Adieu to the avante-garde - avante-garde art

Reason, July, 1997 by Kanchan Limaye

Apart from having published five books of poetry - including two book-length epic poems - and a novel, Turner served as editor of The Kenyon Review, one of the most influential literary magazines in America, in the early 1980s. (He is also a contributing editor to REASON.) The Culture of Hope serves as an artistic manifesto (some attendees at the Derriere Guard Festival had the book under their arms). In that book, Turner calls on the artists of today to bridge the gap between the elitist avant-garde world and the general public, and celebrates the conflation of high and low culture which is now occurring.

According to Turner, artists who fall under the "radical center's" umbrella because they exploit world classical traditions include Frederick Hart, sculptor of Three Soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Ex Nihilo at the Washington Cathedral; earthworks sculptor James Turrell; Tom Wolfe, who has criticized the self-absorption of modem fiction and called for realistic storytelling; composer Philip Glass; "world music" practitioners; Peter Brook and his "ethnodrama," which makes use of Kathakali, Japanese Noh Theater, and ballet; dance troupes such as Sankai Juku, Momix, and Mark Morris; and pop artists such as Laurie Anderson and David Byrne.

Some of these artists, such as Frederick Hart and Tom Wolfe, are aware of the cultural trends they embody, and consciously support a specific cultural movement. Others may not be aware of the larger trend. Some, like Laurie Anderson or Philip Glass, have long been classified as "avant-garde" due to their experimentalism, yet they also use classical traditions.

Turner describes the "death of the avant-garde" - a trendy topic among many academics in the disciplines of English and cultural studies, most of whom agree that the avant-garde has died. But he also deals with the question, "What's next?" And he suggests answers for the questions that preoccupy artists: Why create art? For whom? What kind? In response, he has developed a philosophy of the arts based on what he calls "natural classicism." Based on recent advances in neuroscience and Turner's own collaborative research with neuropsychologist Ernst Poppel, it suggests that human beings are biologically hard-wired to appreciate the classical genres of art - visual representation, narrative, melody in music, verse in poetry, and dramatic mimesis.

It is no coincidence, Turner argues, that these genres manifest themselves in the arts of all world traditions. Artists of the future, he predicts, will eschew the cynical and desperate mannerisms of postmodernism, and exploit these multiple classical vocabularies to make art of lasting value. These artists will tap into the fundamental artistic principles that are recognizable across cultural barriers. During the 20th century the artist was commonly perceived as a denunciatory prophet, whose main goal was to expose the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie - a notion that still dominates the avant-garde art world. Turner's "radical center" envisions artists as pan-cultural shamans whose purpose is to dramatize the multiple voices in a culture, bourgeois or otherwise.