What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?

Abstract

that bolsters conservative tendencies in the present and a return to a lost model of art made in order to displace customary ways of working? Or, in the register of history, how to tell the difference between a revisionist account written in support of the cultural status quo and a genealogical account that seeks to challenge it? In reality these returns are more complicated, even more compulsive-especially now at the end of the century as revolutions at its beginning appear to be undone, and as formations thought to be long dead stir again with uncanny life. In postwar art the problem of repetition is primarily the problem of the neo-avant-garde, a loose grouping of North American and Western European artists of the 1950s and '60s who reprised and revised such avant-garde devices of the 1910s and '20s as collage and assemblage, the readymade and the grid, monochrome painting and constructed sculpture.1 No rule governs the return of these devices: no one instance is strictly contrived, concerted, or compulsive. Here I want to focus on recapitulations that aspire to criticality, and to do so initially through a remark of Michel Foucault made in early 1969, i.e., in the heyday of such returns.

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