New tag for Advertising and Happy Talk
Unless and until I forget, every post with that tag is also tagged under Utopia and Intentional Communities. Yeah, it's obvious.
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Nochlin, "The Invention of the Avant-garde" first published in Art News in 1968, and the opening essay in The Politics of Vision
The first paragraph.
"Art changes only through strong convictions, convictions strong enough to change society at the same time." So proclaimed Theophile Thore, quarante-buitard critic, admirer of Theodore Rousseau, Millet, and Courbet, an art historian who discovered Vermeer and one of the spokesmen for a new, more democratic art, in 1855, in exile from Louis Napoleon's imperial France. Whether or not one agrees with Thore's assertion, it is certainly typical in its equation of revolutionary art and revolutionary politics of progressive thought in the visual arts at the middle of the nineteenth century.
...The very term "avant-garde" was first used figuratively to designate radical or advanced activity in both the artistic and social realms. It was in this sense that it was first employed by the French Utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, when he designated artists, scientists, and industrialists as the elite leadership of the new social order:
It is we artists who will serve you as avant-garde [Saint-Simon has his artist proclaim, in an imaginary dialogue between the latter and a scientist] ... the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas.
My copy has "NO" scrawled above the first line. "The 'convictions' are that society has changed and that the artist is honest enough to admit it."...What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the van of all the intellectual faculties ... !'
Nochlin: "Whether or not one agrees with Thore's assertion,..." She was a smart woman and a serious historian, but aside from some scribbling on margins, I've just ignored the history before the mid 20th century. I attacked the Pompiers and defended Baudelaire, but I ignored the earnest Socialists.
The direct line from from utopianism to Madison Ave, but I bypassed Saint-Simon.
Nochlin, from "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" 1971
The difficulties imposed by such demands on the woman artist continue to add to her already difficult enterprise even today. Compare, for example, the noted contemporary, Louise Nevelson, with her combination of utter, “unfeminine” dedication to her work and her conspicuously “feminine” false eyelashes; her admission that she got married at 17 despite her certainty that she couldn’t live without creating because “the world said you should get married.” Even in the case of these two outstanding artists—and whether we like The Horsefair or not, we still must admire Rosa Bonheur’s achievement—the voice of the feminine mystique with its potpourri of ambivalent narcissism and guilt, internalized, subtly dilutes and subverts that total inner confidence, that absolute certitude and self-determination, moral and esthetic, demanded by the highest and most innovative work in art.
Conclusion
We have tried to deal with one of the perennial questions used to challenge women’s demand for true, rather than token, equality, by examining the whole erroneous intellectual substructure upon which the question “Why have there been no great women artists?” is based; by questioning the validity of the formulation of so-called “problems” in general and the “problem” of women specifically; and then, by probing some of the limitations of the discipline of art history itself. Hopefully, by stressing the institutional—i.e. the public—rather than the individual, or private, pre-conditions for achievement or the lack of it in the arts, we have provided a paradigm for the investigation of other areas in the field. By examining in some detail a single instance of deprivation or disadvantage—the unavailability of nude models to women art students—we have suggested that it was indeed institutionally made impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius. The existence of a tiny band of successful, if not great, women artists throughout history does nothing to gainsay this fact, any more than does the existence of a few superstars or token achievers among the members of any minority groups. And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and guilt and outer monsters of ridicule or patronizing encouragement, neither of which have any specific connection with the quality of the art work as such.
What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history and of their present situation, without making excuses or puffing mediocrity. Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intellectual position. Rather, using as a vantage point their situation as underdogs in the realm of grandeur, and outsiders in that of ideology, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and, at the same time that they destroy false consciousness, take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought—and true greatness—are challenges open to anyone, man or woman, courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown.--
More history
Călinescu, Five Faces Of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch Postmodernism, Duke, 1987. A reprint of Faces of Modernity, Indiana, 1977, with an additional essay.
The word "avant-garde" (fore-guard) has an old history in French. As a term of warfare it dates back to the Middle Ages, and it developed a figurative meaning at least as early as the Renaissance. However, the metaphor of the avant-garde -- expressing a selfconsciously advanced position in politics, literature and art, religion, etc. -- was not employed with any consistency before the nineteenth century. Among other things, this fact accounts for the indelibly modern appearance of the label "avant-garde." Poggioli's earliest example of the cultural use of the term is from a little-known pamphlet published in 1845 by Gabriel Désiré Laverdant, a follower of Charles Fourier. I was convinced, with Donald Drew Egbert, that the cultural notion of the avant-garde had been introduced at least two decades earlier, in 1825, and that the utopian philosophy of Saint-Simon had been responsible for this specific application of the term. Actually, the avant-garde metaphor was applied to poetry almost three centuries earlier, as I found out looking up the word "avant-garde" in the recent and excellent Trésor de la langue française ( Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1974, vol. 3, pp. 1056-57). During the second half of the sixteenth century, in a period that anticipates certain themes of the later Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, the French humanist lawyer and historian Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615) wrote in his Recherches de la France:
A glorious war was then being waged against ignorance, a war in which, I would say, Scève, Bèze, and Pelletier constituted the avant-garde; or, if you prefer, they were the fore-runners of the other poets. After them, Pierre de Ronsard of Vendôme and Joachim du Bellay of Anjou, both gentlemen of noblest ancestry, joined the ranks. The two of them fought valiantly, and Ronsard in the first place, so that several others entered the battle under their banners.
...Although it is encountered in the language of warfare, the modern notion of “avant-garde has a lot more to do with the language, theory, and practice of a comparatively recent kind of warfare, the revolutionary civil war. In this sense, it is safe to say that the actual career of the term avant-garde was started in the after- math of the French Revolution, when it acquired undisputed political overtones. The first periodical to bear this specific word in its title was, to be sure, a military one, but it left little doubt as to its revolutionary political stance. I am referring to L’Avant-garde de I’armee des Pyrenees orientates, a journal that appeared in 1794 and whose watchword—engraved on the blade of an emblematic sword—was: “La liberte ou la mort.” This journal was committed to the defense of Jacobin ideas and was intended to reach, beyond military circles, a broader audience of “patriots.”We can therefore take the 1790s as a starting point for the subsequent career of the concept of avant-garde in radical political thought. In hindsight, considering the analogical potentialities of the military notion, it is not difficult to explain the appeal of the metaphor for various kinds of revolutionary, and therefore future-oriented, philosophies: their representatives certainly liked the idea of being, at least intellectually, closer to Utopia than the rest of mankind, which was to follow their paths.
It is, therefore, not by chance that the romantic use of avant-garde in a literary-artistic context was directly derived from the language of revolutionary politics. This occurred in 1825, when the term avant-garde was applied to the arts in a dialogue written by one of the closest friends and disciples of Saint-Simon, namely, Olinde Rodrigues. Rodrigues's dialogue, "L'Artiste, le savant et l'industriel," was published in a volume entitled Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, which appeared in 1825, the year of Saint-Simon's death. Although generally attributed to Saint-Simon, it is known that this unsigned volume was, in fact, the result of a collaboration, which, beside the work of the master, included those of his disciples: Léon Halévy, Rodrigues, Duvergier, and Bailly. This occurrence of avant-garde was discussed at some length by Donald Drew Egbert but, curiously, the author -- who seems only to have consulted the 1825 edition of Opinions... -- attributes the use of the term avant-garde to Saint-Simon and does not mention the name of Rodrigues, who, even if inspired by Saint-Simon's socialism, actually wrote the dialogue between the artist, the scientist, and the industrialist.
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