Walter L. Adamson. Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xii + 435 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25270-7.

Reviewed by Anke Finger (Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of Connecticut)
Published on H-German (May, 2008)

The Avant-Gardes as Part of the System

At a time when the historical avant-gardes are bound to meet with increasing interest for years to come--the centennial of F. T. Marinetti's notorious and groundbreaking "Futurist Manifesto" is February 2009--Walter L. Adamson's book marks a welcome addition to discussions that highlight the intricate relationship between modernism and avant-garde movements. His is one of several (Martin Puchner's work on manifestos, Poetry of the Revolution [2006], for example) recently published and forthcoming, presumably fresh, takes on avant-garde groups such as the Italian Futurists, Dada, and Bauhaus, to name just a few of the European artists' movements, some of which have traditionally been labeled "avant-garde." And, while recent (and not so recent) anthologies and monographs on the avant-gardes have attempted to move away from Peter Bürger's overwhelmingly influential Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), their contents have suggested less a substantial criticism or revision of Bürger's political premises but rather a closer look at themes such as material history, media theory, and the interrelationship between the arts.

As a scholar of intellectual history (and also as a critic of Bürger), Adamson approaches the arguably thorny subject of the avant-gardes in the twentieth century from a sociohistorical perspective. Intrigued by the postmodern critique of modernism's "blinding elitism," but skeptical of postmodernism's wholesale dismissal of both the avant-gardes as failed and high modernism as aloof, he refuses to acknowledge their legacy as "the last stand of a Eurocentric, male-dominated, elitist culture that has stood in the doorway of advancing cultural democracy and that deserves to be forgotten" (p. x). In this book, in contrast, he seeks to defend the modernists by trying to "understand the experience of avant-garde modernism" and to find out if "we have something to gain from it and, if so, what?" (p. x). This sizeable, somewhat value-laden question is applied to specific themes, including fragmentation, commodification, democratization of culture, "high art" versus entertainment, the modern arts in the marketplace, and "the potential for good and evil of a public sphere transformed by mass politics and nationalism" (p. 3). And although Adamson subscribes to what he calls a biographical approach, the protagonists in each chapter are chosen because they represent certain positions within the network of competing and intertwined modernisms, positions that speak to being entrenched in a new culture of commodity as an artist, the main focus of Adamson's study. Given these concerns, his close analysis of the avant-gardes' resistance to commodity culture, as the title suggests, addresses the interrelationship between art and artists, mass entertainment, and aesthetic judgment often compromised by financial interests.

The book is divided into two parts with four chapters each. Part 1, "Early Avant-garde Modernism," is devoted to art and commodity culture at the end of the nineteenth century, Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Wassily Kandinsky. Part 2 addresses modern design movements, Italian Futurism and Fascism, André Breton, and Herbert Read. In chapter 1, and based on writings by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Emile Zola, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, Adamson locates the beginnings of commodity culture in the nineteenth century, when artists and their work entered the marketplace as individualized entities, forced to advertise and vend their products alongside competing merchandise and outside of state institutions. According to Adamson, a new "religion of art" resulted from this "emotional cauldron" (p. 74). His list of so-called "artist-intellectuals" includes John Ruskin, William Morris, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose notions of art and aesthetics claim resistance to the demise of the artist as an inspired genius and who promote a rejuvenation of the imagination as distinct from the dubious regulatory effect of the marketplace. Marinetti, the subject of the second chapter, understood this marketplace and its commodity culture exceedingly well and sought to shock it with "gestures of craziness" (p. 80). Apart from attaching his technology-infused avant-gardism to clever advertising (arguably an eighth art of modernism), he also sought to "raise kitsch to art" (p. 84) and subscribed to a level of radical performativity not encountered again until the 1960s. Apollinaire (chapter 3), unlike Marinetti, did not do away as quickly with the "passatists," that is, those who value history and tradition--he decided to use both classical and popular elements for his artistic endeavors. In that, he excelled, according to Adamson, as a "non-political man," ably engaging in "tricksterism" in order to engage the public and a considerable audience (p. 121). This view seems a bit overwrought, in light of Adamson's connection of Apollinaire's antisemitic remarks about Heinrich Heine with the view that the quality of avant-garde art depends on its resistance to impending internationalization. The last chapter in part 1 is dedicated to Kandinsky and concentrates on his search for the "spiritual in art," on the Blaue Reiter, and his work for the Bauhaus. Adamson concludes that, unlike, Marinetti or Apollinaire, Kandinsky had little interest in engaging with commodity culture, preferring, rather, the more exclusive aesthetics of art "with a capital A" (In Adamson's words, "Kandinsky believed that art with a capital A and an expanded audience for it were perfectly compatible ends, and he was therefore unwilling to incorporate entertainment values to achieve his ends" [p. 177]).

Part 2 continues with examining modernist design after WWI, based on Alois Riegl's concepts of Kunstwollen and Kunstindustrien and, in particular, by presenting the aesthetics of Walter Gropius, Theo van Doesburg, and Le Corbusier. At issue is the more or less compromising collaboration with industry, frequently at the expense of artistic autonomy and control and a search for an Einheitskunstwerk or Gesamtkunstwerk, the latter concept already in play in the early parts of Adamson's book. Chapter 6 reexamines the Futurists, in their postwar commitment to fascism, and the possibilities--such as they were--for "an Art of State" (p. 241), by calling particular attention to Marinetti, the "Novecento," and Mino Maccari's "Il Selvaggio." Analyses of Breton's surrealism and Read's "critical modernism" conclude the study, and each chapter concentrates on their motivations to move beyond commodity culture. Breton sought to pursue an "art alive to expanding our cognitive frontiers" (p. 266), a distinctly political endeavor, according to Adamson; for Read, an art critic, his work consisted of constructing a "political and education philosophy" that would reestablish "modern civilization 'from under'" (p. 308). These were lofty goals, and Adamson guides us through the intricacies of both Breton's and Read's ideas without trying to avoid their contradictions (Read's various positions certainly did clash over the course of his career, politically as well as aesthetically), presenting us with two more "positions" eager to engage with and battle the commodification of art.

What some readers may consider curious about this book might be liberating to others: Should the Bauhaus and Herbert Read actually be categorized under the label "avant-garde"? Is not "commodity culture" part and parcel of the Dadaist aesthetic and political enterprise? Why then are the Dadists not part of this investigation? In his introduction, Adamson defines the term "avant-garde" as "the set of practices that artists, individually or in groups, develop to challenge the 'bourgeois' institutionalization of art; gain attention of ... the audience for art ...; establish a greater presence for art within the public sphere," and more (p. 17). His is a long list of things "avant-garde" and one might be unconvinced by this remarkably inclusive reading of divergent artists, and even art critics, designated as such. It comes dangerously close to making the subject matter murkier, and indeed more all-encompassing, than it already is. Nonetheless, Adamson addresses a subject crucial for (re)examining the avant-gardes: their engagement with and/or resistance to commodity culture. By politicizing these moments of contact, he facilitates a necessary cross-disciplinary and transnational debate about the "purity" of the avant-gardes' aesthetic and political purpose. Moreover, by isolating and analyzing certain positions, Adamson allows us to consider the individual avant-gardist (whether or not we accept his label for each representative in this study) who faced his or her own struggle with democratization in modernist commodity culture, whether the artist emerged from that same bourgeois, market-focused background most avant-gardes decided enthusiastically to confront.

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Citation: Anke Finger. Review of Adamson, Walter L., Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14550

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