde anymore. There is maybe only the tragedy of representing the passing of the avant garde, its absence. As the saying goes, it’s all over but the crying.7
What I find so gripping about Simon Bus’s work is how visceral it is, you feel it in and with your body. There is no form at all. You cannot measure it against other dance or performance or art. There are no precedents, no models.
With every twitch and spasm, you feel the tension, as if he is moving to and under mysterious forces not his own. It feels like an unravelling, a letting go. There is tragedy in it too, the wasting away of everything that was once dance, was once art. A kind of grief, and mourning.
Even so, can we not take some reassurance, something positive away; perhaps the fact that Bus is very much a real person alive today, creating and performing these moving masterpieces of the moment, breathing breaths that are everything but his last.
The un-avant garde, not avant garde, retrogarde
I am not at all well versed in dance, what used to be called “contemporary dance.” I have singled out Simon Bus for this essay because the algorithm threw him at me one day and I found his work completely new, striking, so radical yet also resolved and resolute. Also perplexing.
I am just beginning to discover that there a global network of highly original auteur8 dancers like Bus. I hope to write more about them in the future.
Here are a few recent discoveries, all on Instagram:9
@Nouses_Motomi
@Muda.japan
@YvonneSpink
It appears that substack doesn’t provide for captions to video… the clip is a Simon Bus performance screen captured from Instagram on 14.12.24. To see more of his work: https://www.instagram.com/simon.bus/ and https://cargocollective.com/simonbus
Very recently, Duchamp was cited as a precedent for the spectacular sale of a banana duct-taped to a gallery wall, a work the auctioneer called “disruptive.” Yes, well, hardly. https://www.cnn.com/style/duct-taped-banana-maurizio-cattelan-auction-hnk-intl/index.html
The hysteria, the tears and wailing and anger, expressed once it became clear Harris was going to be defeated can be explained by this analysis of zealousness about their cause, blindness to alternatives and incapacity to engage in genuine critical discourse, overall a kind of desperation that they must be right and they must win.
a novel by Aldous Huxley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
Lyric from a song by Hank Williams.
We have auteur cinema and in music, the singer-songwriter phenomenon, for decades now, and in dance most likely too (Pina Bausch) but the role of the choreographer is something worth thinking about, i.e. is it passé?
These are all screen captures from Instagram, taken 15.12.24. I hope you will check these artists out.