Adieu to the avante-garde - avante-garde art

Reason, July, 1997 by Kanchan Limaye

But at the Realist protest, painters took the microphone to describe their alienation from what remained of 20th-century modernism. "There is a renewed interest in a realism that blends the tradition of the past with our pure contemporary content," Assael said that day.

Assael and his fellow painters, like the poets, architects, and composers they joined in March at The Kitchen, are harbingers of a new cultural development: They represent the emergence of a third front in the nation's long-waged culture wars - one that its adherents hope will render the rigidly polarized debate between right-wing conservatives and left-wing avant-gardists defunct.

That cultural battle has been raging in universities over the literary canon, as Shakespeareans have fought multiculturalists. In 1995, the battle broke out at Lincoln Center over the jazz canon, with blues-and-swing purists like Albert Murray and Wynton Marsalis fighting avant-garde musicians like Cecil Taylor. This past February, a skirmish over race, representation, and cultural power in the theater occurred at New York's Town Hall between playwright August Wilson and Robert Brustein, critic and director of the American Repertory Theater.

In virtually all the manifestations of the culture wars, the right has favored tradition over evolution, and Western culture over multiculturalism. The left has usually favored gender-, class-, and race-based analyses, and excoriated the West for colonialism and bigotry. For both sides the stakes have been high: The winners hope to write the history of the arts in America, and control the nation's cultural future.

Enter, now, a group of artists and scholars who reject the ethnocentrism of the right, the demonization of the West and identity politics of the left, and the dogmatism of both. For them, great art can include - but ultimately transcends - political goals. They include Christians and atheists; WASPs and recent immigrants; blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians; straights and gays. The cultural battle lines are being redrawn.

A week after 1995's Realist protest, Assael faced Whitney director David Ross in a radio debate. "Sometimes the present created the future by breaking the shackles of the past," he said. "But sometimes the past created the future by breaking the shackles of the present." Assael was borrowing the words of University of Texas at Dallas Professor Frederick Turner, words describing the apparently cyclical nature of cultural movements. Like Turner, Assael hopes that a decaying modernism will lead to an aesthetic rebirth.

Turner, in fact, was a key guest at the Derriere Guard Festival. Dubbed by Kirkus Reviews as "Apollo to Camille Paglia's Dionysus," Turner is, like Paglia, an intellectual maverick, but lacks her sensationalistic strategies crafted to garner media attention. Like Wolfe, Turner has also prophesied a cultural shift. In his 1995 book, The Culture of Hope, he wrote that "a growing number of artists in various fields" have rejected modernist orthodoxy and, like the World War I-era artists who broke with their aesthetic establishments, "are preparing their Armory Show." Turner's phrase for those artists who are attempting to shift the cultural regime is the "radical center."