‘Barbaric Peoples of the Earth’: The Avant-Garde and the Revolt Against Civilisation

Abstract

Between Vorticism, the post-WW2 Independent Group and the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibit of 1968, elements of a working-class internationalism emerge that define both the circumstances of a revolutionary art and its methodology, founded upon a confrontation with the aesthetico-political ideology of work as alienated surplus-production. In positioning art-work as “general commodity” (Bataille) against the commodification of the “artwork” as artefact of an impoverished aesthetic labour, the avant-garde subverts the tragic view of history presented by Peter Bürger in the supposed failure of the avant-garde to resist appropriation to the “culture industry.” In contrast, the radical tendencies represented by such artists as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Eduardo Paolozzi and Gustav Metzger and persisting in the work of Laura Oldfield Ford, for example, can be regarded as a discourse of irrecuperability, born of the “impoverishment” of aesthetico-political totalisation as it succumbs to the excessive labour required to sustain the illusion of itself. And just as this failure of totalisation is always to some extent an aestheticisation, so too it ultimately constitutes the work of the avant-garde.