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The Avant-Garde and Its Successors




Contents

The Avant-Garde and Its Successors 2
Rodin’s Successors 9
The Grid 12
Software art 17
Singularity as Original 17
Cultural Archives and the New 21
The Dialectic of Art 24
Threefold Sublation 24
Fourfold Sublation 26
Improved Groysean Threefold model 26
The Fourfold Model 27
Bibliography 31


This work summarizesand discusses the famous controversial essay “Originality of the Avant-Garde”[1] by Rosalind Krauss. Her arguments will be recapitulated and reviewed under contemporary conditions and development of modern art and its institutions.

The modern Avant-Garde is the milestone in aesthetics of the 20th century. Like Nicola Pisano or Veith Stoss for Cinquecento, Michelangelo, Raffael and Tizian forSeicento or Baroque, Caravaggio, Rubens and Rembrandt for the Classicism, so are few artists like Rodin and Monet preparers for the 20th century modernism. Their ideas and techniques live further after their deaths in almost all works afterwards, where the succeeding artists keep them alive and radicalize these already radical ideas even further.

To see the realization of these ideas andtechniques is not really difficult, but of course to argue about them is a quite tricky adventure. One of the critics of the postmodern times, Rosalind Krauss, took this task on her and tried to find specific arguments to describe them. She also extrapolated these on the development of “modern” art after modernity. She, being the theoretical voice of post-modernism, gives really fruitful thoughts to beread and contemplated further.

Krauss starts her essay with a description of an exhibition of Rodin’s works “never seen before and pieces in plaster that had lain on the shelves in storage at Meudon since the artist’s death”[2].

A new cast of the Gates of Hell has been shown to the audience which seems almost a fake for her. How can after the death of the artist a new cast been put in bronze?Can this be defined as original, or is this rather a strange idea of the curator to show something specifically new and get more audience to the exhibition?

Krauss cannot answer this question with yes or no, which is rather a neither nor.

Comparing the cast from 1978 with the new version, we could say it is an original. The Chambre des Deputes decided to limit any cast of Rodin’s work totwelve pieces. After his death the artist himself left his work in possession and reproduction to the French state giving all copyrights to the French nation, or better to its politicians.

In fact The Gates have never been finished. Rodin has played with the recomposition of them before he died and left various variations of possible casts. The first bronze of The Gates has been casted in 1921,which was actually three years after the artist’s death.

What does this mean regarding the originality of the work, when the artist never has seen his work casted and not forgetting the fact that there are various realizations of his compositions around the world nowadays? It’s quite difficult to answer this question, except if you think following: All casts of the gates are multiple copieswithout presence of the original and this only and only if you define the original in this case as a cast that has been realized before the artist’s death.

Trying to underline this statement, Krauss is taking a look at Walter Benjamin’s essay, ”The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” where photographic prints are considered not to be authentic in the way that it makes no sense to askfor authenticity if an innumerate number of prints can be made out of a negative.[3]

The actual meaning of this statement is that the idea of authenticity is suspended or it just doesn’t exist.

“Like Atget’s thousands of glass negatives for which, in some cases, no lifetime prints exist, Rodin left many of his plaster figures unrealized in any permanent material, either bronze or...