Grass ROOTS Vanguard

This essay, from "CROSSROADS: Reflections on the Politics of Culture" by Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard (Talmage, Ca.: DNA Press, 1990), originally appeared in Art in America, Volume 70, Number 4, April 1982, Brant Publications, Inc. It appears here with permission.

Recently we attended a meeting of public-arts administrators — the people who run the National Endowment for the Arts and the various state and local arts agencies built to its specifications. One of these administrators was paid to share his views with the conferees. In doing so, he observed that "the avant-garde seems to be weakening at this time" because it has been "enveloped by systems," and he quoted Suzi Gablik’s essay in these pages ("The Art Job, or How the Avant-garde Sold Out," April 1980, 9-11):

Trapped more and more in a situation that seems both hopeless and inescapable, artists have become increasingly dependent on the complicated bureaucratic machinery which now organizes and administers the consumption of art in our culture. But this apparatus does much more than merely organize and administer; it also preconditions the drives and ambitions of the artists whose well-being it ostensibly exists to promote. It encourages accommodation and surrender to our society’s predominant values and in so doing, it has undermined the very basis of artistic alienation.

Gablik’s thesis is that a genuine avant-garde is a "small, conscious elite" and that its strength lies in its alienation from everything else in society. Individuality is invoked as a kind of magic charm against absorption by the cultural bureaucracy: "the individual’s potential to stand firm and alone," "the recovery of an effective and creative individuality," "a qualitative change in the individual’s aspirations and goals." Her essays end with Clyfford Still’s exhortation: "Dig out the truth and one man is a match for all of them."

Gablik attributes the "weakening" of the avant-garde to artists’ involvement with worldly ambitions, to their seduction by the promise of money and success. The administrator who quoted her blamed his audience of cultural bureaucrats for leading artists astray (apparently by providing them with the apple of knowledge in the form of grants guidelines). Though the locus of blame shifts, both critic and administrator accept as fact the decline of the avant-garde today, and look to the fiercely independent individual artist for its revitalization. Hardly an original idea, this is typical of an art-world mentality which, like much else in our culture, seems consumed by nostalgia.

We would like to suggest another thesis altogether. Let us suppose that the idea of the avant-garde as fundamentally individualistic is specific to a historical moment, that under other circumstances the avant-garde might embody other characteristics. Let us further suppose that a more accurate description of the role of an avant-garde in the arts might be that it seeks to change the idea and function of art itself, to posit a new relationship between the artist and the institutions of society. These suppositions may lead us to see that an avant-garde does indeed flourish at this moment and that far from being absorbed by the art market, undermined by bureaucrats, and seduced by corporate society, it is largely ignored by the critics, administrators, and other spokespersons of official culture.

The conventional idea of the avant-garde is that it exists in opposition to the dominant cultural ideas and institutions, that it stands outside the circle of received wisdom and throws stones at those inside. In this way the power and the very existence of the avant-garde depend upon the power and existence of the conventional idea of art it opposes. This relationship has seemed so much a given, so much a bare fact of description, that it has fallen to the spokespersons of official culture — its critics, bureaucrats, dealers and agents — to decide what is avant-garde and what is not.

Though to this day some artists presume to characterize themselves as avant-garde, attempting to walk the line between the pleasant shock and horrid insult which separates the "avant-garde" from the merely "bad," critics who bestow the avant-garde label prefer to act on their own, thus retaining an element of surprise. The optimal situation is one in which the critic (or dealer) is able to sneak up on an unsuspecting artist and make him Queen for a Day. Then the element of surprise functions as an elegant marketing tactic: It assures an ample supply of the work designated avant-garde (since few will have anticipated its notoriety), but not too ample (with its small number of authentic practitioners, the work will be scarce enough to ensure a good price). Avant-garde work can thus be absorbed by the machinery of the marketplace in no time flat: On Tuesday, no one but his drinking buddies had heard of X; on Tuesday next, he is a celebrity of sorts.

Traditionally the avant-garde has earned its stripes by challenging the ideas of the acceptable in a work of art — what it might "say," what materials and techniques it might employ, how far it might diverge from prevailing taste. In recent years a substantial body of avant-garde work has focused on innovations which have little to do with style, technique and content as they are generally conceived. Such work takes exception to the idea which has long dominated the visual arts — the idea that art must be an object which endures and can be possessed and exchanged, in short, a marketable product. Conceptual and performance art in particular have resisted the status of the marketable art object, but they too have remained safely within the boundary separating the avant-garde from the ignored. Their innovation only "reads" within the context of the visual arts market.

Some of this avant-garde work stresses the context in which art occurs. Such art takes objects, ideas, and even events which exist outside the realm of art and places them squarely within its bounds. It makes much of its focus on territory, toying with the idea of the art world but referring to its own art-world predecessors first and foremost. This art makes a gesture of movement outside the boundaries, but depends for its existence on its failure to complete the gesture. In fact, such avant-garde work has to stop short of rejecting conventional ideas lest it render itself inaccessible or uninteresting to the art market. Granted, it is difficult to imagine new styles or subjects sufficiently offensive to warrant ostracism from the jaded market. But it is not difficult to see the danger incurred by ignoring the market. To throw stones outside the circle of the art world is to risk rendering one’s gesture irrelevant. It’s one thing for Joseph Beuys to camp out with a coyote in an art gallery and quite another for him to confront the animal on neutral ground, undocumented and unadmired. The latter act takes its perpetrator outside the art world altogether.

The critic who holds to the old idea of the avant-garde locks the artist in a double bind. On the one hand, the artist is encouraged to step outside the bounds of convention and do something really new. On the other hand, the artist is warned not to step too far. Like players in a game of statues, the critic calls "freeze" and the artist had better not move a muscle. In this static situation, a return to an idealized past begins to seem a solution, and the current nostalgia for "artistic alienation" is born.

We must remember, however, that the art world — the market, its adjuncts and subsidiaries — is not all there is. While the critics play statues a new artist has been developing, one who has resolved the avant-garde dilemma in a radically new and satisfactory way. The neighborhood artist has actually stepped outside the art market and lived to tell the tale — an innovation so sweeping and unexpected that its significance has largely escaped the critics and administrators. The neighborhood arts movement is the avant-garde.

A neighborhood artist (sometimes called a community artist or an animateur) is someone whose work consists of placing artistic skills at the service of a community (neighborhood art thus also requires the skills of a community organizer — the ability to explain, assist and to learn from others). He or she abandons the old idea of the artist as a person who is set apart from others. "Artistic alienation" then takes on another meaning. It is alienation from the values of the marketplace and the snobbery of the academy, from the pabulum in commercial culture and the bland acceptability in government art.

The conventional idea of the avant-garde equates alienation from the values of the marketplace with alienation from all aspects of society: if the artist refuses to assume the values of the official culture, the only alternative is to be an isolated individual, a law unto oneself. But neighborhood artists are not alienated from their communities. They have chosen a role which demands that their work be valued for its utility to those communities. This is a standard of value which is completely separate from the question of marketability or acceptance by critics and agents. But how have members of this new avant-garde come to their work? Certainly a few have simply followed the logic of innovation, moving by increments outside the gallery or theater and into the life of a community. But most have acted deliberately to avoid the circumscribed role to which artists in our society are consigned.

We have spoken with many groups of young artists — in art school seminars, panel discussions, and in workshops designed to offer "pointers" on grants and marketing. These meetings tend to be suffused with powerlessness and desperation, and for good reason. Often, the lot of the young ambitious artist is to be a kind of Sleeping Beauty, one who must wait to be "discovered" and whose mode of life is to prepare for this discovery. The artist then alternates between fond hope and despair — and frustration at enforced passivity and the capriciousness of "success."

The new avant-garde — the neighborhood arts movement — is not waiting to be discovered. Justification and gratification are inherent to neighborhood art; they are not postponed until the verdict of arbiters of success is given. Neighborhood artists want their work to have impact, to have meaning to others. Each day they are able to see that art can help transform the experience of the members of a community. Their work is thus not the expression of a single sensibility, but part of a continuing dialogue among the members of a community.

Neighborhood artists are able to see through today’s nostalgia for romantic alienation. They see that our society is now unwilling to support even a fraction of the artists it spawns, even though educational institutions still encourage young people to pursue careers in art (to ensure an ample supply of artistic alienation?). Any young artist with a rudimentary grasp of economics knows that without a great deal of competitiveness and luck it will be difficult to earn a living by making art. Gablik poses the alternative of "self-imposed austerity," of living as an "outcast." But is the art market really so comfortable and congenial an environment that only a lifelong act of self-denial will remove one from its spell? Might not an artist cast a cold eye on the market and its skewed values and opt for something better, a more meaningful and dignified way of working? Many artists entered neighborhood art temporarily because a CETA public service job or community organization salary offered an honest and modest living and a promising way to subsidize their "real" work — only to find that their real work was neighborhood art. For them, a return to the rarefied atmosphere of the art world is as appealing as taking up residence in a mausoleum. Finding themselves released from the game of statues that imprisons so many of their contemporaries, they are understandably reluctant to resume it.

This is not to say that a neighborhood artist is likely to live entirely outside the conventional art systems. But the nature of the relationship between the neighborhood art movement and the systems it touches is unique and perhaps exemplary. Most sources of support for neighborhood art are not public or private extensions of the art market. By and large they are social service and educational programs, community organizations, and public programs like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, designed to alleviate unemployment. Neighborhood artists don’t get much support from the art world because there, like the earlier avant-garde, they are still subject to the old debate: Is this art?

At other times this debate centered on the admissibility of a new medium or style to the pantheon of the arts: Is photography art? Is Cubism art? Is jazz art? In the case of neighborhood art, the debate is slightly different. The question is whether the work is too useful, too much of a departure from the art-for-art’s-sake norm. In public arts agencies and private philanthropies that support official culture, the controversy about neighborhood art has focused on whether the work is primarily "social programming." In the midst of much talk about "professional standards," "excellence" and "quality," neighborhood artists have found little encouragement from critics and administrators preoccupied with the concerns of another age. Instead, what support their work has found has come from systems which make no claim with respect to art as such and for which the debate "Is it art?" is as irrelevant as it is to the real concerns of the neighborhood arts movement.

Yet in every respect this movement has fulfilled the role of an avant-garde by extending the idea of the possible in the practice of art. It draws on many cultural traditions and influences, uses many mediums and materials, and crosses many disciplinary and social boundaries. Its members are women and men, old and young, of many races and ethnic groups. They work in every imaginable setting, and in collaboration with people traditionally ignored by the art world.

But here’s the rub. Neighborhood art is not really a marketable commodity in art-world terms. It can’t be absorbed by the market and take its place beside former avant-gardes. The neighborhood artist can’t be made Queen for a Day, can’t make fame the goal. This artist’s work just doesn’t ship well; it loses meaning outside the context in which it is created. Such art proceeds independent of critic and agent, and of the tight circle of artists consigned to throw stones at official taste-makers. The neighborhood artist assumes neither of the roles ordained by the official culture: rather than court fashion or make a fetish of alienation, he or she chooses to break new ground. Pity those who can’t keep up; the most radical manifestation of the avant-garde in our time is unfolding before their eyes. Blinded by nostalgia, they fail to take notice.

Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard have worked as partners in Adams & Goldbard since 1978, consulting in a wide variety of public and private agencies, most of them involved in cultural policy, artistic production and distribution, and cultural development planning and evaluation.

Original CAN/API publication: August 2002