Distinctions between modernism and avant-garde..

[Brad]

Isn't "modernism" in jazz usually associated with bebop?

I believe that bebop is generally considered the beginning of what is now called the modern age. It's the dividing point of how things were before and after.

[Simon Weil]

At this point I think I was, but since I invited Simon to this group............

I'm editing to correct this post. I originally invited Simon to join the BNBB. I did this to get him away from RMB where I thought he was wasting his time. I don't regret this and still welcome everything he has to say. He's a valuable member. No real offense taken, or one intended.

Well, thanks for saying that Chuck. I do appreciate it - and, indeed it is true the reason I was on the BNBB and now here is because Chuck suggested it.

I wasn't trying to be insulting. I wasn't really even sure where Chuck was coming from. I guess I'd say my sense of humour has been stripped away from me in the intellectual threads by all the flak that I've taken over the years. I mean my general sense of humour remains, but in these threads I've just taken so many sideways comments and digs and what have you - some of which I dare say appeared humourous to the posters - that, well I'm touchy and aggressive and tend to expect the worst. So that's about it...

I felt threatened because I respect Chuck and reacted aggressively.

Simon Weil

[Pete C]

I just have had very poor experiences being intellectual on Jazz boards.

Simon Weil

I always find that intelligence gets much better results than intellectualism.

[Larry Kart]

Impossible --

I like what you say here, particularly the idea of the built-in out-thereness of artistic avant-gardism (though I'd prefer something like "alternate reality" to your "distorted reality"):

"Modern refers to that which attempts to reflect the current, be it architecture or a canvas. As an idea, if we were starting now, this is what music, or art would sound or look like. This is what our skyline would look like.

"Avant-garde refers to that which will never be modern. The avant-garde is just left of modern, a distorted reality that resides in the fray of modern. This is what our skyline would look like from out here."

Throwing another shrimp on the coals, here's a related passage from the introduction to ye olde forthcoming book:

"...jazz now has what might be called a permanent avant-garde. Perhaps that sounds paradoxical, even absurd--how, after all, can the latest thing of several yesterdays ago still be avant-garde? But artistic avant-gardism in general and the jazz avant-garde in particular are not merely time-line affairs. In the words of music historian Carl Dahlhaus: "[N]ewness is also an aesthetic factor, which for example is inextricably bound up with the earliest atonal works, Schoenberg’s Op. 11 Piano Pieces and the final movement of the Second String Quartet. What is seemingly most transient--the quality of incipient beginning, of ‘for the first time’--acquires a paradoxical permanence. Even half a century later it can be felt in almost undiminished form, and as an immediate aesthetic quality at that…." The same could be said of the music of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, et al.--the sense of language upheaval is inherent and does not become normalized."

[king ubu]

Fascinating thread!

I think I understand what you mean, Simon.

One small qeustion, rather, two:

- the first: on jazz in general: would not jazz in its entirety, from its roots, its beginnings, be a "post-modern" art-form? A collage, a play with existing forms, a once more, once less, successful attempt to create and define new forms - and each time such forms get established, there is something new to throw them over again.

Just a though. I don't know if it's of any value.

- second: if Mingus (and maybe Sun Ra, no? I don't know him well at all), is "post-modern" - you mean his playing with form, his irony? His consciousness of what's been made and thought and said before him?

Then, what about today's musical ecclecticism? Wynton playing Jelly Roll one day, and "modern" post-bop the next? Now letting the discussion of "is this jazz or not" aside, what do you do with this?

Or maybe the "is this jazz or not" thing is just the point here?

These are only some spontaneous musings - I don't know if there's much to it!

ubu

[.:.impossible]

Impossible --

I like what you say here, particularly the idea of the built-in out-thereness of artistic avant-gardism (though I'd prefer something like "alternate reality" to your "distorted reality"):

"...jazz now has what might be called a permanent avant-garde. Perhaps that sounds paradoxical, even absurd--how, after all, can the latest thing of several yesterdays ago still be avant-garde? But artistic avant-gardism in general and the jazz avant-garde in particular are not merely time-line affairs. In the words of music historian Carl Dahlhaus: "[N]ewness is also an aesthetic factor, which for example is inextricably bound up with the earliest atonal works, Schoenberg’s Op. 11 Piano Pieces and the final movement of the Second String Quartet. What is seemingly most transient--the quality of incipient beginning, of ‘for the first time’--acquires a paradoxical permanence. Even half a century later it can be felt in almost undiminished form, and as an immediate aesthetic quality at that…." The same could be said of the music of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, et al.--the sense of language upheaval is inherent and does not become normalized."

"Alternate" works well Larry. "Distorted" may not be the best term, but I was trying to convey that "through the looking glass" idea. The vantage point is as important as the subject.

What you write about the permanent avant-garde... I believe this is what Simon is referring to within visual art and painting. When I think of these terms, they seem maligned, since modern can only refer to art created to reflect a range of time, and avant-garde can only refer to what is parallel to, but not modern. It is not modern, but would not exist, or would not make any sense without modernism.

Jazz's avant-garde, as we tend to refer to it, may not have advanced much in the past 3-4 decades. In fact, what was modern in the mid-sixties, still applies to today's standard.

Bebop is no longer considered modern; however, looking back at jazz as an artform, I believe the current era began circa-1960 and has no end in sight.

[Dr. Rat]

Eric --

Have to admit that my knowledge of Poggioli's book is pretty much confined to the book itself. When I have time, I'll look for P. Burger's response. Where would I find it?

P.S. As I recall, one of Poggioli's goals was to make as clear a distinction as possible between romanticism, modernism and the avant-garde. As I recall he did so by arguing backwards from his fairly direct experience with/understanding of avant-garde art and figures of the early 20th Century -- i.e. having divined the principles of avant-gardism in action, he looked backwards to see when and how they arose, and noted that those principles were only intermittently present (or present in nascent form) in romanticism and modernism. This approach, if I've described correctly, had a lot of appeal to me because it was rooted in things that P. himself had been through or witnessed close up.

(Larry Kart)

Sorry to be so long about this, and I hope the whole discussion hasn't passed me by . . . But I went back to Burger and Poggoli last night.

Actually Burger has nothing to say about Poggoli, it's the guy who writes the foreword to the American edition of his book: Jochen Schulte-Sasse. S-S makes a case for preferring Burger to Poggoli ont he basis of the fact that Burger has a better schema to distinguish romanticism, modernism and the avant-garde.

Terry Eagleton, in his post-modern chapter of Ideology of the Aesthetic does a good job of summarizing Burger's schema. Essentially Romanticism is the aesthetic movement that came out of the separation of the arts from normal life, where art became a profession and artists were thought to have a different order of understanding than regular folk. (Not that there was an absolute division, by contemplating the aethetic or the sublime, regular folk could reaccquaint themselves with that artistic way of knowing, but everyday life generally mitigated against it.)

Modernism is a response to the fact that everyday life essentially incorporated the Romantic viewpoint as a complement to itself. Many artists conceived of their work not as a relief from the everyday (and all the power plays and inhumanity inherent in it), but as a challenge to it.

When society essentially accepted and absorbed romantic art, art started moving to the modern, which was more or less challenging aesthetic form stripped of content (in a relative rather than absolute sense for the most part).

(And here there are big problems in applying these categories to music, because instrumental music can't really be said to have form vs. content in the same sort of way that painting or even poetry can. Music is an abstract art to begin with. So where are we to draw the line where "modernism" begins in jazz? It could be said that jazz from the get go is essentially modernistic, or that bop finall brought it to its modernistic destiny.)

Society came to accept and absorb this as well. The avant-garde ups the ante by challenging the entire category of art and challenges society to accept as art that which manefestly rejects the category. Thus the challenge is put most directly to the initial absorbtion of romantic art: that the aesthetic is a necessary, humanizing complement to urbanizing, industrializing society.

By attempting to reject and destroy this separate category of "the aesthetic," AG as Burger conceives of it is essentially anti-romantic.

The difference btw Poggoli and Burger, it seems to me, is a productive one, rather than a case of one being right and another wrong. I think the two points of view both account for different parts of or aspects of what we call the avant-garde.

By bringing this up I didn't mean to challenge your use of Poggoli, which I thought was just what was needed in your essay, but to ask about connections you might see between the romantic and the avant-garde as you see it.

--eric

[Simon Weil]

Fascinating thread!

I think I understand what you mean, Simon.

One small qeustion, rather, two:

- the first: on jazz in general: would not jazz in its entirety, from its roots, its beginnings, be a "post-modern" art-form? A collage, a play with existing forms, a once more, once less, successful attempt to create and define new forms - and each time such forms get established, there is something new to throw them over again.

Just a though. I don't know if it's of any value.

The speed of change in Jazz - I mean from inception ca 1900 to avant-garde ca 1965 - is amazing. I guess I'd say that the first 20+ years of that maybe fit the post-modern paradigm, in that the forms of Jazz seem to flow in and out of other black forms. That feels kind of related to what you're saying. I do think that once the heroic soloists get going, with Armstrong and Bechet, then that breaks the paradigm, in that post-modernism seems to question the very idea of heroism in art.

Another thing is that Jazz isn't, in general, about the finished work of art - You don't paint your masterpiece and stick it on the wall and have people come and admire it - which is what Modernism art revolves around. It is a performance art (obviously) - Once a solo is played it's gone. But "performance art" as generally understood, is a description of a particular post-modern form of visual art - where people watch this process happening, and then it's gone.

Yeah, I think impermanence is a significant aspect of Post-Modernism that appears in Jazz. I guess that's what you're getting at, in part.

- second: if Mingus (and maybe Sun Ra, no? I don't know him well at all), is "post-modern" - you mean his playing with form, his irony? His consciousness of what's been made and thought and said before him?

Actually Sun Ra probably does have pastichy kind of postmodern elements in him (I also don't know him that well, but that's how it seems). I think there was irony in there. But I think Mingus is kind of like the post-impressionists. I mean, I remember going to the Van Gogh centenary exhibition in Amsterdam and seeing the massive crowds and being amazed they could go for something with quite such blazing colours and disturbing content. But the thing was it was all contained within, more-or-less comprehensible, form. All the distortions and colour were understood as expressionistic devices the artist had used to articulate his inner struggles. So I think Mingus is like that, in that he uses all sort of expressionistic extentions of familiar Jazz forms - and people can grasp that and run with it, whereas they can't really grasp Cecil Taylor, who came after. I think there is irony in Mingus, for sure. But it's a heavy, barbed weapon with (I guess) a political agenda. Post-Modern irony is different, kind of lighter, without that sort of belief....

Yup there is pastiche in Mingus too...

Then, what about today's musical ecclecticism? Wynton playing Jelly Roll one day, and "modern" post-bop the next? Now letting the discussion of "is this jazz or not" aside, what do you do with this?

Or maybe the "is this jazz or not" thing is just the point here?

I think Wynton is Post-Modernist and doesn't know it. Irony is pretty alien to him. So he does pastiche and eclecticism and doesn't know that it's that. My sister used to work for a marketing organisation, and she once got this project to devise some campaign or another. So she and her co-workers came up with these different styles for the campaign. They devised two which they thought would be OK, and then, just for fun, devised a third which was like a pastiche of all the various "classical" styles they could think of - and called it "classic" as a kind of in-joke with their client.

They weren't seriously thinking of doing a campaign with their joke classic style...Trouble was....The customer decided their "classic" style was just great, not realising it was in fact a spoof. It demanded that my sister and her mates do the whole campaign in classic style. And they had to do it.

I think there is something in styles of once it's played (out), it's gone.

Simon Weil

Edited March 27, 2004 by Simon Weil

[Dr. Rat]

I think Wynton is Post-Modernist and doesn't know it. Irony is pretty alien to him. So he does pastiche and eclecticism and doesn't know that it's that. My sister used to work for a marketing organisation, and she once got this project to devise some campaign or another. So she and her co-workers came up with these different styles for the campaign. They devised two which they thought would be OK, and then, just for fun, devised a third which was like a pastiche of all the various "classical" styles they could think of - and called it "classic" as a kind of in-joke with their client.

Seriously, I think Wynton is a post-modernist. He's very much analagous to the more "conservative" stream of post-modern architecture (essentially non-ironic gestures toward heritage). I think this would be a very interesting way of making sense of his career.

Edited March 27, 2004 by Dr. Rat

[clifford_thornton]

I'll quote art critic Clement Greenberg's definition of modernism: "[it] is the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." In other words, using paint and canvas to get at the nature of the practice in order to eventually paint better paintings. It is a progressivist, idealist notion of reality. Pollock and Noland were necessary for painting. Cecil Taylor and Andrew Hill were/are necessary for jazz. Modernism was avant-garde, because avant-garde is 'high art' (cf. Greenberg's "Avant-garde and Kitsch," 1939).

Post-modern, or post-structural, thought seeks to decentralize the arguments of modernism, in that the structures of society and art (paint and canvas, for example) must be undermined. Meaning varies, there is no objective reality, and we must be able to make sense of the world through breaking down these false relationships. Boundaries are nothing if not fluid. The integration of other time-arts into jazz, such as theatre (cf. Instant Composers' Pool), would be an example of post-structuralism in the music. The irony of it is that post-structural or anti-modern art and thought replaced progressivist modernism as the avant-garde. Therefore, Wynton is arch-formalist but not avant-garde.

That's over-simplified, but pretty much how I would consider the argument. Andrew Hill and ICP are both avant-garde, dig? Wynton would've been in 1943.

[Simon Weil]

I agree with a lot Clifford Thornton's post - i.e. a lot of the basic characterizations.

But....There is a kind of discontinuity between denying "progressivist" notions (which is what Post-Modernism does) and being avant-garde, in that you can hardly be at the front of something that doesn't believe in moving forward.

I guess, at this stage, avant-garde more or less means whatever is the Dangerous New Thing in Art just now. Still, I'm inclined to think that 60s Jazz avant-garde and early 20c visual art avant-garde did do something irrevocably shattering, which our current avant-garde doesn't.

Basically they discovered a new world.

Simon Weil

[but I'm not familiar with the ICP so maybe I'm missing the point.]

Edited March 27, 2004 by Simon Weil

[Brandon Burke]

Modernism was avant-garde, because avant-garde is 'high art'.

I agree. This is something I meant to touch on earlier. This cuts to the very fundamental core of the discussion.

[Dr. Rat]

Modernism was avant-garde, because avant-garde is 'high art'.

I agree. This is something I meant to touch on earlier. This cuts to the very fundamental core of the discussion.

As I see it, Clifford is essentially making a point for a sort of permanent avant-garde (that is whoever is the most "progressive" or "radical" in the arts at any given time is the avant-garde).

But, the point made by Simon weighs in importantly here. If you don't beleive in progress and you think art is going anywhere (essential beliefs of the post-modern movement), what does it mean to be in art's advance guard?

So a lot of historians have moved toward specifically identifying a historical avant-garde movement--sort of a last flourish of modernism.

Post-modernism is a term that has been applied to works that are quite un-radical (big buildings with Chippendale chair motifs) and has been, with some reason, been identified as a conservative movement (not that this is the only way to define post-modernism, but pomo doesn't mean the same thing as avant-garde).

These categories--modernism, post-modernism, avant-garde--aren't just stylistic descriptors, they're attempts to identify historic artistic movements, some of which have a pretty high degree of self-consciousness.

The thesis of Avant-garde and cliche has some pretty big problems if we are to use it to categorize and periodize art, the opposition between artistic speech and everyday speech was already much commented upon during the eighteenth-century, and the Russian formalists use it to define literature as such, which seems a lot more plausible that using it to define the avant-garde, imo.

The high/low distiction behind "high art" goes back even further, and was in dispute starting with the romantics. I know there's a distinction often made between "high-art" modernism and "populist" post-modernism, but I think a lot of that is retrospective: what makes a lot of modernism "high art" to us is that it eventually was embraced by the establishment, which some in the next generation repudiated by (usually ironically--no populism here) approprating pop-culture.

--eric

[paul secor]

I've been reading through all of this for a while. I think I'll let you professors continue your discussion, and I'll just listen to some music.