Adieu to the avante-garde - avante-garde art

Reason, July, 1997 by Kanchan Limaye

"I was surprised I wasn't laughed or condescended-to out of the room," says de Kenessey of the moment two years ago when she presented her idea to The Kitchen.

De Kenessey's proposal for the festival explained that, "What was once revolutionary is now the ruling orthodoxy...the avant-garde has become the status quo. A new generation of artists are actively re-engaging history...they neither regress to the distant past nor yearn for a now vanished world; instead, they strike out in an altogether different direction. By fusing tradition with innovation, the Western with the Eastern, they offer a radically new alternative for the art of the new millennium." She presented the proposal on stationery that had a logo of a hand shielding a pair of buttocks. The Kitchen agreed immediately.

New York artists who participated in the Derriere Guard Festival included the Absolute Ensemble, a group of young classically trained musicians who play everything from Mozart to Frank Zappa to Black Sabbath on classical instruments, and incorporate visual art, film, and performance elements into their presentations; 25 Realist painters who share a commitment to representational work, including Steven Assael, Martha Mayer Earlebacher, Vincent Desiderio, and Wade Schuman; several sculptors; the internationally acclaimed Ahn Trio, three young South Korean sisters trained at Juilliard; verse poets such as Dana Gioia, Tom Disch (perhaps better known as a science fiction writer), R.S. Gwynne, Charles Martin, and Molly Peacock; and New York architects Richard Franklin Sammons, Anne Fairfax, and David Mayernick.

In another symbolic challenge, de Kenessey intentionally scheduled the Derriere Guard Festival to open on the same day the Whitney Museum of American Art was opening its 1997 Biennial. This was not an opening volley in the cultural war; Realist painters, including a number of those exhibiting at The Kitchen, have been in open conflict with the Whitney for some time. Their continuing argument about art is one front in what is turning into a much broader engagement.

On September 29, 1995, painter Steven Assael stood on the steps of the Whitney before more than 200 protesters. For them, the Whitney was a Xanadu of pierced bodies, vomit displays, and other forms of avant-garde art; a symbol of what had become - in a supreme irony - Establishment cultural orthodoxy. He and his fellow painters in the Realist movement, though hardly speaking with one voice on all aesthetic matters, had put aside their differences to protest the Whitney's prejudice against their style of art, much of which makes use of classical techniques.

One of the country's most powerful arts institutions, the Whitney's notoriety stems from its infamous 1993 Biennial exhibition, which, as usual, professed to survey the American art scene. The 1993 Biennial sought to right such socio-aesthetic wrongs as, for example, Jewish homosexual artists having to submerge the iconography of their religious heritage - or hide their sexual preferences - to get into prestigious galleries. Other works in the 1993 show drew attention to the ills of colonialism or sexism. Huge blocks of chocolate pointed to the horrors of anorexia and bulimia in a society based on "white-male hierarchy." In 1995, the Biennial again focused on shock-value avant-gardism that some audiences found more obscure and unintelligible than shocking.