Daniel M. AbramsonObsolescence: An Architectural HistoryChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 208 pp., 68 b/w illus. $35 (cloth), ISBN 9780226313450; $28 (paper), ISBN 9780226478050
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By the 1970s, a consensus was emerging that the avant-garde was extinct. Such was the
conclusion reached by the Theory of the Avant-Garde proposed in 1974 by a German
critic, Peter Bürger: the ...“advanced guard” that used to challenge the entire institution of
culture had now dispersed.1 Of all the experiments with art that stretched back at least as
far as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the unique contribution of the fully “avantgarde” work that peaked in an extraordinary concentration in the early twentieth century
(with Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and the early Soviet
experiments in revolutionary culture) was that it turned against art itself. In other words,
the true avant-garde spurned the ‘autonomy’ that separated art from the rest of life,
thereby challenging bourgeois society. Notorious avant-garde “works of art” had really
been the bombs to wreck bourgeois consciousness. By contrast, the art still trading as
“avant-garde” after the Second World War was failing to revolutionize everyday life, and
had itself become an artistic institution (that is, treated as a product of individual genius,
housed in bourgeois galleries and museums, serenely set apart from collective political
struggle). The shock value of avant-garde art, once a weapon against bourgeois
sensibilities, was now an expectation of the audience, the museum and the dealer. A
distinction would have to be drawn, it seemed, between art that was truly avant-garde,
created with the intention of revolutionizing the world at large, and that which was
simply “Modernist,” created to revolutionize art. The “historical” avant-gardes of the
early twentieth century had been politically “engaged”; by contrast, the “neo-avantgarde”2 of the late twentieth century, like the Pop Art movement, seemed politically
disengaged, and ironic in its rapprochement with bourgeois capitalism.
