The revolution would have carried me along, but I saw the first head paraded on a pike, and I recoiled.
I.
What is an avant-garde? One trend in defining it seeks to place it as a kind of historical subjective. This states that it existed at one particular moment in time but can then also have its vital information extrapolated and applied to the different moments in the arts when the old ideas of preceding generations have been overthrown by those of new. The dominant stylistic forms of the arts have been ousted innumerable times in the last 200 years and to such an extent that the idea of the ‘radical’ has become an historical artefact with that of the avant-garde and trans-cultural figures of intellectual magnitude. When seen like this the actual element of the radical becomes a stylistic genus to be studied with a microscope in the sterile conditions of the institution. Once this had happened the radical transforms itself and becomes a facet of economics to art dealers and critics. All attempts at radicalism in the arts and literature must then fall prey to either being forgotten or are alternatively forced to sell out. The changing of radicalism and the avant-garde into an economically viable investment has been the most recent overthrow of the dominant artistic forces in the modern era. It has destroyed the avant-garde, it is time to move beyond it, and so it is also time to move beyond the modern age, which provides the framework for the avant-garde.
The idea of an avant-garde is intertwined with that of revolution; the historical area of the avant-garde exists only in the modern era, the era of revolutions. Both the avant-garde in the arts and in politics share two common events as their theoretical progenitors; the American and French revolutions. These events move us into the modern era whilst also take it into an area of paradox; revolution is a return to something that existed before the now, it is an attempt at the replication of a golden age of either Romantic or Classical connotations. The newness of revolution is actually a return to the prehistoric, to the beginning, to a time of origin. Revolution is an act that returns time to a state of limitless progressions; it further place’s revolution within a subtext of the displacement of religion. Time used to be imbued with significance given by the gods. Heavenly apparitions defined progress and in the angels, cherubim and seraphs there was the ultimate reality, an infinity of either pleasure or suffering that existed beyond the world of the flesh. But the rise of Modernity and the avant-garde caused theological belief to dwindle to the point where it was replaced by ideology; in the modern age progression is no longer given definition by God, it is now only relatable to Man’s achievements. The modern man is free to create himself and his society as he wishes.
II.
Revolution is a time when criticism is transformed into the premonitions of utopia and the omens of dystopia. It is a mixture of the theological and the ideological. Revolution is a modern idea, born out of ideological belief, but its very basis is found in theological leftovers. Revolution is the area where cause-and-effect intersects with miracle, where history mixes with myth; this creates a new historical archetype that defines the ‘modern’ age. The old cultural gods crumble away, rotted by superstition and debased by fanaticism; a tribe of phantoms emerge from among the ruins to replace them. This is faith born from a void of exhausted faiths. This is a final paradox in the age of paradoxes.
Revolution starts out by promising the pleasures of an earthly heaven and often ends in the reality of an earthly dystopia, which brings about another revolution – the word revolution itself has connotations of the cyclical, the revolving. The new in revolution is not truly new; it is only different from the old, new and old are different halves of the same revolving wheel.
It is time to move out of the modern age. The age of revolution is over in the western world, the great experiments in ideology and mythology – socialism and fascism have collapsed and since then the modern age has been concerned only with its death throws. Modernism is done for.
III.
Revolution gives us a glimpse of the origin of everything – it allows us to see the present in a new light. It is a cleansed earth policy of development; what has come before must be stripped away to create a fertile platform for new developments. So, to move out of the modern age, in which its radical tendencies have been converted into the economics of the excel spreadsheet, we must glimpse what came before the modern age in order to move past it. The post-modernists tried to achieve it by looking back to the theories and that were rooted in pre-modernistic traditions; the prose Romances of knights, of Don Quixote and the epic poems of Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Milton and Virgil, all of this is still defined as being against Modernism, it is a conscious rebellion against Modernity and thus it interlinks itself with it. The tragedy of the post-modern is that in outwardly denying the idea of development as interlocking with the idea of revolution it comes to represent a glitch in our temporal reality. This prevents the creation of a personal history amongst the disparate fragments and multitude of voices that the postmodern condition is made of. Because it doesn’t allow anything to exist beyond it – it is presumptuously saying that is already all things that could exist. The Off Modern permits all kinds of progressions via the reconstituted detournement of all old technologies, identities, histories and ideas in order to create a new parallel modernity.
The avant-garde now exists as only a part of an historical study, its ideas and theories are relative to only one temporal reality and this is not the one we exist in. Futurism, Dada, Cubism and Surrealism, those bold advances that took the arts past the nineteenth century can no longer be replicated in order to create the necessary advances in the arts that the start of the twenty first century requires. Advances must be NEW else they are not advances, merely replications. What created the avant-garde was a great desire for progress – they came about because of the search for answers to great questions – the task at hand is to ask ourselves those same questions and come up with new answers. The main question that remains then is how do we move past them? And what advances can be made to truly delineate our new epoch from the old one?
This change must come because of the realisation that elements that were once radical have become profitable and thus are no longer sacred. They can no longer operate in the area of prophecy and rapture. To reclaim this area for ourselves we must ensure that the necessary movement is to be a final movement; a revolution of the pre-revolutionary. The end of revolution is a revolution in itself but one devoid of ideology and set apart further apart from old ideas of theology. The cycle must start again for us to progress further, as it always does and always has. There must be new dominant forces and they must not be grand unifying ISMS or cliques of experimental activity. The future must be pan-historical and pan-modern.
