Morgan Falconer, art historian, writer, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art faculty, has just published How to Be Avant-Garde, a new book that explores the strange story of modern artists’ quest to end art.
Banner image by Steve Johnson, sourced on Unsplash.
"We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,” Tommaso Marinetti decided. Museums, he argued, are “cemeteries,” “public dormitories,” “abattoirs.” His friends agreed, so they put down their thoughts in a manifesto and in February 1909 they published it on the front page of a French newspaper. It was the first salvo in the noisy affair that was the Italian Futurist movement.
This kind of activity lit a fire in Marinetti. He didn’t want to be a lonely poet, scorned by the world — he wanted to be a leader. This drove him to advocate across Europe, rallying writers and artists around him as if he were forming a political party and arming a militia. Marinetti was avant-garde. He was “before the front,” if we are to translate the French literally, and for Marinetti as for so many others, the military metaphor is entirely apt.
We generally take the phrase “avant-garde” to denote something that might be advanced or ahead of its time, and today we use it in that loose sense to acclaim all kinds of phenomena, everything from fashion to music — even food. But in his new book, How to Be Avant-Garde, Morgan Falconer explores how the term can also have a very different meaning — one that was a kind of dream, a dream in which artists fuse art with life and in the process, bring art itself to an end.
We tend to assume that all modern artists loved art. But that’s not the case. André Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, repeatedly called for the end of literature. Theo van Doesburg, the leader of the De Stijl movement, proclaimed that “art has poisoned our life,” while his friend and compatriot, Piet Mondrian, believed that if we did abolish art, no one would miss it. And in December 1914, as the First World War entered its first winter, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky declared that art was already dead. “It found itself in the backwater of life,” he wrote. “It was soft and could not defend itself.”
The aim of avant-gardism wasn’t necessarily great art—it was, perhaps, the end of art. And today, living in a world where the art market is larger than ever, and those museums that Marinetti wanted to destroy are stronger than ever, this idea may still hold lessons for us.
Written by Morgan Falconer, Faculty, MA Contemporary Art, and MA Historic Art and Design, New York