Adieu to the Avant-Garde

As the artistic regime shifts, realism, rhyme, and representation make a comback.

Kanchan Limaye from the July 1997 issue

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One of the country's most powerful arts institutions, the Whitney's notoriety stems from its infamous 1993 Biennial exhibition, which, as usual, professed to survey the American art scene. The 1993 Biennial sought to right such socio-aesthetic wrongs as, for example, Jewish homosexual artists having to submerge the iconography of their religious heritage--or hide their sexual preferences--to get into prestigious galleries. Other works in the 1993 show drew attention to the ills of colonialism or sexism. Huge blocks of chocolate pointed to the horrors of anorexia and bulimia in a society based on "white-male hierarchy." In 1995, the Biennial again focused on shock-value avant-gardism that some audiences found more obscure and unintelligible than shocking.

But at the Realist protest, painters took the microphone to describe their alienation from what remained of 20th-century modernism. "There is a renewed interest in a realism that blends the tradition of the past with our pure contemporary content," Assael said that day.

Assael and his fellow painters, like the poets, architects, and composers they joined in March at The Kitchen, are harbingers of a new cultural development: They represent the emergence of a third front in the nation's long-waged culture wars--one that its adherents hope will render the rigidly polarized debate between right-wing conservatives and left-wing avant-gardists defunct.

That cultural battle has been raging in universities over the literary canon, as Shakespeareans have fought multiculturalists. In 1995, the battle broke out at Lincoln Center over the jazz canon, with blues-and-swing purists like Albert Murray and Wynton Marsalis fighting avant-garde musicians like Cecil Taylor. This past February, a skirmish over race, representation, and cultural power in the theater occurred at New York's Town Hall between playwright August Wilson and Robert Brustein, critic and director of the American Repertory Theater.

In virtually all the manifestations of the culture wars, the right has favored tradition over evolution, and Western culture over multiculturalism. The left has usually favored gender-, class-, and race-based analyses, and excoriated the West for colonialism and bigotry. For both sides the stakes have been high: The winners hope to write the history of the arts in America, and control the nation's cultural future.

Enter, now, a group of artists and scholars who reject the ethnocentrism of the right, the demonization of the West and identity politics of the left, and the dogmatism of both. For them, great art can include--but ultimately transcends--political goals. They include Christians and atheists; WASPs and recent immigrants; blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians; straights and gays. The cultural battle lines are being redrawn.

A week after 1995's Realist protest, Assael faced Whitney director David Ross in a radio debate. "Sometimes the present created the future by breaking the shackles of the past," he said. "But sometimes the past created the future by breaking the shackles of the present." Assael was borrowing the words of University of Texas at Dallas Professor Frederick Turner, words describing the apparently cyclical nature of cultural movements. Like Turner, Assael hopes that a decaying modernism will lead to an aesthetic rebirth.

Turner, in fact, was a key guest at the Derriere Guard Festival. Dubbed byKirkus Reviews as "Apollo to Camille Paglia's Dionysus," Turner is, like Paglia, an intellectual maverick, but lacks her sensationalistic strategies crafted to garner media attention. Like Wolfe, Turner has also prophesied a cultural shift. In his 1995 book, The Culture of Hope, he wrote that "a growing number of artists in various fields" have rejected modernist orthodoxy and, like the World War I-era artists who broke with their aesthetic establishments, "are preparing their Armory Show." Turner's phrase for those artists who are attempting to shift the cultural regime is the "radical center."

Apart from having published five books of poetry--including two book-length epic poems--and a novel, Turner served as editor of The Kenyon Review, one of the most influential literary magazines in America, in the early 1980s. (He is also a contributing editor to REASON.) The Culture of Hope serves as an artistic manifesto (some attendees at the Derriere Guard Festival had the book under their arms). In that book, Turner calls on the artists of today to bridge the gap between the elitist avant-garde world and the general public, and celebrates the conflation of high and low culture which is now occurring.

According to Turner, artists who fall under the "radical center's" umbrella because they exploit world classical traditions include Frederick Hart, sculptor of Three Soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Ex Nihilo at the Washington Cathedral; earthworks sculptor James Turrell; Tom Wolfe, who has criticized the self-absorption of modern fiction and called for realistic storytelling; composer Philip Glass; "world music" practitioners; Peter Brook and his "ethnodrama," which makes use of Kathakali, Japanese Noh Theater, and ballet; dance troupes such as Sankai Juku, Momix, and Mark Morris; and pop artists such as Laurie Anderson and David Byrne.

Some of these artists, such as Frederick Hart and Tom Wolfe, are aware of the cultural trends they embody, and consciously support a specific cultural movement. Others may not be aware of the larger trend. Some, like Laurie Anderson or Philip Glass, have long been classified as "avant-garde" due to their experimentalism, yet they also use classical traditions.

Turner describes the "death of the avant-garde"--a trendy topic among many academics in the disciplines of English and cultural studies, most of whom agree that the avant-garde has died. But he also deals with the question, "What's next?" And he suggests answers for the questions that preoccupy artists: Why create art? For whom? What kind? In response, he has developed a philosophy of the arts based on what he calls "natural classicism." Based on recent advances in neuroscience and Turner's own collaborative research with neuropsychologist Ernst Poppel, it suggests that human beings are biologically hard-wired to appreciate the classical genres of art--visual representation, narrative, melody in music, verse in poetry, and dramatic mimesis.

It is no coincidence, Turner argues, that these genres manifest themselves in the arts of all world traditions. Artists of the future, he predicts, will eschew the cynical and desperate mannerisms of postmodernism, and exploit these multiple classical vocabularies to make art of lasting value. These artists will tap into the fundamental artistic principles that are recognizable across cultural barriers. During the 20th century the artist was commonly perceived as a denunciatory prophet, whose main goal was to expose the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie--a notion that still dominates the avant-garde art world. Turner's "radical center" envisions artists as pan-cultural shamans whose purpose is to dramatize the multiple voices in a culture, bourgeois or otherwise.

Turner's been in the cultural trenches for decades. In 1981, he met with two other poets, Dick Allen and Fred Feirstein, at a corner table at the Minetta Lane Tavern in Greenwich Village. All were disturbed by the political dogmatism that they believed was stifling the poetry world. At that moment, as they saw it, confessional poetry was in; meter, rhyme, and formal verse were out. Poetry about the poets was in; poetry in which poets stepped outside themselves to cast light on the lives of others was out. Anne Sexton was in; Shakespeare was out, and if you didn't agree, you were branded an anti-feminist.

So the poets, two of whom had teaching appointments at universities, drew up a manifesto for a movement they called "Expansive Poetry," to break down these restrictive political barriers. From its roots rose today's New Formalists, poets who believe, as did the Expansive Poets, that adhering to forms can liberate artists, rather than restrict them. In this sense, the poetry movement coincidentally runs parallel to the Realist movement among painters. New Formalism has gained much more institutional acceptance since its first stirrings in the early 1980s, and is now accepted in the academic world as a legitimate movement.