The theme of
neo-feminism that the editors of Etc have proposed for an issue on
contemporary feminist practices compels me to wonder what might the
prefix ‘neo’ signal as a return to strategies that were
elaborated in the 60s and 70s, that is, before ‘third-wave’
or ‘post-structural’ feminism. The question of a return,
here as elsewhere, causes me to consider the current political context
not only for feminism but for any critical cultural politics, and,
moreover, for any critical articulation of culture in the context of
the neoliberal engineering of culture industries. In this regard, I
would ask what contribution neo-feminism might make to the most
ambitious art of our time, including the kinds of collaborative,
activist and relational art that seem far removed from the question of
intimacy.
In keeping with the idea of a return to critical models from the past,
I would like to recall Hal Foster’s 1994 essay
“What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?”1 In doing so,
I am well aware that I am mixing apples and oranges, feminism and
avant-garde, and do so precisely to question the place of feminism
within contemporary avant-garde production. The work I propose as an
exemplary model of engaged practice is Andrea Fraser’s Untitled
of 2003, which I will return to in the pages below. My reasons for
selecting this piece includes not only its answer to the recurring
feminist slogan that “the personal is political,” but also
its meaning in the context of a feminist- inspired institutional
critique and a psychoanalytically-informed subjectivization of cultural
politics.
In “What’s Neo”, Hal Foster examined the ways in
which postwar artists recovered and attempted to transform the
strategies of the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth
century. The purpose of his essay was to provide a tempered assessment
of the work of postwar artists that problematized the pessimistic view
of the neo-avant-gardes provided by Peter Bürger in his Theory of
the Avant-Garde.2 As Jochen Schulte-Strausse correctly asserted in the
foreword to the 1984 English translation of this book,
Bürger’s Marxist approach would not necessarily prove to be
compatible with French post-structuralism, a relative
incommensurability that is teased out by Foster through his use of the
psychoanalytic concept of ‘deferred action.’ Whereas
Bürger concluded his book with the view that an adequate theory
– and therefore, an adequate practice – of engaged art does
not exist, Foster argued that 50s artists undertook the important work
of recovering avant-garde strategies like collage, montage, the
readymade and construction principles. While the 50s artists succeeded
in doing so against institutional constraints, they nevertheless
cancelled the prewar critique of the “institution of art ”
(Bürger) by allowing its strategies to become, in turn,
institutionalized and appropriated by the culture industries. This fact
led 60s artists like Broodthaers, Buren and Asher to develop strategies
that resisted accommodation through the exploration of the frameworks
of artistic production and reception.
Notwithstanding Foster’s complex model of temporality and
effectiveness, what I want to mention here is what his essay suggests
for the critical pertinence of the contemporary practices of the 90s in
relation to the legacy of the avant-garde. Most telling in his essay,
in this regard, is the assertion that “Our present is chastened
by feminist critiques of revolutionary language as well as by other
suspicions about the exclusivity not just of art institutions but of
critical discourses as well.”3 Contemporary artists, he argued,
engage in strategic collaborations and subtle displacements –
nothing here we couldn’t also find in historical precedents. The
crucial distinction is that a critique of the avant-garde and its class
politics progresses today through the probing of gender, ethnic and
sexual differences, as noticed in the work of artists like David
Hammons, Robert Gober and Andrea Fraser.
The value of the construct of the avant-garde, then, would appear to be
not only its relation to the radical transformation and reproduction of
the sphere of cultural production, its revelation of the inconsequence
of autonomy with regard to its economic determinations, but its
flexibility with regard to social structures other than those
associated with militant or revolutionary class politics. The relation
between avant-gardism and identity struggles was raised by the Montreal
art critic and historian Johanne Lamoureux in her Réponse
à Hal Foster.4 On this same subject of the relevance of
avant-garde discourse to contemporary deconstructive and feminist
practices, Lamoureux argued that all practices that are critical expose
and derail the aporias of the systems that seek to contain them.5 In a
more recent essay on the concept of the avant-garde, Lamoureux draws on
feminist art history, in particular, Carol Duncan’s landmark
essay “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century
Vanguard Painting” (1982), in order to draw out the gendered,
masculinist and conformist bias of the nineteenth-century avant-garde,
as first noted by Charles Baudelaire in the 1860s. Against the doxa
that the avant-garde represents a sophisticated class of cultural
actors, Lamoureux suggests that the virtues of originality or
metropolitanism were never universally held and that avant-gardism was,
as early as the 1850s, an “institutionalized variant of
everyone’s gambit.”6 The real avant-garde, including
Courbet, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cezanne and Gauguin involved those who
ignored or rejected it. However, as the story goes, they eventually
rejected it only to project their difference onto the screen of a
gendered or racially marked other, appropriating codes from outside the
European canon and simultaneously invalidating claims to innovation.
The question of progress, then, comes full circle in the postwar period
with the rise of anti-colonial movements, civil rights, feminism, gay
rights and antiwar protest.
Lamoureux concludes her essay with the question: “How are we to
articulate and assess the relevance of the avant-garde for contemporary
art practices?7 Traits that proved insufferable, she writes, are not as
invariable as they once seemed inasmuch as they are transformed under
the pressure of feminist and postcolonial theory and aid in the making
visible of hybrid and fluid identity positions” within
reconfigured social and cultural spaces. Avant-garde criticality, it
seems, has its uses. The constructive omission in Lamoureux’s
text, however, becomes apparent when she argues that the
‘performativity’ of a contemporary critical practice does
not need to be labeled avant-garde. What, we might ask, does the
historicization of the concept of the avant-garde leave behind and how
do class politics come into play, if at all? Opting for Foster’s
model of negotiation against Bürger’s model of hibernation,
Lamoureux looks to identity and performativity theory to rescue the
avant-garde’s testing of institutional boundaries.
What might a critical practice gain, however, from not testing or
transgressing institutional limits, but in the tradition of radical
autonomy, reflexively exposes the rules of the game? If
Bürger’s argument that the social function of art does not
depend on particular works, but on the institutions themselves, then
the persuasive force of the avant-garde may not be to demonstrate modes
of liberation or creative innovation, but the modes of domination
within which works are produced. Inasmuch as the culture industries
seek to eliminate this tension between institution and critique,
artists’ protests tend, in the present, to draw on ever more
intimate aspects of the self, on affect and sexuality as signifiers of
subjectivity. In this respect, the question of neo-feminism becomes...(Extrait)
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