No one does avant-garde like the French (think Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"); even the term itself is French. Back in September Jean-Christophe Valtat, a French author whose visit was sponsored by the French Embassy, came to BYU and gave a talk entitled "The 'Lost Children': Myth & Mirage of the Avant-garde". He spoke first about his inner struggle of professor too conservative for the author versus author who does not always live up to the professor's expectations. These two sometimes conflicting perspectives lend themselves well to his topic, which is this: the avant-garde prove that literature is important for its "existential impact". What follows is my own summary of the lecture; click here to read the full text (well worth your time).
The avant-garde is a personal subject for him; Valtat first discovered them as a teenager, and his fascination with the avant-garde led him to reconstruct several aspects that connect the plethora of avant-garde movements and make them relevant to us today. First is radicality. Whether it be literature, music, visual arts, or anything else, the avant-garde artist does what has never been done before. This radicality is more than originality, in that the artist "should handle topics that were unknown or taboo before him or her". Second, that radicality is not just aesthetic; instead it has the intent to "change life". This power to change comes from the tendency of avant-garde artists to combine artistic media: poems and paintings, costumes and poetry, etc. It also derives from artists' efforts to make art as a "separate, specialized form" disappear, and replace it with "a life that would be a realization of art". Third, avant-garde movements are group efforts. There is a community pursuing "collective adventures". While some argue that these collective efforts are simply for marketing purposes, Valtat feels that these networks and groups were essential to their art.
Valtat's next points on surprising: after carefully constructing these three aspects, he now describes them in terms of myth and mirage (maybe that's not such a surprise given the title, but there you go). Radicality and reality do not always go in hand. It "often means taking steps towards political action", but politics and art do not always have the same agenda and not a few artists lost themselves to mistaking myth for reality". Changing life is almost oxymoronic to the avant-garde, for once change has been affected it becomes mainstream and thus no longer avant-garde. In fact, one group of young Frenchmen in the 1930s said that “ if they were to be remembered, it would only be as a catastrophe ”. And even those wonderful artistic communities were divided by rivalries and arguments. In Valtat's words, "an ideal community... demands conformity to its members, who in turn fail to see where the liberation, and therefore the point, is".
So where does that leave us? Were the avant-garde movements of the last century a waste of time and talent? According to Valtat, not at all, and I'll finish with his words: "...they left us the memory of a time where art was considered as something meaningful and essential, and possibly life-changing... So the avant-garde is dead, long live the avant-garde".
