Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture, the second volume of Sascha Bru’s and Peter Nicholls’ European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies series, targets the intersections of so-called “high” and “low” artistic and literary cultural expressions, historically situated in a period spanning the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Working from the assumption that the “divide between both [‘high’ and ‘low’ culture] appears as firm as ever” (5), the editors cull work from a broad swath of European academics from Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Sweden, along with a handful of scholars from Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. The anthology arranges major topics and issues into five sections: “Terms and Canons,” “Folklore,” “The Everyday,” “Commerce,” and “Media.” Most essays are revisions of papers presented at the second biennial conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies held in Poland 2010; twenty-three of the articles are in English, five in German, and three in French. Coverage, therefore, is both broad and specific, each case study offering intriguing insights into various facets of the inherent tensions between art and “anti-art,” between popular and “unpopular” artists, artworks, and their public reception. As such, the collection serves as an appropriate reader for humanities courses that seek to make cross-cultural connections to explore larger trends, themes, and commonalities. One caveat: while the diversity of contributors assures a similar diversity of perspectives, and while all of the articles are intelligent and insightful, the babel of scholarly voices heard here requires the reader to make constant adjustments to each author’s tone and literary style. Despite their diverse backgrounds, however, the contributors share an aesthetic and academic heritage grounded in ideas of Theodor Adorno, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Beuys, Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Bourdieu, Bertolt Brecht, André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Matei Calinescu, Michel de Certeau, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Michel Foucault, Federico García Lorca, Clement Greenberg, Max Horkheimer, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Amelia Jones, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Pablo Picasso, Renato Poggioli, Man Ray, and others—iconic artists and intellectuals associated with the Bauhaus, Cubism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Futurism, Kitsch, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and other Modernist (broadly defined) and/or the Avant-Garde (broadly defined) movements. In particular, Peter Bürger’s influential Theorie der Avantgarde (1984) is often cited throughout the anthology, serving as a touchstone and reference point for investigations into more topical themes such as gender politics, cultural consumption, historiography, and the like. Well annotated, the book facilitates further research by maintaining an online open-source bibliography in English, German, and French.
The first section, on terms and canons, addresses the notion of a perennial divide between elitist and populist art, emphasized by Clement Greenberg in his formative 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1986), echoed by Andreas Huyssen in Across the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), but problematized in more recent scholarship. The articles here—Marjorie Perloff’s study of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade sculptures, Alexis Paterson’s look at British Experimental Music, Dominika Buchowska’s discussion of English art criticism, Esther Sánchez-Parod’s article on the representations of dance in painting and literature, David Ayers’ political analysis of idealist art criticism, and Christophe Genin’s historical overview of the opposition between “le palais et la rue,” the palace and the street (84)—for example, all challenge the apparent polarization of “high” and “low” art forms, calling attention to the mutual agency existing between them, to the political dimensions of such cultural exchanges, to their shared aesthetics and various points of crossover, and to the interrelated and interdependent nature of the production, interpretation, and reception of such artworks. In general, these articles serve to reinscribe the “divide” even as they challenge its accuracy as an intellectual metaphor.
The next section, on folklore, consists of six case studies treating Dadaism in the context of German Carnival, the use of traditional and popular song and jazz by Avant-Garde poets, and popular elements in Jorge Luis Borges’ early work and in the modernismo plays of Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Of note is Geert Buelens’ well-researched and well-documented article highlighting the irony that avant-garde poets’ perceptions of popular songs may be diametrically opposed to public perceptions of Avant-Garde works that appropriate these very sources.
The following section, “The Everyday,” overlaps with previous themes, further exploring the concept of “popular” or “populist.” Treating a variety of subjects, from photography to literature (especially Surrealist literature), fiber art, and installations, this chapter further blurs boundaries between elite and popular art when Raymond Spiteri raises provocative questions about Jean Cocteau’s sexual politics, Harri Veivo unpacks the socio-political discourse attendant to Finnish Avant-Garde poetry, and George H. Williams reveals further layers of aesthetic juxtaposition: the organic/natural versus the industrial, the actual versus the representative, and the transcendent versus the earthbound.
The five essays in the fourth section, on commerce, focus on the commodification of art, as a form of capital (in both the cultural and financial senses) whose value emerges in its translation and transportation across economic class-lines. Abigal Susik’s nuanced argument that Surrealist scavenging of “outmoded” ideas functions as a “double critique of the ideological binaries of ‘old’ and ‘new’” (323) is buttressed by references to pertinent scholarship on the changing value of commodities over time and through cultures.
The final group of articles examines the effects of mass media—newspapers, magazines, journals, posters, television, film, etc.—as instruments of both constraint and agency. Sara J. Angel, for example, draws a direct correlation between Picasso’s graphic designs and the layout of contemporary newspapers. Károly Kókai, Gabriele Jutz, and Rea Walldén all consider the various roles of cinema. Ross K. Elfline’s concluding piece takes a broader view of media, suggesting that Italian architects associated with Superstudio represented a radical revision of communication and interconnectivity, a sort of “anti-architecture,” analogous to the Avant-Garde’s historical posture as “anti-art.”
The anthology opens up a number of exciting avenues for further discussion and investigation. In its attempt to regard the “popular” through the lens of Modernist and Avant-Garde artists and scholars, the collection confirms, as Jesper Olsson concludes in his piece on Swedish television, that “the encounter between avant-garde (or critical) art and mass culture (or the culture industry) is a precarious relation, a dangerous liaison,” and readers are apt to agree with Olsson that “this is perhaps the most productive and engaging relationship to hope for” (457).
Works Cited
Bürger, Peter. 1984 [1974]. Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Greenberg, Clement. 1986. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In The Collected Essays & Criticism, Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, edited by John O’Brian, 5-22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
--------
[Review length: 1126 words • Review posted on March 6, 2013]