The Avant-Garde Imperative The Visionary Quest For A New Language [Hardcover]

As the twentieth century dawned, artists and writers increasingly felt that realistic themes and realistic techniques were inadequate to address the human condition. Convinced that there was more to reality than physical appearance, they turned their gaze inward and adopted a number of unconventional approaches. Paradoxically, considering that they strove to give a more faithful impression of reality, their experiments were overwhelmingly anti-realistic. Some artists and writers, such as the cubist and the futurist poets, subverted traditional rhetorical devices. Others, like the cubist and the metaphysical artists, invented new spatio-temporal constructions. Some individuals, including the cubists and futurists, borrowed freely from other disciplines. Others, especially the dadaists and the surrealists, cultivated nonsense and illogicality. Focusing on basic principles and drawing on their personal experience, poets and painters writers began to explore subjective reality, which proved to be far more interesting than its objective counterpart. As they soon discovered, the quest for a new reality required the creation of a new language that could express that reality. Each goal was inextricably bound up with the other in a relationship that was fundamentally reciprocal. Artists and writers searched for a language that would express the complexity of the modern world while revolutionizing traditional aesthetics. Visual imagination demanded linguistic innovation and vice versa. Language and vision were entwined in a double helix like a strand of DNA. Rather than opposite sides of the same aesthetic coin, they represented complementary ways of processing experience. So important were vision and expression to the vanguard enterprise that this double quest soon became obligatory--an avant-garde imperative. Eager to attract attention, artists and writers struggled to be on the cutting edge. Keen to impress publishers, dealers, and colleagues, they dressed original idealc