AF 2 Commentary: Historical Avant Garde Tropes, the PostAvant and Visual Poetry by De Villo Sloan

 

Vispo collab by Michael Orzechowski (Michael Orr) (Georgia, USA) 

& De Villo Sloan (NY, USA) (2018) 

(Asemic Front Archive)

Historical Avant Garde Tropes, the PostAvant and Visual Poetry

 

By De Villo Sloan

 

In my writing about visual poetry, I frequently refer to the historical avant garde and later notions of continuity via the post avant garde or postavant.

The avant-garde of the West, for me, is a cultural tradition rooted most immediately in certain aspects of 18^th and 19^th century Euro-centric cultures; the 20th century brought a spectacular flowering. A dominant trait of the avant garde is found in its anti-art aesthetics combined with well-defined ideo-cultural tropes meant for disruption, distortion and deconstruction of bourgeois cultural norms.

The historic avant garde ultimately represents a combination of art action and commitment to social change we can still identify today in the work of visual poets and asemic writers.

Thus, I contend along with many others, the historic avant garde has evolved and solidified into a series of recognizable tropes used widely today. Culture workers who identify with this tradition can likely benefit most fully by learning avant tropes as well as creating their own tropes.

The historic avant garde has lost some of its ability to shock and/or bore (creating states of boredom is an avant tactic). However, the historic avant garde has become a cultural tradition.

I began using the term “postavant” in my reviews and essays over a decade ago when I was reading Ron Silliman’s blog and became interested in his use and applications of the term “post-avant.” I know Silliman did not invent the term, but he did effectively circulate it among new generations of poets. This sparked my own recognition that while artists work in the spirit of DaDa and Fluxus today, they are inherently removed from the vital revolutionary impulse that made the earlier avant so compelling.

The regularization of the historic avant garde into a cultural tradition is not so much a decline as it is an opportunity to make the desire for positive cultural and social change a part of everyday life.

 

De Villo Sloan

August 9, 2024

Elbridge, New York

-sSs-

Vispo collab by Michael Orzechowski (Michael Orr) (Georgia, USA) 

& De Villo Sloan (NY, USA) (2018)

(Asemic Front Archive)