The Long Avantgarde, Installation View, Cartel 2011

The Long Avantgarde, Installation View, Cartel 2011

The Long Avantgarde, Installation View, Cartel 2011

The Long Avantgarde

Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Freee, Artlab, Clegg and Guttman, Plastique Fantastique, Hut Project, AAS, Carrot Workers Collective, No Fixed Abode, Beagles and Ramsay, Chto Delat? and SALT.

curated by Dave Beech

30 July- 10 September 2011

Beagles and Ramsay, The Long Avantgarde, Installation View, 2011

Raymond Williams reminds us that recuperation is never final. Recuperation is a complex, conflictual process. It is never one-way, automatic, inevitable, 100% complete and irreversible. Williams is one of the few on the Left who has attended seriously to questions around the persistence of hope and critique in the most objectionable of circumstances. But resistance calls for perseverance and resourcefulness if the struggle is not going to be lost. The Left has been better at theorizing the impossibility of social and cultural transformation, and they have excelled in theorizing the ease with which the existing structures absorb all opposition, not least in questions related to artistic struggle, radical artistic practice and the politics of art. We have been told time and time again that the avant-garde is dead. The avant-garde is no longer on the outskirts of cultural power - it is taught in the universities, hangs in the museums, fills bookshelves. Some wish for the avant-garde to stop spoiling art's sacred spaces. But the cultural, ideological and aesthetic struggle is incomplete and has not been stopped. It is the persistence of the avant-garde's struggle after recuperation that we would call the 'long avant-garde'.  

Dave Beech

Chto Delat?The Long Avantgarde, Installation View, Cartel 2011