+++
title = "Avant-garde"
glassblowers = ["tomislavmedak.md"]
has_shards = ["avantgardeemerging.md", "newfromarchive.md", "modernityscontradiction.md"]
+++

# Capitalist modernization

The early industrial capitalism unleashed an enormous social transformation through the formalization and rationalization of processes, coordination and homogenization of the everyday and permanent innovation. Thus emerged the modern bureaucracy, the mass society and the technological revolutions. Progress was made the telos of social development. The productive forces and the geographic expansion made the world and the humanity into a new horizon of both charitable and profitable endeavors, emancipatory and imperial. The world became a project (Cf. ![](bib:63accc11-890d-4a51-8984-2b65731e7f0f)).

# Abolishing the old, creating the new

The avant-garde around the turn of the 20th century integrated and critically inflected these transformations. In the spirit of the October Revolution, its revolutionary subjectivity approached the social reality as eminently transformable. And yet, recurrent concern of artists was with the practical challenges and innovations of accelerated modernization: how to control, coordinate and socially integrate the immense expansionary forces of early industrialization. This was invitation to insert one's own radical visions into life and create new forms of standardization and rationality that would bring the society out of its pre-industrial backwardness. Central to the avant-garde was abolishing the old and creating the new while overcoming the separation of the art and the everyday. 

# Avant-garde and the archive

Unleashing the imaginary and constructive forces in a reality that has become rational, collective and universal that was avant-garde's utopian promise. That was its radical innovation. Yet paradoxically, it is only once there is the new that the old can be formalized and totalized. As Boris Groys has insisted in his book ![On the New (2014)](bib:bbec33e7-3d8d-46de-88fd-029531f79763) has insisted, the new can be only established once it stands in a relation to the archive and the museum. This tendency was probably nowhere more in evidence than, as Sven Spieker documents in his book on ![Art from Bureaucracy (2008)](bib:839b5b7d-7c2d-4ab3-96e2-02c40b88e98d), in the obsession of Soviet constructivists and suprematists with the archival ordering of the flood of information that the emergent bureaucratic administration and industrial management were creating on an unprecedented scale.