The Materialist Theory of Avant-garde and Neo-avant-garde

Abstract

The paper analyzes and discusses two sets of issues: (1) differences between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, and (2) different avant-garde and neo-avant-garde approaches to materialism in a philosophical, political, and aesthetic sense. The avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde were seldom doctrinaire, but one can nevertheless speak about the circularity of beliefs and attitudes, the mobility of theoretical and practical platforms from self-destructiveness to artistic and media nomadism, in the manner of rhizomatic manifolds. Certainly, there are common obsessions with the unity of art and life, or the fundamental turn of art into life, which are expressed by the macro-utopian projections of the new society (industrial society, communist society) forwarded by avant-garde artists, or by the concretizations of micro-utopias (communes, alternative production and exhibition institutions) by neo-avant-garde artists. Examples of primary materialism, aleatory materialism, historical materialism, and basic materialism are given in order to point out the unstable relations between the medium (material) and the media (technique, technology) of communication, but also non-communication.