The political avant-garde was even shaping the political reality of society.

Interviewee: Neala Schleuning

Well, modernism is such a broad term. It covers everything but within modernism, there were people who were more specifically focused on an over political agenda. Modernism in art, in my mind, is an on-going debate more or less within the art community. It’s about the kind of style, form and content in an art work. But the political avant-garde in studying and creating the action to the larger society was shaping even the political reality of the larger society. Modernism did it in a kind of an abstract distant way, but the avant-garde wanted to directly impact and make politics and not just react to it and try to create art for its own sake. They were more interested in art as action and more interested in what art was going to do. I also don’t think that there is such a thing as postmodernism, although there is kind of waning of modernism. I think it’s a continuation if you will, and a further degeneration of modernism. So the question is what comes next?

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