The Points of No Return: The Avant-Garde and the Institutional Crisis

When compared to post-vanguard artistic practices absorbed into an institutional frame, the historical avant-garde in its broad artistic and social contexts, as Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) claimed, acts as radically new. Disrupting previous concepts of artistic universalism and homogeneity, the historical avant-garde is presented as unique and historically inimitable. When reused in later (neo)avant-gardes, this artistic practice loses its radicality and ends up being institutionally absorbed, without any visible social or political impact. This conclusion was previously presented in (Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2005) study of manifestoes as an artistic form that reappears with its transformative force, questioning the inimitability of the avant-garde. Although it is possible to trace recurrent artistic attacks in the public space, it is worth examining Bürger’s statement, which says that both art and social institutions demonstrated resistance to the attacks of the avant-gardes, the former by adopting its artistic practices and the latter by confirming their resistance to the avant-garde claim for the revision and aestheticisation of everyday life. Discussions and controversies on writing and understanding literary history (Perkins, Roberts) as well as the institutional crisis that collides with or follows after neo-avant-garde movements demonstrate the vulnerability of the institutional system, the gaps in production and maintenance of institutional footholds: literary history, canon formation and academy. The aim of this essay is to examine the interdependence between the institutional position and the vanguard opposition that could be traced both in the historiographic discourse and its methodology striving to discipline and surpass vanguard disruptions and unevenness in the literary field. In Croatian literature, these procedures are evident in the reductive treatment and valorisation of the historical avant-garde as much as in omitting or bypassing its participation in the neo-avant-garde positioning of some relevant literary movements, groups, and individuals (Ujević, Vrkljan, Krugovi). Furthermore, artistic practices that problematise the “neutral” and “transparent” distribution of institutional power (Haacke, Zorica) renew the contemporary avant-garde resistance and keep alive counter-discourse with its transgressive power.