Blog entry 38:
Mondays session of Visual Culture: Debates was based on Avant- Guarde(ism), this subject is something I had not particularly studied in the past and found it very scintillating.
(I have decided that writing a blog entry for each session ov visual culture debates, might take up too much time, so I am going to only include points which I think are necessary to my personal practice and my development of thought or process.)
Dictionary definition for Avant - Guarde:
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| Oxford Dictionary (2014) |
The essential reading for Monday's class was Avant - guards After Avant Guardism by John Roberts, this text got me to start considering how the subject applies to my work.
A breif idea of the text in my opinion, states two different sets of theories by a number of theorists, the first outlines that avant - guarde is a lost or dead movement, which suffered its discourse after the war by artists so desperately clinging to it that they began replicating what had been done, which defeats the object of avant - guarde (as stated in the dictionary definition above). The opposing theorists outline that avant - gurade is not a movement but rather an experience of modernism as it emerged, due to it spanning over a wide range of modernist movements such as cubism.
This very brief grasp on the text alone, draws into question for me whether art in these times can ever truly be avant - guarde. For example I might do a piece of work painted onto the back of a model's head: is this most definitely not avant guarde because people's heads have been painted on before; furthermore if I have used materials on said back of head which have never been used in this way before does it become avant - guarde? This questioning can literally span forever, similarly to the task of looking at one catalog to find another in The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges.
I feel that as practitioners, especially at this level, we should all be looking to at least be gripping on to the Avant - guarde even if it is only with our finger tips. As students we are constantly asked to be innovative in module hand books and other such materials, is this not just another term for being avant- guarde? To me a key word of the dictionary term of avant - guarde is 'experimental'; in the past even as far back as school and college, I have always struggled with experimenting, so I feel that during task 4, I must attempt experiment as much as possible to aid my practice, look out for this in later blog entries.
Another interesting point of Monday's lecture was Sam Brown and Nathan Hall's presentation on Kitsch: kitsch is considered as low art for the lower class masses who are viewed as not cultured enough to understand 'real' art, such as work by Van Gough, etc. What I find most interesting about kitsch is the idea of the term kitsch being contradictory in some way, for example if I was to create a Renaissance - style painting and use typography as multimodality, which read "Kitsch", would this contradict the term of the painting. I may consider this further.
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