Which avant-garde concepts are of interest for Dialogical Aesthetics?

Martin Krenn: Grant Kester

In your book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art you criticise the avant-garde discourse and an understanding of art as one whose “role is to shock us out of the perceptual complacency, to force us to see the world anew. This shock has borne many names over the years: the sublime, alienation effect, l'amour fou, and so on. In each case the result is a kind of epiphany that lifts viewers outside the familiar boundaries of a common language, existing modes of representation, and even their own sense of self.” You describe this as an "orthopaedic" aesthetic and that this orthopaedic orientation preserves the idea that the artist is a superior being, able to penetrate the veils of mystification that otherwise confuse and disorient the hapless modern subject. Despite your critique on shock in the art discourse that we also have discussed today I’d like to ask you about the possibilities of a historical re-reading of the avant-garde art. As a starting point I would like to talk with you about the position of Walter Benjamin, especially in his essay The author as producer. Although Benjamin’s use of shock is sometimes contradictory, I would argue that he defines shock as an inherent part of social change. In his essay he relates his ideas of art as a political practice to the idea of alienation by Berthold Brecht but he also refers to Sergei Tretyakov’s model of the operative writer. So I would say that this model of the operative writer as well as his art practice in the 1920s and 1930s were a kind of pre-dialogical art practice. Although there are some failures and contradictions in his book Feldherren, for example he talks about the peasants as Kulaks, a discriminatory term by Stalin to expropriate, deport and finally kill independent farmers, Tretyakov’s concept and practice also has a lot of emancipatory potential. I would like to ask you if you think that these and other historical avant-garde concepts as well as practices are of interest for dialogical aesthetics, today.