The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde Author(s): Benjamin H. D.

Buchloh Source: October, Vol. 37 (Summer, 1986), pp. 41-52 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778517 Accessed: 15/03/2009 11:56
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The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde*

BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH

The concept 'historic avant-garde movements' distinguishes these [dada, constructivism, surrealism] from all those neo-avant-gardiste attempts that are characteristic for Western Europe and the United States during the fifties and sixties. Although the neo-avant-gardes proclaim the same goals as the representatives of the historic avantgarde movements to some extent, the demand that art be reintegrated in the praxis of life within the existing society can no longer be seriously made after the failure of avant-gardiste intentions.

The neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avantgardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever.2 These two quotations give us, in highly abbreviated form, one of the central hypotheses of Peter Burger's important but problematic study, The Theoryof the Avant-Garde.To rephrase it, the hypothesis runs roughly as follows: It was the goal of the original avant-garde, that of the period 1910-25, to criticize the notion of autonomy, the central term of modernist thinking. Furthermore, this avant-garde aimed to abolish the separation of the aesthetic from the real (what is often referred to as the gap between art and life) and attempted instead to in* This symposium contribution is excerpted from a study of the reception and transformation of the paradigm of monochrome painting in the practice of the neo-avant-garde from 1951 to 1961. The study forms a chapter of a projected book devoted to the relationships of the neoavant-garde to the historical avant-garde of 1910-25, focusing on the paradigmatic strategies of that period: in addition to monochromy, ready-made, collage, serial grid composition, and open construction. 1. Peter Burger, Theoryof the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 109, n. 4. 2. Ibid., p. 62.

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tegrate art within social praxis. At the very least, the historical avant-garde attempted to criticize the institutionalization of modernism. By contrast, all those activities of the generations of postwar artists that Burger calls the neo-avantgarde are flawed from the beginning by the most obvious of all failures in art production: repetition. "The neo-avant-garde," Burger claims, "institutionalizes the avant-gardeas art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions."3

The word genuinelybetrays Biurger's evaluation of the "historical" avantgarde artists: they were original, while their postwar followers are imitators, recapitulators. The neo-avant-garde has copied and therefore falsified the original moment of rupture with the discursive practice and institutional system of modernism. While it is evident that Burger's model of repetition is infinitely more complex than those which traditionally separate the unique, auratic original from the debased copy (whether repetition is understood as a process of learning and ever-closer approximation to an ideal of perfection or as a manufacturing process of copies and fakes), it is also evident that Burger's notion of the "genuine" original versus the "fraudulent" copy is still determined by the binary opposition ultimately deriving from the cult of the auratic original. Burger's historical scheme, valid and important as it might be in other respects, is marred by this one feature: the fiction of the origin as a moment of irretrievable plenitude and truth. This fictitious moment of an "origin" functions, as we know, as the fulcrum of the historian's pursuit. Only after establishing this plenitude or originality in the past- and that past moment can, as in an infinite regress, either be shifted further back into history or be pulled to the forefront of present-day experience - only then can the work of the historian begin. As is usually the case with such fictions, we find in Burger's text the consequence of this loss of the original for the present. The present moment is devalued, is comparatively empty and meaningless, lacks the vigor of the original, and therefore, at best, offers us the randomness of historicism. Thus, the present is not only "void of sense" and "permits the positing of any meaning whatever," but, "through the avant-garde movements, the historical succession of techniques and styles has been transformed into a simultaneity of the radically disparate. The consequence is that no movement in the arts today can legitimately claim to be historically more advanced as art than any other."4
3. Ibid., p. 61. 4. Ibid., p. 63. The implications of this statement seem particularly problematic when considered in relation to current "postmodernist" production, whose cynical apologists argue precisely for a value-free art practice based on the end of the avant-garde and the simultaneous availability of all historical styles through pastiche or quotation. Burger's discussion of the neo-avant-garde shows no awareness whatever of those art practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s (his book was originally published in Germany in 1974) that radically opposed the "institutionalization of the avant-garde as art," for example, the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans

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I want to argue, against Burger, that the positing of a moment of historical originality in the relationship between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde does not allow for an adequate understanding of the complexity of that relationship, for we are confronted here with practices of repetition that cannot be discussed in terms of influence, imitation, and authenticity alone. A model of repetition that might better describe this relationship is the Freudian concept of repetition that originates in repression and disavowal. Rather than discarding forty years of neo-avant-garde history with the highhanded naivete of the art historian who has staked out a field and predetermined its limits, it would be more appropriate to investigate the actual conditions of reception and transformation of the avant-garde paradigms. This would entail clarifying the peculiar dynamics of selection and disavowal, of repression and "simple" omission that resulted from the particular dispositions and investments that the various audiences brought to their involvement with the avant-garde after the Second World War. Furthermore, I want to ask whether it might not be precisely the process of repetition which constitutes the specific historical "meaning" and "authenticity" of the art production of the neo-avantgarde. This clarification should be developed first of all within the discursive practice itself, and not by instantly seeking recourse in transcendental categories of causality and determination. Nor can the relationship between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde be elucidated from a centralized point, that of the authenticmoment of originality, from which all subsequent activities appear as mere repetitions. In the following I want to discuss a single example, a case in which one of the central pictorial strategies of the original avant-garde of the 1910-25 period was in fact rediscovered and "repeated" by artists of the neo-avant-garde, and was subjected to the process of institutionalization that Burger discusses. As is well known by now, between 1919 and 1921, in the context of postcubist painting, monochromy became one of the most important reductivist pictorial strategies of the historical avant-garde. While Malevich, in his series of square and modular-cross paintings of 1915-19, was the first to introduce the monochrome figure and to map this figure onto an achromatic field in a nonrelational central composition, it is not until 1921 that we can speak of a completely monochrome canvas from which all figure-ground and chromatic relationships have been eliminated as well.5 Rodchenko's triptych Pure Colors. Red, Yellow, Blue, 1921, is the first work that not only abolishes the denotative functions of color but also liberates color from all spiritual, emotional, and
Haacke. For a more developed critique of this aspect of Burger's book, see my review, "Theorizing the Avant-Garde," Art in America, vol. 72, no. 10 (November 1984), pp. 19-21. 5. For a first extensive and excellent discussion of the history of monochrome painting, see Yve-Alain Bois, "Malevich, le carre, le degre zero," Macula, no. 1 (1978), pp. 28-49.

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psychological associations, analogies with musical chords, and transcendental meaning in general. Thus, with Rodchenko's introduction of the monochrome, we witness not only the abolition of relational composition but, more importantly, the abandonment of conventional attributions of the "meaning" of color in favor of the pure materialityof color. It is only logical that this recognition of the materialityof color coincided historically with the discovery of the chromatic values of materials as pronounced one year earlier in the Realistic Manifesto of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner (and as it had already been put into practice in Duchamp's ready-mades). Thus it is perfectly convincing to read Rodchenko's claim (made retrospectively in his text "Working with Mayakovsky" of 1939): [In 1921] I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting. These are the primary colors. Every plane is a discrete plane and there will be no more representation.6 While one cannot deny with certainty that a remnant of antibourgeois, futurist shock value still motivated Rodchenko's claim, it is nevertheless evident that the project of Rodchenko's critical modernist strategies was the demystification of aesthetic production, in this case the pictorial convention of assigning meaning to color. In its explicitly scientistic attitude -since it adapts scientific models of empirio-criticism-it proclaims itself as a model for aesthetic practice, and thus as a model for cultural practice in general. Moreover, by the mysterious process of model imitation that is never clarified in modernist practice (how exactly did Mondrian, for example, expect his paintings to operate as models of the socialist society?), Rodchenko's triptych suggests the elimination of art's esoteric nature, the rationalistic transparence of its conception and construction supposedly inviting wider and different audiences. Rodchenko aims to lay the foundations for a new culture of the collective rather than continuing one for the specialized, bourgeois elite. Inevitably, the reduction to the monochrome also implied a redefinition of the role of the artist. Insofar as the work eliminates the marks of manual creation - analogue of the specialized vision - in its form and structure, it opposes the social division of labor and that condensation of talent in the single individual that is synonymous with its suppression in the collective. This implication of the monochrome painting is programmatically and provocatively overstated in an anonymous text of 1924, written either by Malevich or El Lissitzky: With the increasing frequency of the square in painting, the art in-

6. Alexander Rodchenko, "Working with Majakowsky," in From Painting to Design: Russian Constructivist Art of the Twenties, Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, 1981, p. 191.

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stitutions have offered everybody the means to make art. Now the production of art has been simplified to such an extent that one can do no better than order one's paintings by telephone from a house painter while one is lying in bed.7 Exactly thirty years later the French artist Yves Klein - in many ways the quintessential neo-avant-garde artist--astounded the Parisian art world with his work, and he seems to have convinced that art world with his claim to have invented monochrome painting. While Klein acknowledged his awareness of Malevich at a point in time later than this "invention," we have no evidence that he had come in contact with any examples of postcubist monochrome painting before 1957, when he saw Malevich's and Strzemiriski's paintings in Paris. This fact does not in the least, however, resolve the questions that are raised by this clear-cut case of neo-avant-garde paradigm repetition. If anything, it should make us realize that these phenomena must be addressed in a way that avoids mechanistic speculations about priority and influence. This is corroborated by the fact that Klein was literally surrounded at the time by other artists of his generation who (re-)discovered the strategy with equal enthusiasm and naivete- for example, Fontana, Rauschenberg, and Kelly. This coincidence, as well as the simultaneity of rediscoveries and repetitions of other avant-garde paradigms, substantiates the hypothesis that the discursive formation of modernism generated its own historical and evolutionary dynamic. If we assume that visual paradigms operate analogously to of modernism would constitute the neolinguistic paradigms, then the "langue" avant-garde "speakers" and continuously replicate and modify their 'paroles." Since the aesthetic objects that emerge from these discursive formations seem at first to be structurally, formally, and materially analogous, if not identical, traditional art-historical approaches have been confronted with two possibilities. Either choose Burger's transcendental criticism (and it does not really matter whether this is argued on political or aesthetic grounds), which rejects neo-avant-garde practices as so much charlatanry, as insufficient in comparison to the authenticity and sublime seriousness of the "original," historical avant-garde's critical project; or revert to the opposite (and complementary) method of connoisseurship. This latter approach attempts to elevate the activities of the neo-avant-garde- often with an effort bordering on the grotesqueand to transform them into such traditional high-art categories as the oeuvre, within which each object becomes again inherently self-sufficient, its meanings understood as a function of its "essence."8

7. Quoted in Bois, p. 37, n. 40; originallypublishedin Hans Arp and El Lissitzky,Kunstismen, Munich, Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925, pp. ix-x. 8. For a recent example of this approach, see John Bowlt, "The Zero of Forms,"in OfAbsence andPresence, New York, Kent Fine Art, 1986, np.

Malevich (center)and El Lissitzky (left, with wool cap) with UNOWIS studentsleavingfor Vitebsk,1919.

at YvesKlein's Anthropometries de 1'epoque Spectators d'Art Contemporian, bleue, GalerieInternationale Paris, March 9, 1960.

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But it is precisely this traditional conception of the work of art as a complete, self-enclosed, self-sufficient entity that the repetitions of the neo-avantgarde calls into question. And even though Burger argues for a conception of the work as a fragment, an open structure, he does not seem to realize that within such an open structure, all formal and material, not to mention iconographic, elements are no longer able to generate the traditional semantic functions that he nevertheless deems essential to original avant-garde practices. It is thus inevitablethat these works have reached what Bfirger calls, critically, a state of "semantic atrophy." This term betrays Burger's expectations of a traditional meaning structure inside an open, fragmented work, a meaning centralized and integrated and residing within the elements of the aesthetic object itself, yet nevertheless maintaining a referential relation to the real world. On the contrary, however, the repetitive structure of the neo-avant-garde work, with its apparently identical chromatic, formal, and structural elements, prohibits the perception of an immanent meaning and dislodges this traditional structure. It displaces meaning to the peripheries, shifting it to the level of the syntagma and toward contingency and contextual heteronomous determination. Consequently, the inherent qualities of the work no longer offer sufficient possibilities of differentiation among one another. (What would be the point of a formal comparison between two ready-mades by Duchamp or two paintings of soup cans by Warhol?) Nor are the works of the neo-avant-garde to be distinguished from their paradigmatic predecessors in the historical avantgarde; structurally, formally, chromatically the two triptychs by Rodchenko and Klein are at first almost identical. It therefore becomes obvious that the reading of these neo-avant-garde works consists exclusively in assigning meaning to them from what traditional discourse would call the outside, that is, the process of their reception-the audience's disposition and demands, the cultural legitimation the works are asked to perform, the institutional mediation between demand and legitimation. For the work of the neo-avant-garde, then, meaning becomes visibly a matter of projection, of aesthetic and ideological investment, shared by a particular community for a specific period of time. Yves Klein seems to have been aware of all of this when he decided to repeat the modernist strategy of monochromy, and he pushed all the inherent contradictions to their logical extreme. In one of his most "scandalous" exhibitions, Klein installed ten identical blue monochrome paintings in a commercial gallery in Milan in 1957. The implications of what Klein called his "monochrome adventure" seem at first glance to be that the very continuation of painting is threatened. And indeed monochromy had, in Rodchenko's case, lead to the conclusion of his painting production. By purging color of its last remnants of mythical, transcendental meaning; by making painting completely anonymous through seriality and infinite repeatability; by imbuing painting with the status of the ready-made, the final blow to painting-considered as a unique

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Galleria Kleinat theEpoca Blu exhibition, Yves Milan,January1957. Apollinaire,

to have been dealt. We object and a moment of auratic experience-seemed are left with the infinite repetition of the structurally analogous or identical, as was precisely the case in the work of so many artists during the 1950s and '60s, the complete destruction of the closed, centered, self-contained work, as well as the destruction of the organic development of the oeuvre. But there is an almost schizophrenic split between Klein's pictorial production and the perceptual experience he wants it to generate, as demonstrated in his own observations on the 1957 exhibition: All of these blue propositions, all alike in appearance, were recognized passed by the public as quite different from one another. The amateur from one to another as he liked and penetrated, in a state of instantaneous contemplation, into the worlds of the blue. However, each blue world of each picture, although of the same blue and treated in the same manner, revealed itself to be of an

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entirely different essence and atmosphere; none resembled another, no more than pictorial moments or poetic moments resemble each other.. The most sensational observation was that of the "buyers." Each selected out of the ... pictures that one that was his, and each paid the asking price. The prices were all different of course. This fact proves, for one thing, that the pictorial quality of each picture was perceptible through something other than the material physical appearance .. So I am in search of the real value of the picture, that is, suppose two paintings rigorously identical in all visible and legible effects, such as lines, colors, drawing, forms, format, density of surface, and technique in general, but the one is painted by a "painter" and the other by a skilled "technician," an "artisan," albeit both officially recognized as "painters" by the public. This invisible real value means that one of these two objects is a "picture" and the other isn't. (Vermeer, van Meegeren.)9 It is in Klein's desperate (or is it facetious?) attempt to protect himself against the erosion of painting and to maintain it as a form of sublime and privileged experience that he reveals most poignantly (it is unclear whether his clairvoyance is innocent or cynical) the extent to which painterly production had already become subservient to the conditions of the culture industry. The realm of modernism -once a domain of resistance to the totalizing demands of ideology and those of the production of use value and exchange value; a domain that had offered a form of refuge, a utopian space where cognition and vision, sensual play and apperception could be experienced as integrated; where the primary process maintained its supremacy - this realm was now in the process of being converted into an area of specialization for the production of luxurious perceptual fetishes for privileged audiences. But more than that, we read in Klein's account the way in which every single feature of the modernist pictorial strategy and its enlightenment agenda is turned on its head. While for Rodchenko it was the tactilityof his monochrome panels, their relief character, so to speak, that suggested the abolition of the bourthat Klein geois contemplative mode of perception, it is precisely contemplation as the to his works. While Rodchenko prescribes proper perceptual approach wished to purge chromatic qualities of their mythical and transcendental meaning, Klein conjures up the essence and the atmosphere of the poetic moment of each individual painting. And finally, it had been evident from Rodchenko's
9. Yves Klein, "The Monochrome Adventure," trans. and quoted in Nan Rosenthal, "AssistedLevitation: The Art of Yves Klein," in Yves Klein, Houston, Institute for the Arts, Rice University, and New York, The Arts Publisher, 1982, p. 105.

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positivist agenda, and from the Malevich/Lissitzky statement, that one of the most radical implications of the strategy of monochromy was the redefinition of the artist's role, the abolition of the painter's patte and his specialized vision in the systematic breakdown of the work's auratic status. In Klein's statement, by contrast, the artificial reconstitution of the aura is the central issue, and he must therefore logically separate the art of the copyist or faker from that of the reconstructed, inspired, original, creative genius. This reconstitution of the artist's traditional role is, however, by necessity mythical, and the products emerging from this restoration are inevitably fetishistic. They are fetishistic, first of all, because their auratic quality can only be demonstrated by their commodity status. The hierarchy of exchange value to which Klein refers with such candor reveals the myth as myth even in the act of constructing it. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the fetishistic nature of these products originates-as is crucial for the formation of the fetish in general--in disavowal, in this case, the disavowal of the historical legacy of modernism itself. Neither the original implications of the strategy of the monochrome nor its subsequent development (constructivism's transition to productivism, for example) could be acknowledged in the reception and repetition of this paradigm by the neo-avant-garde. The primary function of the neoavant-garde was not to reexamine this historical body of aesthetic knowledge, but to provide models of cultural identity and legitimation for the reconstructed (or newly constituted) liberal bourgeois audience of the postwar period. This audience sought a reconstruction of the avant-garde that would fulfill its own, needs, and the demystification of aesthetic practice was certainly not among those needs. Neither was the integration of art into social practice, but rather the opposite: the association of art with spectacle. It is in the spectacle that the neo-avant-garde finds its place as the provider of a mythical semblance of radicality, and it is in the spectacle that it can imbue the repetition of its obsolete modernist strategies with the appearance of credibility. According to Klein - and to many of his apologists and exegetes - one of his prime achievements was to have "liberated the pigment" from its traditional binding media. This was accomplished by discovering and mixing new materials to create his patented International Klein Blue. The recipe, which used transparent acrylic as a binder, made the blue pigment appear as if pure and unbound, sitting like a powder on the surface of the canvas. Paradoxically, though, it is just this extreme devotion to the details of the painting's surface which indicates most poignantly that the modernist concern with transparency of construction had run its course. Any attempt to refine it, to increase its precision, or to extend the life span of the paradigm was bound to result in fetishization. Thus we find our hypothesis empirically confirmed on the level of the materials and procedures themselves, and so the actual differences between the two triptychs - Rodchenko's and Klein's - must be taken very seriously indeed.

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The one is by no means a mere repetition of the other using slightly altered colors (from yellow to gold, from red to pink, from blue to IKB); rather, the first triptych completed the modernist, materialist project in order to abolish the last vestiges of myth and cult to which high art had been inextricably tied within bourgeois culture. Rodchenko's work thereby made possible the conception of a new collective culture. By contrast, Klein's triptych resuscitated the idea of art as transcendental negation and esoteric experience precisely at that moment when the mass culture of corporate capitalism was in the process of dismantling all vestiges of bourgeois culture's individual experience and liquidating the oppositional functions of high art. It becomes obvious, then, from these very minute material and procedural features of the neo-avant-garde paradigm repetition that the bourgeois public sphere from which the modernist project emerged had been utterly transformed and that modernist culture had lost its function of mediating between individual and public. The very same strategies that had developed within modernism's project of enlightenment now serve the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere into the public sphere of the corporate state, with its appropriate forms of distribution (total commodification) and cultural experience (the spectacle).