"Avant-Garde Historiographies: Constructing Historical Time In the Image of Art"

A cura di Stefano Marino 
In collaborazione con il Centro di Ricerca Internazionale "Culture Fashion Communication" (CFC)

In this paper I will consider the historicity of the avant-garde in a dual perspective. On the one hand, the art of avant-garde appears as a counter-historical phenomenon that poses a thoroughgoing challenge to historicist concepts such as causation, succession, and synchronous context. A conceptual legacy of the art of the 20th century was, as Bürger and others have argued, to explode the traditional boundaries of art and undermine the possibility of a style-based or formalist historiography of art. A history of the avant-garde, accordingly, must account for interwoven social, political, technological, anthropological, and spiritual dimensions that compel the articulation of new historiographic frameworks. These are, at least partially, inspired by the formal-rhetorical structure of exemplary avant-gardist works themselves. On the other hand, transcending their art-historical significance, avant-garde works of art may also inspire alternative ways of thinking about historical time and hence applications of avant-garde historiography to other historical contexts and questions. I will consider examples of this new historiographic space opened by the avant-garde, discussing examples from the 20th century such as the work of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and Humphrey Jennings, as well as recent critical work developing notions of anachronicity, polychronicity, and non-linearity in relation to the avant-garde.