On Listening to the Avant-Gardes: Introduction

In the current cultural landscape, the term “avant-garde” appears to be omnipresent; some argue that its influence has waned. A Google search from 2007 yielded 11.2 million pages on the term, a number that has likely grown significantly since then (Berg 2009). A preliminary examination of the term’s use on websites pertaining to both artistic and non-artistic topics reveals a tendency to trivialize its meaning, as evidenced by terms such as “Covid Avant-garde,” “Avant-garde Vegan Hotel,” “Arab Avant-garde,” and “Avant-garde Jazz.” Despite this, such usage paradoxically highlights the term’s hybrid nature, constant appropriation, and multiplicity of meanings. This demonstrates the term’s continued relevance and vitality within the contemporary discourse. In the arts, the term is more carefully chosen, yet its heterogeneity regarding movements and ideas is a well-known fact. In the present volume, we aim to recover this heterogeneity and the rhizomatic character of the term, as well as its countercultural hubris, by bringing to the fore works that pay some sort of tribute to the original sense of the notion, in search of a creative life, unconventional language, audacity, and outrage. As Richard Huelsenbeck, in Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (1991), puts it: “… we killed a quarter of a century, we killed several centuries for the sake of what is to come.” Accordingly, our understanding of the avant-garde is multiform, although it developed from two main ideas: the invisible realm of Bob Dylan’s basement tapesand the Lettrist creative turn to the ear.