OUGD401: Context of Practice - High Culture / Low Culture: 'Defining the Avant Garde'

• Understanding the term ' Avant Garde'
• Question the way art/design education relies on concept of Avant Garde
• Understand the related concept of 'art for art's sake'
• Question the notion of 'genius'

Avant Garde

• Idea of doing art/design work that is progressive - innovating
• Also refers to group of people being innovative

1. Being Avant Garde in the work you do; challenging, innovating etc.

2. Being part of a group - member of the Avant Garde

• Avant Garde: Experimental, challenging conventions, rebellion - Marcel Duchamp
• 'Fauves' - Wild Beasts (Untrained, weird style)

  LCAD quotes prioritise certain concepts

• Innovation - Creating new 'stuff'
• Experimentation - Process to create new 'stuff'
• Originality - Copy is bad, new is good
• Creative genius - Hidden creative depth held deep within the student

•  Chatterton

• Avant-Gardism - Relies on individual being a genius/superior (Myth)

• Vanguard - Elite Troops, driving us forward

•  Remind people of exploitation when people were painting the sheen of the city

• Whistler - Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) - No political message, just seeking to look Avant Garde / experimental
• "I got paid twenty ginnies for all the knowledge I've learned in a lifetime"

Two approaches to Avant Garde

• Socially committed - Pushing forward political objectives
• Art that seeks only to expand/progress what art is (in itself and for itself) art for arts sake

• Clive Bell (Critic) - Significant form, "Relations and combinations of lines and colours which when organised give the power to move someone aesthetically" 
• His favourite painting: Cezanne Mount St. Victoire (1900)

• Art for arts sake approach - 20th Century

• Radical, Avant Garde in Russia - Banned by Stalin, 'no one understands it'

• Major Problem for the Avant Garde - 'Elitism' 
• Members of the 'left wing' rely on academic techniques

• Clement Greenback : Avant Garde - Pollock, pinnacle of art. Kitsch - Commercial, mass marketed

• Constable Haywain - art, high culture not kitsch
• Contable Haywain reproduced on a plate - Kitsch, bought and sold, not serious

• Thomas Kinkade - Sells art work on QVC

• Jack Vettriano - Not an artisit
• Carl Andre 'Equivalant VIII' - Is art despite being described as a 'load of rubbish'

• Turner Prize - Tracey Emin's Bed - Not art, Avant Garde?

• K-Foundtion - Group of Avant Garde artists 'art terrorists', Burned one million pounds
• Rachel Whiteread won Turner Prize (Which celebrates the greatest artists) and the K-Foundation award (For the worst artists)

• Damien Hirst - Brand? Hirst only comes up with the idea, the piece is made by others

• Avant Garde - Found in media, film and design