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If the multiple trajectories in the arts today have threatened the viability of an avant-garde, then developments in mass culture may have dealt radical art an even more fatal blow. Several cultural historians have noted that the shock techniques employed by the avant-garde no longer have the impact in a society that has popularized these techniques in films such as Jaws and Aliens II. [41] Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, where audience members are asked to take a pair of scissors and cut portions of the performer's dress no longer has the potential to shock audiences who in the movie theaters routinely have the opportunity to observe dismembered bodies in all shapes and sizes. There exists yet another line of reasoning in support of the claim that the avant-garde is dead. Critics generally agree that avant-gardism should be defined in a narrower sense that incorporates social, political, as well as artistic issues. Peter Bürger, for example, limits the twentieth-century avant-garde to the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde movements from the 1960s and early 1970s.[42] He traces the evolution of the historical avant-garde in three stages. First, the rise of the middle class during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the disappearance of the patronage system placed the artist in an new environment--a market governed by economics in which artistic activities increasingly became a commercial enterprise. In Bürger's second stage, artists became alienated from society and mass culture as a protest against commercial art--a condition that culminated in turn-of-the-century modernism. Bürger's third and final stage is a reaction against the autonomy of art and is linked to the emergence of the historical avant-garde. Thus, the historical avant-garde's These arguments apply to the history of the Fluxus movement.
Its parallels with the historical avant-garde, and particularly
the dada movement, are unmistakable. Both movements arose during
periods of political and social unrest--dadaism during the years
around the time of World War I, Fluxus during an era of post-McCarthy
anxiety that was exacerbated by a number of disasters including
the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War. Dadaist
art has been appropriated by the very institutions that it once
attacked. The same is true for Fluxus. Fluxus art is now found
in museums as well as in private collections. The Fluxus artifacts
intended for the masses at low prices are now collectors items
sold for large sums. The dissolution of the gulf between elitist
art and mass culture advocated by the avant-garde has become
a component of postmodernist art and aesthetics. However, the
transformation of society that was to accompany this change is
an ideal that is no longer present. Postmodernist art is institutionalized
and fully integrated within the framework of our late twentieth-century
capitalistic society.[46] IV Thus far I have positioned Cage only as a link between the
historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde movements following
World War Two. The 1960s was a period of political and social unrest in America,
yet for the most part, the political protest that arose from
this turmoil remained unparalleled by a politically focused avant-garde.[49]
Pop Art and Minimalism, in most cases, lacked a political edge.
Despite the spirited rantings and ravings by figures such as
George Maciunas and Henry Flynt, Fluxus, at least on the surface,
also seems more concerned with games and other sorts of amusements
than with the civil rights movement, student protests or the
Vietnam War. Fluxus, according to a recent and compelling analysis
of the movement's political impotency, was yet another manifestation
of the apolitical 1950s.[50] GO TO THE TOP OF THIS
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insistence
on the fusion of art and life and its rejection of institutionalized
art is the result of a historical process that began in the eighteenth-century.
I have briefly traced the fragmentation and dissolution of dadaism.
Unfortunately, the collapse of that movement is only symptomatic
of the historical avant-garde's failed aesthetic program. In
a discussion of Marcel Duchamp's famous ready-made "Fountain
by R. Mutt" (1917), Bürger shows how this piece, in
its use of a mass produced object as a work of art symbolizes
Duchamp's rejection of institutional art and his protest against
art as an elitist enterprise that exalts the artist's creativity.[43]
However, as Bürger observes, Duchamp's ready-mades have
now been accepted as autonomous works of art that are displayed
in museums despite the creator's original intentions. Since the
historical avant-garde failed, as Bürger points out, neo-avant-garde
movements such as Fluxus were doomed from their inception. He
explains that "since now the protest of the historical avant-garde
against art as institution is accepted as art, the gesture
of protest of the neo-avant-garde becomes inauthentic."[44]
Moreover, as Andreas Huyssen asserts, the neo-avant-garde has
in fact derived its originality from an historical, social, and
aesthetic amnesia.[45]
This is because that, at
least on the surface, Cage's work immediately following the war
does not indicate that he was directly engaged in political concerns.
The 1950s were a period during which many artists withdrew from
the political arena, advocating what one art historian, in an
essay on the activities of Jasper Johns, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg,
and Merce Cunningham during the McCarthy era, has termed an "aesthetic
of indifference."[47] Works such as Cage's Music of Changes,
his "Lecture on Nothing," and the Concert for Piano
and Orchestra seem to support this trend. Much of the ultra-modernist
art of the 1950s was clearly apolitical and it has even been
asserted that music written by composers of the New York School
was exported to Darmstadt with the covert assistance of the Central
Intelligence Agency in order to assure that composers in Germany
would remain uninfluenced by cultural politics emanating from
the Soviet Union.[48]