THE HISTORICAL AVANT - GARDE
In his extensively debated work ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde,’ of 1974 Peter Bürger argues that the shared objective of connecting art and life unites the diverse, radical, and innovative artistic groups of the twentieth century into a unified phenomenon the "Avant-garde" in its truest sense. The critique of the artistic establishment and the reintegration of art into life, despite frequent misinterpretation and deployment out of context, have become inseparable from this concept. The periodizing categories of 'historical avant-garde' and 'neo-avant-garde,' which group together art practices and movements from the first and second halves of the twentieth century, have since become pervasive and their utility remains unquestionable.
Bürger's narrow selection of 'historical avant-garde' movements includes Dada, Surrealism, and post-1917 Russian Constructivism. It also includes some Italian Futurism and German Expressionism, but not Cubism. The avant-garde movements represent the logical point from which art’s development can be grasped. According to Bürger's theory, there are three stages of art: sacral, courtly, and bourgeois. He examines art through three lenses: function, production, and reception. The changes in this theory point to a turning point (aestheticism), where art's function is reduced to its own representation and all communal or social functions are reduced to bourgeois individualism.
In his writings that attempt to establish a novel sociology of literature, Bürger introduces the concept of the 'institution of art' as a sociological and interpretive category, elucidated primarily in formal and historical terms. The 'institution of art' is thus positioned as a historical category that emerged as a central concept in the development of ideas. Bürger contends that despite the fact that the institution of art was fully formed by the 18th century, a tension between content of a genuinely political character and the apolitical infrastructure provided by the institution existed until the emergence of high modernist aestheticism. However, this tension altogether disappeared with the emergence of high modernist formalism. The turn away from realism towards experimentation with resources internal to art itself should, according to Bürger, be understood as the aesthetic expression of institutional autonomy, wherein the latter becomes manifested in the contents of the artworks.
The theorist managed to establish a correlation with aestheticism, which he perceives as a historical stage that represented art's highest point, leading to a crisis in the development of art. Thus, he believes that the key cultural limitation of high modernism is its focus on "aesthetic autonomy.” This aestheticism shows how the purity of "art as an institution" comes to life in the formal aesthetic ideas of certain artworks. He is not really interested in looking at specific art forms or the content of particular pieces. Instead, he wants to explain how artworks are made, received, shared, and thought about in relation to the organizations that have a big impact on their role in society and culture. He makes a clear distinction between individual artworks and art as an institution by treating the institution itself as the object of analysis.
The mounting interest in elements of everyday life has prompted numerous theorists to distance themselves from Bürger's theory and seek theoretical and methodological foundations in theories of everyday life that are more aligned with the practices of the historical avant-garde itself.
