The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s

Abstract

Imagine Walter Benjamin in Berlin, the city of his childhood, walking through the international avant-garde exhibit Tendenzen der zwanziger Jahre, on display in 1977 in the new Nationalgalerie built by Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s. Imagine Walter Benjamin as a flaneur in the city of boulevards and arcades he so admirably described, happening upon the Centre Georges Pompidou and its multi-media show Paris-Berlin 1900-1933, which was a major cultural event in 1978. Or imagine the theorist of media and image reproduction in 1981 in front of a television set watching Robert Hughes' BBC-produced eight-part series on avant-garde art The Shock of the New.' Would this major critic and aesthetician of the avant-garde have rejoiced in its success manifest even in the architecture of the museums housing the exhibits or would shadows of melancholy have clouded his eyes? Would he, perhaps, have been shocked by The Shock of the New or would he have felt called upon to revise the theory of post-auratic art? Or would he simply have argued that the administered culture of late capitalism had finally succeeded in imposing the phony spell of commodity fetishism even on that art which more than any other had challenged the values and traditions of bourgeois culture? Maybe after another penetrating gaze at that architectural monument to wholesale technological progress in the heart of Paris, Benjamin would have quoted himself: In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.2 Thus might he acknowledge not only that the avant-garde embodiment

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.