Jeppe Ugelvig

UGE12368867
12 May 2015
!
(Dis)locating the Avant-Garde and Institutional Critique



The term ’avant-garde’ is but one of the many concepts utilised by art historians and
cultural producers to legitimise their own periodicisation and historicity, emphasising
novelty and innovation. Since the Romantic period, the term has frequently been
used retroactively to describe particularly innovative or artistic production ‘at the
forefront’. Historians resorted to the usage of this para-military term (etymologically
indicating the literal advanced guard of an army, in front of the rest, the retardataire)1
in the first decade of the 20th century, reflecting the modernist emphasis on progress
and advancement.2 As such, ‘the avant-garde’ signifies nothing but newness: a
historical construct in which certain producers of culture are imagined ‘ahead’, of the
rest (for example, politically), of history, of tradition, or the masses. “For each age, for
each place, for each time, there has always been an avant-garde,”3 Marilyn Singer
writes in History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema (1976): by writing history, the
present establishes its 'present-ness' by differentiating itself from the past,
understood through its own imagined genealogies of the past; and it does so
according to a narrative of historical progress.

!
Nonetheless, the avant-garde (however frivolously utilised or denounced today)
usually, within art, signifies the practices of early 20th century movements such as
the surrealists, constructivists and Dada, today collectively referred to as the

1The Bloomsbury dictionary defines the avant-garde as ”front-line, ahead of the rest, in contrast to those who
bring up the rear and are retardataires.” ‘Avant-garde’ (1993), Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought, Bloomsbury,
London, United Kingdom. Accessed: 1 December 2014, from Credo Reference: http://arts.idm.oclc.org/login?
qurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.credoreference.com.arts.idm.oclc.org%2Fcontent%2Fentry%2Fbght
%2Favant_garde%2F0
2The Online Etymology Dictionary sources the artistic appropriation of the word to 1910: ”…borrowed again
1910 as an artistic term for "pioneers or innovators of a particular period." Also used around the same time in
communist and anarchist publications. As an adjective, by 1925.” Accessed in May 2015: http://
www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=avant-garde . For full reference, see: Barnhart, Robert K., ed. (1988)
Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. London: H.W. Wilson Co.
3Singer, M. (1979) The American Avant-Garde Cinema. Amer Federation of Arts the University of California, page
unknown, via Chin, D. (1985) ’The Avant-Garde Industry’ in Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2/3. Cambridge,
MA: PAJ/MIT Press. p. 62

JEPPE UGELVIG !1
‘historical’ avant-garde. This status was cemented by German theorist Peter Bürger
in his book Theory of the Avant-Garde, in which he treats this loose constellation of
Western artists as particularly crucial or essential to the formation of the notion of an
avant-garde that pushed the boundaries and understandings of art significantly, as
an ‘absolute origin’ of an avant-garde rhetoric, as elaborated by American critic Hal
Foster.4 To Bürger, and many others, the avant-garde is always characterised by a
particular sense of transgression, in which the autonomous art object, epitomised in
aestheticism in the 19th century (l’art pour l’art), and its institution are criticised and
tentatively destroyed, to reveal new ways of re-merging art and life. However, the
avant-garde project, Bürger argues, utterly failed as the institutions of art not only
survived, but accommodated the historical avant-garde – a failure only more so
tragically repeated in the so-called ‘neo-avant-garde’ of the 50’s and 60’s. 

!
But there are several issues with Bürger’s melancholically narrated genealogy and
death of the avant-garde project: first of all, what constitutes the avant-garde, and
how does it appear? What are its characteristics, and is it indeed dead? If not, where
and how do we locate the avant-garde today, 50 years after its supposed neo-
reappearance in the ‘60s? The question of the avant-garde today and the future
seems the most urgent with the current trend of unravelling hegemonic histories –
locating the avant-garde heritage in contemporary critical practice (not necessarily
fine art), and examining how we understand practices that are ‘at the forefront’ of
today and in the future. 



By engaging Foster and his treatment of Bürger’s avant-garde in The Return of the
Real (1996), this essay seeks to challenge the preconceptions of this highly disputed
term; to identify its supposed attributes and idiosyncracies (as proposed by Foster’s
minimalist genealogy), and test them in today’s contemporary climate of cultural
production. Here, criticality becomes essential – perhaps, even genetic – a criticality
that never ceased to exist after the institution’s co-option of the historical avant-
garde, but has operated from within and outside of it for the last hundred years. If we
release the avant-garde from its total-transgressive agenda and identify some

4 Foster describes Bürger’s treatment of the avant-garde as a projection as an ”absolute origin, whose aesthetic
transformations are fully significant and historically effective in the first instance.” Foster, H. (1996) The Return of
the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 8

JEPPE UGELVIG !2
alternative definition – namely, its essential articulation to criticality as
interdisciplinarity, as theorised by Helmut Draxler – the term might once again prove
useful in the 21st century and the climate of post-critique.
!
The idea of an avant-garde has been explored and theorised by many of the greatest
theorists – as technique, political engagement, or class marker. For Walter Benjamin,
the avant-garde was very much an emancipatory project, instigated by the technical
revolutions experienced in the 20th century, particularly within photography and
printing. Benjamin opposes the ‘l’art pour l’art’-doctrine of aestheticism and accused
it of being a final attempt to maintain a cultist theology of art “which not only denied
any social function of art, but also any categorising it by subject matter,”5 as he
writes in his essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). With
mechanical reproduction, (avant-garde) art was emancipated from “its parasitical
dependence on ritual”6 (theology) to trigger a mass and ultimately democratic
spectatorship. Art critic Clement Greenberg continued Benjamin’s Marxist rhetoric,
although he drew completely opposite conclusions: in his essay Avant-garde and
Kitsch (1939), he opposes avant-garde practice to consumerist mass culture,
characterising the avant-garde as a matter of taste, and demonising anything culture
that is mass-produced.7 With further contribution from Adorno8 and the Frankfurt
school, the modernist avant-garde (or perhaps, its discourse or treatment) came to
be identified as essentially oppositional and transgressive.
!
On these premises, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde (1974) attempted to
characterise and historicise the avant-garde within a modernist narrative. He
identified the characteristics set out by Benjamin and the Frankfurt School,
establishing a transgressive genealogy, led by the historical avant-garde – as with
Dada, who opposed the institution of art by making nonsensical work, or with the

5 Benjamin, W. (1935), Zohn, H. trans. ’Art in the Age of Mechanical Repoduction’ in Arendt H. ed (1969)
IIlluminations,. New York. Schocken Books. P. 220
6 Ibid
7Greenberg, C. (1955) ’Avant-garde and Kitsch’ in Clement Greenberg – The Collected Essays and Criticism
Volume 1 – Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, John O’Brian ed. Chicago: University of Chicago.
8 Adorno targeted the avant-garde in his Aesthetic Theory from 1970, but his primary contribution is found in his
essay Cultural Industry Reconsidered. See Adorno, T. (1963) ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ in Bernstein, J.M ed.
(1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge

JEPPE UGELVIG !3
Constructivists, who attempted to reinsert a social purpose for artistic practice in the
Soviet Union. Bürger states two parameters for the avant-garde: “the attack on the
institution of art and the revolutionising of life as a whole”9 However, Bürger
essentially argues for a failure of the avant-gardiste intent to sublate and merge art
with life: “since now,” he writes, “the protest of the historical avant-garde against art
as institution is accepted as art, the gesture of the neo-avant-garde becomes
inauthentic.”10  
!
In his essay ‘Who’s Afraid of The
Neo-Avant-Garde?’ Hal Foster, a
post-structuralist, presents a series
of problematisations of Bürger’s
claims – and of the avant-garde as
such. “Did Duchamp appear as
Duchamp?”11 he asks rhetorically,
probing its obvious answer: perhaps
Duchamp’s satirical gesture of
submitting a signed urinal as an art
Fig. 1 Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917, replica
piece to the Society of Independent
from 1964. Image: www.tate.org.uk/art/
Artists in 1917 was considered
artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573
radical at the time, but the full
importance of such a gesture was not
understood in its present. “The avant-garde work is never historically effective or fully
significant in its initial moments,”12 he argues: the temporal significance of the avant-
garde cannot be understood in its initial present, exactly because it images itself
ahead of it. Rather, the actual significance of the historical avant-garde, or of any
given history, is understood only as it is revisited and recoded in the future;

9Bürger, P. (2010) ’Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the
Avant-Garde’ in New Literary History, Volume 41, Number, 4, Autumn 2010. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins
University Press. p. 696.
10Bürger, P. (2002) ’The Negation of the Autonomy of art by the Avant-Garde’ in Bishop, C. ed.(2006)
Participation. London: Whitechapel. p 51
11 Foster, H. (1996) p. 8
12 Foster (1996), p. 29

JEPPE UGELVIG !4
specifically with the avant-garde, Foster argues that this happens through the neo-
avant-garde of the 50’s and 60’s, whom he avidly defends against Bürger’s criticism.
Probed by the (Foucauldian) image of Lacan and Althusser “rigorously [re-]reading”
Freud and Marx13 respectively, so as to expand their cultural significance (a so-called
‘return’), the neo-avant-garde re-dis-connects with the historical avant-garde not to
assimilate it as a style or theme, but to elaborate it and continue its formal and
political aspiration: “The first move (re) is temporal, made in order, in a second
spatial move (dis), to open a new site for work.”14 . Using Freud’s concept of trauma
and Nachträglichkeit (deferred action, or ‘afterwardness’), an ‘event’ (for example,
the historical avant-garde of the 1920s) is “only registered through another [event]
that recodes it.”15



The poststructuralist return to the “initiators of discursive practices”16 (Marx, Freud,
Nietzsche) is here aligned with the postmodernist return (a term Foster rigorously
believes in) to the modernist discourse of the historical avant-garde, expanding and
advancing it in a “nachträglich” relation to them. Foster rightly resurrects the avant-
garde from its premature death, “recoups it from Bürger”17 as scholar Godfre Leung
phrases it, and establishes a different temporality and narrativity for its historicity.
The avant-garde is, like Lacanian subjectivity, “structured as a relay of anticipations
and reconstructions of traumatic events.”18  
!
13Foucault wrote extensively on so-called ’discursive practices’ initiated by Marx. Peter Brooker writes in 1999:
”Foucault's work gave the terms 'discursive practices' and 'discursive formation' to the analysis of particular
institutions and their ways of establishing orders of truth, or what is accepted as 'reality' in a given society. An
established 'discursive formation' is in fact defined by the contradictory discourses it contains and this tolerance
Foucault understands as a sign of stability rather than as it would be understood in Marxism, for example of
conflict and potential change. Thus characterized, a given 'discursive formation' will give definition to a
particular historical moment or episteme. 'Discursive formations' do nevertheless display a hierarchical
arrangement and are understood as reinforcing certain already established identities or subjectivities (in matters
of sexuality, status, or class, for example). These dominant discourses are understood as in turn reinforced by
existing systems of law, education and the media” Brooker, P. (1999) A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory. London:
Hodder Education, unknown page, retrived from https://faculty.washington.edu/mlg/courses/definitions/
discourse.html. Accesed in May 205. Also, see footnote 16.  
14 Foster (1996),  p.  3
15 Ibid, p. 29
16 Ibid, p. 2
17Leung, G. (2008) ’Review: After the Neo-Avant-Garde? New-Genre Conceptual Art and the Institution of
Critique’ in Art Journal, ol. 66, No. 4 (Winter, 2007). New York: College Art Association, p. 110
18 Ibid

JEPPE UGELVIG !5
In practice, he divides the neo-avant-garde return into two moments: artist like
Rauschenberg and Kaprow in the ‘50s recovered the avant-garde quite literally,
reprising its basic devices such as collage and ready-made. They represent, in this
respect, a certain repetition of the avant-garde’s ‘Bürgerian’ failure: their becoming-
institutional. However, this initial recovery of avant-garde devices paves the way for a
second neo-avant-garde to emerge – artists like Broodthaers, who actively criticises
the becoming-institutional of the historic avant-garde, expanding its dialectic and
repursuing a radicality. “In this way,” Foster writes, “the so-called failure of both
historical and first neo-avant-gardes to destroy the institution of art has enabled the
deconstructive testing of this institution by the second neo-avant-garde.”19

Fig. 2 Marcel Broodthaers’ Pense-Bête from 1964. Image courtesy of Frieze Magazine:
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/marcel_broodthaers/

Foster thus places the (second) neo-avant-garde centrally in the avant-garde project;
not only an ‘event’ that successfully reactivated institutional criticality, but in fact
finalised it via its re-reading of past criticality. The avant-garde survives through
continuous critique of the institution of art as well as through a critique of the initial
avant-garde – not so much a literal attack of institutionalisation (a romantic avant-

19 Foster (1996), p. 25

JEPPE UGELVIG !6
garde as complete rupture and revolution), but rather through continuos critique. He
also expands the notion by identifying contextual and performative characteristics of
the avant-garde, beyond the revolutionary or transgressive: the mimetic dimension
(“whereby the avant-garde mimes the degraded world of capitalist modernity in order
not to embrace it, but to mock it”)20 as well as the utopian dimension (“whereby the
avant-garde proposes not what can be so much as what cannot be – again as a
critique of what is”).21  
!
Foster dedicates the rest of The Return of the Real to narrativise the neo-avant-
garde of the ‘50s and ‘60s as active re-coders of the historical avant-garde, and
establishes a so-called ‘minimalist genealogy’ of subsequent ‘critical practice’ (a term
now seemingly interchangeable with ‘avant-garde’) up until the '90s; that is,
minimalism (as championed by artists in the '60s such as Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt
and Donald Judd, and theorists such as Rosalind Krauss) reprises the avant-garde
by ‘breaking’ with modernist formalism and disrupting the formal categories of
institutional art. Krauss, for example, in her seminal essay Sculpture in the Expanded
Field (1979) expands the historicised (and hence, institutionalised) notion of
sculpture to encompass works that does not fit within an institution - sometimes quite
literally, as with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in which the construction of a piece of
land compromises the work.22 This expansion reprises the avant-garde critique of the
institution of art through a reflection of its contextual condition. Foster narrates the
development of ‘critical art’ across the last 40 years (the textual turn of the '70s,
appropriation art, etc.) in and through minimalism.  
!
Foster’s reading of the avant-garde is rigorous and attentive, but with his emphasis
on a minimalist genealogy of a continuing avant-garde project (a project he, with his
editorship at the journal October, was clearly personally invested in), he falls into the
same epistemological trap that he criticises in Bürger: that of arguing for an absolute
origin. Exactly Bürger points this out more precisely in his defensive response to the
critics of his book, noting that Foster “… posititions the neo-avant-garde as the

20 Ibid p. 16
21 Ibid

See: Krauss, R. (1979) ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ in October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979). Cambridge, MA:
22

MIT Press

JEPPE UGELVIG !7
ultimate event that establishes meaning.”23 The establishing of an ‘event of meaning’
goes against his own theory of Nachträglichkeit, which opposes such temporality.
Furthermore, Foster’s constant emphasis on ruptures and turns – textual turns,
social turns, ethnographic turns etc. – re-inserts a historicity of the avant-garde that
too easily enables a personal canonisation, dismissing much art along the way (for
example, the so called cynical reason, neo-geo, and some appropriation art of the
'90s) before postulating a crisis in criticality at the end of the century (a postmodern
crisis of aestheticisation and simulacra posited by theorists at the time such as
Jameson and Baudrillard). Foster justifies this position by presenting two ways of
returning to the avant-garde-minimalist origin of institutional critique via two ‘returns
to the real;’ that is, either uncovering the real by “pushing illusionism to the point of
the real,” evoking the pathetic, melancholic or monstrous through objects, or by
rejecting illusionism in the attempt to evoke the real as such in the form of abject
art.24 Constructing such a narrative is to downplay the ability of the avant-garde to
reprise itself continuously – through the re-invention of critique of the institution of the
past, present and future.  
!
Nonetheless, Foster provides, through his analyses, a range of significant and
decisive characteristics for the avant-garde – namely, the engagement with the art
object, institutional criticism, merging art and life, representation, illusionism,

Fig 3 & 4. Katja Novitskova, Approximation Mars I, 2014. and Approximation V Chameleon.
Courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. Images via http://www.sleek-mag.com/showroom/
2014/05/katja-novitskova-are-we-there-yet/

23 Bürger, P. (2010), p. 711

24 Read Foster’s full argument in the fifth chapter of his book The Return of The Real. p. 152

JEPPE UGELVIG !8
mimesis, and utopianism. A quick look at the current landscape of contemporary art
will see a ‘Fosteran’ recoding of these avant-garde strategies.  
!
In her continuous series Approximation, Estonian artist Katja Novitskova
appropriates stock photography of animals and reprints them larger-than-life on
aluminium cut-out displays, making them appear as sculptural singular entities,
removed from their primary (natural) and secondary (digital) habitats. The
relationship between the spectator, the photograph and the photographed is
questioned through a discussion on representation and illusionism, echoing both the
historical avant-garde’s engagement with collage and montage (defined as “the
transfer of materials from one context to another”) and “the dissemination of these
borrowings through the new settings” respectively.25 This recoding enables a
contemporary institutional critique: in the age of the anthropocene, these mediated
animals are (dis-)placed in the sterile white cube gallery space in an almost violent
way, efficiently commenting on the ‘habitats’ of art. Novitskova reprises an avant-
gardiste practice, formally through devices as well as politically via critique. 

!
Indeed, what becomes apparent when reading Bürger, Foster and other critics of the
avant-garde such as Greenberg and Adorno, is that their conception of the avant-
garde, and modernism as such, is captive of a narrative of transgression. A narrative
of ruptures and turns, “cheerfully dishonouring the past in the name of the future,”26
as phrased by scholar Nicholas Bourriaud who, borrowing from Gilbert Durand,
considers modernism as functioning in “oppositional imagery.“ Contemporary art,” he
argues in his essay Relational Aesthetics (1998), “has taken up and does represent
the heritage of the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, while at the same time
rejecting their dogmatism and their teleology.”27 He argues, in contrast to Foster’s
minimalist genealogy, for ‘relational aesthetics’, a new type of practice that
emphasises intersubjectivity and interaction, not as “fashionable theoretical
gadgets,” but “at once a starting point and point of arrival, in short, the main themes

25Group Mu eds. (1978) Collages . Paris: Union Generale, pp. 13-14 via Foster ed. (2002) Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture. New York: The New Press, p. 122.  
26 Ibid
27 Ibid

JEPPE UGELVIG !9
that inform their work.”28 Indeed, relational practice can be considered avant-garde if
understood as merging art and life through its aesthetic relationality to life, the
critique hence coming from within, rather than from outside. Bourriaud articulates
avant-garde devices several times in his writing, arguing that the utopian impulses of
the avant-garde, previously illustrated through extreme impossibility such as with
dada, is now experienced “as a day to day subjectivity.” 29
!
There are issues in Bourriaud’s argument about increased interactivity and
relativity,30 but we do not need to take Bourriaud’s argument as absolute truth;
however, his conception of art as operating from a different point than before gives a
helpful direction to locating avant-garde practice and/or institutional critique today.
The idea of a dis-locating the formerly fixated origin and place becomes essential -
releasing it from a transgressive genealogy into the expanded field of cultural
production. Bürger himself later emphasises that although neither the historical nor
the neo-avant-garde did destroy the institution, they changed it from the inside and
thus expanded it, that is, changed its operative strategies.31 As emphasised earlier,
this is done through a continuous institutional critique, but a critique that is dis-
located from the historical avant-garde’s very literal position.
!
The avant-gardiste concern of the ‘place’ or ‘point’ of critique, as an advocate for the
destruction of the institution, has remained central in the development of critical
writing since the historical avant-garde – also in today’s climate of post-criticism, in
which critique has to break free from its status as institutional commodity, as
postulated by Foster, while maintaining an importance and relevance to society.
French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari addresses this eternal tension, arguing that art,
always fabricated in the socius, possesses “a double finality: inserting itself into a

28 Bourriaud, N. (1998) ’Relational Aesthetics’ in Bishop, C. ed.(2006). p 166

29 Ibid
30Particularly Foster remains sceptical about Bourriaud’s claim for increased interactivity in contemporary social
practices in his essay Chat Rooms – perhaps an extension of the argument developed in his essay Artist as
Ethnographer. See Foster (2004) ‘Chat Rooms’ in Bishop, C. ed.(2006). p. 192
31 In the response to his critics, Burger talks about the expansion of the institution rather than its destruction
after the historical avant-garde. See: Bürger, P. (2010) , p. 796

JEPPE UGELVIG !10

social network … will either appropriate it [read: commodify] or reject it.”32 Guattari
presents two interrelated issues: the ‘art-and-life’-debate and the object of critique.
Indeed, what is the object of critique after the conventional critique of objects in the
'20s (the historical avant-garde and their ready-mades) and the spatial critique of the
'60s (the neo-avant-garde that questioned the actual facilities of art, as with land
art)? The institution seems, ever-morphing like capitalism, to be continuously able to
accommodate even its most transgressive opposers.  
!
It is argued that the idea of ‘the institution’, to return to the avant-garde question, has
been particularly complexified in recent years. Previously so tangible and hence
assailable by the avant-garde, the institution (like neo-liberal capitalism, often paired
as evil twins) today operates omni-presently in culture – symbolically as well as
practically. But did the institution ever appear as a cohesive entity, one that the
avant-garde could attack? In his essay Letting Loos(e) – Institutional Critique and
Design, art historian Helmut Draxler attacks the former theoreticians of the avant-
garde such as Bürger and Foster for their lack of assessment of their own
terminology. He remains sceptical of the glorified ‘institutional critique’ of the avant-
gardes, arguing that:
!
“…the concept of institutional critique includes a lack of clarity as to which
understanding of the institution it refers to, whether institutions are taken to be
concrete entities such as museums … or galleries whose selection … are to be
questioned; whether it is a matter of the institution of art as a whole, as Peter Bürger
sees it – with the avant-garde countering the institution with ‘life-praxis’; or even
whether we are dealing with every conceivable form of institution and an anarchistic
politics.”33
!
‘Life-praxis’ (Lebenspraxis) refers to Bürger’s idea of an avant-garde space within
society – an imagined space outside of the institution, providing what Draxler calls
‘running-room’ wherein the merging of art and life can (potentially) happen. Draxler
attacks the former theoreticians of the avant-garde such as Bürger and Foster for

32 Guattari, F. (1992) ‘Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm’ in Bishop, C. ed. (2006). p. 79

33Draxler, H. (2006) ‘Letting Loos(e): Institutional Critique and Design’ in Alberro, A. and Buchmann, S. eds.
(2006) Art After Conceptual Art. Vienna: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 158

JEPPE UGELVIG !11

their one-dimensional examination of critical practice, arguing specifically for the
inclusion of new media and design in the canon of critical art. He accuses Foster for
considering design as a demonic non-critical ‘aestheticisiser of everyday life’, an
agent of neoliberal capitalism “taking its revenge on postmodernism.”34 Rather than
Bürger’s and Foster’s transgressive model of the avant-garde, Draxler argues for an
interdisciplinary model in which institutional critique is considered as “a practice that
interlinks and confronts various artistic realms and forms of cultural articulation.”35
!
The term ‘New Media’ is the most prevalent of the many more-or-less arbitrary
attempts to describe a whole range of cultural praxes that, in one way or another,
relate or respond to the emergence of the Internet and recent digital-technological
advancement. Rooted in net.art of the '80s as much as the Bauhaus design tradition,
the term is, to many, too vague to be useful - but can perhaps best be characterised
by an enthusiasm for cross-disciplinarily, anti-medium-specificity, digital multimedia
and practical multipurpose (in New Media, distinctions between communication,
creation and mediation of culture is increasingly vanishing). The term’s vagueness is
also a sign of a current terminological crisis, in which cultural phenomena appear
increasingly rapidly and often without a clear genealogy. With the simultaneous
emergence of the Internet and full-fleshed globalism in the last two decades, means
of cultural distribution exploded, collapsing previous canonical understandings of
‘movements’, as well as obvious models of causality, temporality and narrativity in art
history and culture as a whole. This complicates, but not necessarily refutes, much
theory that treats culture as an entity: ‘postmodernisms’ (as advocated by Debord,
Baudrillard and Jameson) happen simultaneously with several local or virtual
‘modernisms,’ and their critical projects are, to the increasingly connected cultural
consumer, experienced at once.
!
The interconnectivity of the Internet, with all its idiosyncrasies, function for some
artists as a relational sphere, in the terms of Bourriauld, of which to work from, and
often described as post-internet art. In their extensive survey of the phenomenon,
Karen Archey and Robin Peckham argue that post-internet practice has offered

34 Ibid, p. 153
35 Ibid P. 156

JEPPE UGELVIG !12

many of the most important current debates within cultural production and
consumption today, namely within the study of distribution, language, post-
humanism, corporate aesthetics, and infrastructure of communication, to name a
few.36 For others, it is simply is an inescapable condition for contemporary critical
thinking and practice, whether it is furniture design, fashion or fine art. It
problematises the question of medium even further, with the digital at once
performing as medium, exhibition format, critical space and institution. Indeed, New
Media provokes the kind of stereographic plurality of signifiers that Barthes spoke of
in his seminal essay From Work to Text:37 today, all cultural production (not just
minimalist sculpture) should be treated as text. But to avoid the rupture-fixated
transgressive narrativity of previous theorists of the avant-garde, the emergence of
the Web should not be understood as a graspable ‘turn’ or ‘event’;38 rather, the digital
enables an increasingly refined treatment of complex structures already imbedded in
the world.
!
Draxler argues that “new media presents new aesthetic criteria that problematise the
genealogies of the avant-garde that have come to stand in for histories of critical
art.”39 In this expanded notion of avant-garde, the institution does not appear as a
tangible ‘enemy’, rather, it is omni-present in culture and cultural production – which
demands a similarly omni-present critique. The art collective Shanzhai Biennial
tackles this omni-presence quite literally, posing at once as art biennial, fashion
week, PR company and real-estate agent. Inspired by Asian Shanzhai culture, in
which counterfeit goods mis-appropriate brand names and thus taking a form of

36Archey and Peckham writes in the introduction of their survey: ”Though the terminology with which we
describe these phenomena is still nascent and not yet in widespread use, this exhibition presents a broad survey
of art that is controversially defined as “post-internet,” which is to say, consciously created in a milieu that
assumes the centrality of the network, and that often takes everything from the physical bits to the social
ramifications of the internet as fodder. From the changing nature of the image to the circulation of cultural
objects, from the politics of participation to new understandings of materiality, the interventions presented
under this rubric attempt nothing short of the redefinition of art for the age of the internet.” See: Archey, K.,
Peckham, R. eds. (2014) Art Post Internet. Beijing: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Accessed in May 2015 via
http://www.post-inter.net/
37 Barthes, R. (1984), The Rustle of Language. Howard, R. trans. New York: Hill and Wang, p. 60
38 For philosopher Jacques Derrida, the ‘event’ can only present itself under the form of an unappropriable
revenance, beyond essence; that is, an unpresentable event, which challenges all teleological narrativity of history.
See for example: Derrida, J., Habermas, J. (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Borradori, G. ed. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press
39 Leung, G, (2008) p. 109

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ownership over them, SB applies epistemological slips within the art and fashion
world, “taking advantage of what each one of them doesn’t know about the other
one, and then what both of them don’t know about China.” 40 For their third
instalment, the group performed a kind of consultancy job for Frieze art fair,
functioning as fair boutique (selling limited edition Frieze tote bags in quilted calfskin
with gold chain available at the price of £5,000) while collaborating with luxury real-
estate agent Aston Chase to sell a £32 million estate in West London. Appropriating
the iconography of the international art event, the pseudo-institutional and hyper-
capitalist face of the art world is turned upside down and used against itself –
operating from within, the piece also addresses the ambivalent relationship all artist
must have to the mega-rich in the age of art as luxury commodity.
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Fig. 5 在惡霸的兇慘下，她被墳怒淹沒 - She stiffens with anger at the sight of the thug’s cruelty. Marketing imagery
for Shanzhai Biennial 3, in which they collaborated with a real estate agent to sell a £100 million town house
in London. Images courtesy of Project Native Informant. Via http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/68220/
shanzhai-biennial-3-100-hamilton-terrace/

!
40 Ugelvig, J. (2014) ’Shanzhai Biennial 3: 100 Hamilton Terrace’ , published on DIS Magazine in November
2014. Accessed in May 2015 via www.dismagazine.com/dystopia/68220/shanzhai-biennial-3-100-hamilton-
terrace/

JEPPE UGELVIG !14

!
For SB, the ’institution’ is used actively and in a sense, as medium, in the pursuit of
new fields of institutional critique while examining the instituting moment: the
moment of institutional co-option that has stood as the ultimate enemy for the avant-
gardes for over a hundred years. But rather than treating the ’institution’ as a fixed,
permanent structure (and target of critique) as with the historical and neo-avant-
garde, ”… here, the institutional and the instituting moment do not disappear as
opposites; they remain in touch with one another,”41 as Draxler phrases it; a
complete opposition results in the failure/death of the avant-garde, so some form of
relation (be it mutualistic or parasitic) must remain.
!
For the continued relevance of the notion of the avant-garde, we must release it from
narrative with beginnings (genealogy), middles and ends. Rather, we must approach
the avant-garde as a particular mode of criticality that pushes or internally/external
dislocates cultural production via critique. Transgressive or not, the avant-garde can,
via Foster, be characterised by having certain concerns; representation, objecthood,
or the pursuit for merging art and life. As critical readers, we are easily lured by
arguments of origins, ruptures, turns, and perhaps even deaths of the avant-garde.
But the avant-garde is never far gone, in fact, it never left. Rather than striving to fix
the avant-garde within political genealogies, we must first of all question the notion of
criticality, the instituting moment and the nature of institutional critique. ”I think that
the life of an institution implies that we are able to criticise, to transform, to open the
institution to its own future,” Derrida writes in Deconstruction in a Nutshell (1996):
”the paradox in the instituting moment of an institution is that, at the same time that it
starts something new, it also continues something, is true to the memory of the past,
to a heritage, to something we receive from the past, from our predecessors, from
the culture. If an institution is to be an institution, it must to some extent break with
the past, keep the memory of the past, while inaugurating something absolutely
new.”42 Indeed, the avant-garde necessarily maintains a complex relationship to the(/
‑

its) past, present and futures – always already-institutionalised, historical yet non-
genealogic, and, somehow paradoxically, always-already ahead of, avant la garde.

41Draxler, H. (2006). p.    158

42 Derrida, J. (1996) Deconstruction in a Nutshell. Caputo, J.D. ed. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, p. 6

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Ugelvig, J. (2014) ’Shanzhai Biennial 3: 100 Hamilton Terrace’ , published on DIS Magazine in
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biennial-3-100-hamilton-terrace/

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Catalogues

Archey, K., Peckham, R. eds. (2014) Art Post Internet. Beijing: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.
Accessed in May 2015 via http://www.post-inter.net/
!
Websites and images - all accessed in May 2015

www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=avant-garde
http://www.sleek-mag.com/showroom/2014/05/katja-novitskova-are-we-there-yet/
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/marcel_broodthaers/
www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573

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