Searching for the contemporary avant-garde is a mug’s game. By the time the mainstream sees fit to confer “cutting-edge” status, the art in question is no longer that. And the consequent celebrity such labels engender kills off any remaining hope for the artist (read on for the cautionary tales of Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac).

These days, though, as technology democratizes art through both ease of creation and access to audience, should it not be easier to encounter the avant-garde? Without having to don a beret, move to bohemian Greenwich Village and start popping bennies? Yes. And no. One must be wary: the very technological platforms that incubate experimental art communities also serve to bring those communities into the mainstream marketplace at dizzying speeds — the gap between cutting edge and commercial has never been so narrow. Many would even contend the avant-garde is dead in New York City, killed by armies of condos and a rapacious, commoditizing hipster monoculture. And though these fears are well founded, the avant-garde abides, even near death. It may take forms unrecognizable to no-wave nostalgists and old-time Alphabet citizens, but it is there, creating and recreating itself all over the city. You just need to look for it.

So, with what criteria do we approach our search for the avant-garde?


A) The reinvention of form and aesthetic? [Kind of has a quaint, musty, high-Modern whiff to it, doesn’t it? No thanks.]

B) The Poundian search for the new? [Well, it was cool the first time, but “make it new” has gone through multiple cycles, leading us, at various moments, to hollow experiments in shock for shock’s sake, and the febrile worship of outsider art. So, no.]

C) The ideological and functional resistance to mainstream commercial accessibility? [While certainly admirable as a political act, this approach can’t really sustain great art over time, especially if it’s the central idea of the art itself. Sorry, nope.]

D) Isolating whichever neighborhood happens to have the highest artist per square foot of un-zoned loft space and diving into “new bohemia/hipsterville/etc.”? [This strategy might lead one to more interesting parties, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to more interesting art. Awesome! But no.]

Wait? Did we just eliminate all possible criteria? Shit.*

Alright, we know “avant-garde” is a lot easier to throw around as a historical designation, after the passage of time has sorted the fools from the geniuses, but we still think it’s fun to talk about while drunk. To that end, we’ve assembled the following barroom guide to the Avant-Garde in NYC, a look at the legendary scenes in the city and their current counterparts, a highly subjective catalogue designed to start arguments and help you sound smart at dinner parties. Take a read, head to the bar, order a drink, and discuss among yourselves.

*[If we had to come up with objective criteria for artists who might be adequate to our idea of the avant-garde, we’d go with honesty, fearlessness, intelligence and a constitutional aversion to convention. Also, good hair.]

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THEN
Origin Story
Like Athena from Zeus, Jonas Mekas (experimental filmmaker; Village Voice critic and champion of the underground; founder of Film Culture magazine, the Film Makers Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives) burst fully formed from the skull of Film As a Subversive Art author and New York Film Festival patriarch Amos Vogel (see page 46 for more on Mr. Vogel).

Holy Works
The Essential Cinema collection, curated by Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, Ken Kelman (and sometimes Stan Brakhage) in the late 60s and early 70s as the permanent collection of the then-newly established Anthology Film Archives, screens at Anthology throughout the course of every calendar year (alphabetically by director), and represents the best of experimental and visionary narrative film made up to 1973.

Apostles
Mekas’s film diaries highlight the fleeting nature of human experience; his de facto autobiography is an episodic five-hour home movie called As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Brakhage often worked directly on celluloid, making cinema a personal canvas for abstract expression. Pasticheur Ken Jacobs is still active, following the 2004 completion of his opus Star Spangled to Death. And Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures continues to provoke. Maya Deren was also a key figure in the 40s and 50s, though she lived in Los Angeles a lot (boo).

NOW
Origin Story
If underground film is characterized by its shoestring production, by people from outside the commercial apparatus, with the aid of cheaply available technology, and in the service of a personal or otherwise esoteric vision, then, well…

Holy Works
YouTube.com. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Apostles
Lonelygirl15, the “Boom Goes the Dynamite” guy, Soulja Boy fans worldwide. For that matter, YouTube also hosts more vintage experimental shorts than Anthology could screen in a year (though the signal-to-noise ratio is preferable at UbuWeb [ubuweb.com], your one-stop-shop for impossible-to-find avant-garde works in all mediums). And Jonas Mekas made a short digital video every single day of 2007. You can download his now-completed “365 Series” in 320 x 240 MP4 files from jonasmekas.com.

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THEN
Foundation Myth
In April 1951, in a three-week coffee- and benzedrine-fueled marathon of prolixity, Jack Kerouac typed out his generation-changing novel, On the Road, on one long cellotaped roll of paper… It’s true, the whole novel sprung forth fully formed from the man’s forehead! Not exactly — the outline for the book had been developed over a couple of years in Kerouac’s journals, and although he subscribed to an improvisational approach akin to jazz bebop, he did, in fact, rewrite significant aspects of the text.

Apostles
In 1944, William Burroughs moved from St. Louis to New York and shacked up with Columbia student Jack Kerouac. They did a lot of drugs. Then they collaborated on a book, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, for which they alternated chapters, while doing drugs. The third member of the Founding Trinity of Beatnik New York was hairy gay mystical poet Allen Ginsberg, who also did drugs.

Holy Works
It is hard now to look at On the Road, Junkie (Burroughs) and Howl (Ginsberg), as anything more than parody, so appropriated they have become as representative texts of the Maynard G. Krebs generation. It’s kind of too bad, as we’ve lost the sense of just how incredibly radical they were at the time. Oh well, such is the fate of the avant-garde…

NOW
Origin Story
It is difficult, in the long shadow of the MFA Literary Industrial Complex, to conceive of an avant garde in the contemporary written arts. Though there exist blocs of original talent (the colicky erudition of the N+1 lads, the wonderwhimsical McSweeney’s machine), their media-savvy brand sophistication exists squarely within the conventional exigencies of the market. Credit for trying, though, to Ed Park’s literary compendium, the New York Ghost, the email-delivered “Paper You Print Out at Work”; Soft Skull Press, who only recently got bought out by a larger commercial entity; radical, political presses like Autonomedia, and bookstores like Bluestockings for giving them an arena; and to the Flux Factory “Novel” project a few years back, which constructed three habitats for three writers who each wrote a novel over the course of a month — all while fully on display. 

Apostles
It would seem these days there are more impresario/facilitators (per above, Dave Eggers, Keith Gessen) than there are writers. However, one of the holdovers from the transgressive East Village scene of the early 80s is Dennis Cooper, whose gritty, intense gaypunk travelogues stand in stark contrast to the soft-focus nostalgia of so much of today’s MFA-generated material. But then he moved to Paris. Ironically, Cooper was one of JT Leroy’s early champions; Leroy, of course, turned out to be a fabulation of kooky Laura Albert, in what might turn out to be the most avant-garde literary gesture of the decade.

Bible(s)
The Wonder Years; books by the French.


THEN
Foundation Myth
Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman planned and began the American theatrical avant-garde together, one day in 1967, over coffee and cigarettes.

Apostles
Allan Kaprow’s early works, particularly 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which helped fend off the last bits of narrative; Judith Malina (now back on the scene at the age of 80+) and Julian Beck’s Living Theater, which exploded the idea of what rebellion looked like and what a theatrical company was; Ellen Stewart and her amazing (and continuing) commitment to getting work on its feet; the Performance Group, which later gave birth to the Wooster Group; the Open Theatre; Mabou Mines; Meredith Monk’s early performance company, The House; Jack Smith, for his influence on everybody; Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman for their formal and persistent innovations, though they really came late in the heyday.

Bible(s)
Everything Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud and John Cage ever wrote. And the Village Voice, because back then it really was the paper it’s famous for being.

NOW
Foundation Myth
Multi-disciplinary and multi-media performance is a 21st century innovation.

Holy Works
A Journal of Plays, because this is the only place you can read some of the truly experimental work that you didn’t get a chance to see.

Apostles
Mark Russell’s artistic direction of P.S. 122 until 2004 and his subsequent creation of the Under the Radar Festival, because he’s given so many of the ones making important work right now a launch pad; HERE Arts Center’s young artistic director, Kristin Marting, and her bevy of resident artists, because the shows are quite often genuinely provocative; just about every show the Foundry Theatre has been helping to put together lately; Nature Theater of Oklahoma, particularly their last couple of shows, No Dice and Poetics: a ballet brut; Basil Twist — ok, he’s been on the scene for a few years now, but his stuff is influencing everybody and it’s still remarkable; Lisa D’Amour, though not a resident New Yorker, her productions here keep seeming to excite and inspire the few who get the chance to see them; Jay Scheib, even though sometimes his machinery and imagery are glitzier than the pieces themselves; and Alice Tuan, particularly AJAX (por nobody)

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THEN
Foundation Myth
“Saint Lenny… died for our sins.” –Eric Bogosian. And we hear that once when he was locked up on an obscenity charge, he promised the thief in the adjoining cell a guest spot on South Park.

Holy Works
“Shit.” “Cocksucker.” “Tits.” “Motherfucker.”

Apostles
Of course, Lenny Bruce’s arrests and trials forced out into the open the dominant theme of his stand-up, namely, what society says you can and can’t talk about, and the words you are and aren’t allowed to use. On the print side of things Harvey Kurtzman’s post-MAD project, the short-lived Help! brought Terry Gilliam and John Cleese together, and was the first place to publish one of R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat underground comix. And though he wasn’t really intentionally funny, Norman Mailer’s mayoral campaigns, while not strictly avant-garde, were large-scale performance art and a subversion of “political theater.” And they were pretty fucking funny.

NOW
Origin Story
“YouTube is an innovative democratizing platform that allows people AROUND THE WORLD to access their inner funny man and globalize… laughter!” Well, that’s great, but it’s 15 years too late. If you want the origin for a generation of viral video comics, look to Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Home Videos. The avant-garde ain’t always where you think it is.

Holy Works
We begin with such hypnotically comic dada masterworks as “Numa Numa” (a chubby man lipsynching an Eastern European pop song) and “It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time” (an animated banana rapping the eponymous phrase), thoroughly amateur videos with inexplicable charm, and move onto thoroughly professional work like the SNL video “Lazy Sunday,” an early adapter to the viral model. Now, of course, all hell has broken loose.

Apostles
You are the apostle. Each and every one of you, with your shaky, hand-held digital video camera, your utter lack of shame and your unwavering need for attention — you are the Chosen Ones. Now go forth and do something hilarious. See what we did there? Like that stupid mirrored cover for Time’s Person of the Year? Yeah, sorry, here are some real apostles: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, along with Chelsea Peretti as seen on SuperDeluxe; Will Ferrell on Funny or Die.

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THEN
Foundation Myth
Some say John Cage’s 1951 piece, 4:33, three movements of total silence, defined by the interstitial opening and closing of the keyboard lid, is actually based on absolute zero, which is -273 degrees, which is how many seconds are in 4:33 minutes. Dude, shit’s fucked up.

Bible(s)
The putative ringleader of experimental New York music was the aforementioned Cage, who studied under infamous 12-tone grump Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal landmark, Pierrot Lunaire (1911) was a groundbreaking work for  avant-garde composers everywhere. Like a lot of artists in post-WWII New York, Cage and gang (see below) were heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy, getting heavily into Zen Buddhist texts, the Tao Te Ching, the writings of Sri Ramakrishna and the I Ching, which created the structural basis for Cage’s aleatory composition for piano, Music of Changes.

Apostles
Well, if Cage is your Jebus, than some others who preached the experimental gospel were pianist David Tudor (who toured with Cage in Europe and debuted 4:33 in Woodstock, NY); composer Earle Brown, a contemporary of Cage’s who explored improvisational composition; composer Morton Feldman, who met Cage at a performance of Webern in 1950; and a group of students that included Christian Wolff, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht and Alice Denham.

NOW
Origin Story
As has been discussed for other genres in this section, it is difficult to isolate an avant-garde in the time you are living, as it’s essentially a post-facto designation. For music, though, it makes sense to look first at venues, those all-important spaces created for art first and commerce second (in many cases, commerce comes third, forth or last). Places like John Zorn’s free-jazz emporium, The Stone, Gowanus’ repurposed silo of art, the Issue Project Room, Williamsburg gallery/rock basement Glasslands, crowd-pleasing, always-free, world-inflected Zebulon (Beesnest on Wednesdays), downtown noiselounge Roulette, and Bushwick’s “how is this kind of thing still possible in NYC?” loft space, the Market Hotel. The music you hear any given night at any of those places might be wildly divergent, but if you’re looking for something new, they’re a good place to start. (Hurry, see it live before it gets digitized and commodified!)

Apostles
These days, as traditional barriers to a wider audience are dismantled, the concomitant speed with which original music is transmuted into bitrate commodity is ever more alarming — the internet may be a democratizing force, but it’s a late-capitalist, free-market strain of democracy. That doesn’t mean people still don’t do fucked up, interesting things with their instruments. Some of our favs over the last decade include: Dan Bejar, Boris, Josephine Foster, Kyp Malone, MF Doom, Joanna Newsom, Shellac, Devendra Banhart, Autechre... the list goes on an on, as do the arguments.

Bible(s)
The complete catalogue of Wesley Willis. Duh.

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THEN
Foundation Myth
Most of you know this one: Jackson Pollock, successful yet frustrated modern artist, moves out to a barn on Long Island in 1945 where he discovers his “drip” technique and starts painting his canvases as they lie face-up on the floor. Four years later, Life magazine invokes the wrath of the gods by asking if Pollock’s “the greatest living American painter.” Much like Kerouac was for the Beats, Pollock becomes the sacrificial figure for the American Abstract-Expressionist movement, dying in 1955 in a fiery ball of alcoholic self-destruction and auto parts.

Apostles
All the dudes who hung around the Cedar Tavern with Pollock: broody color-field man Mark Rothko, slightly less broody color-field man Barnett Newman, black-and-white enamellist Willem De Kooning and Pollock’s talented wife, Lee Krasner. Adolph Gottlieb actually wrote a manifesto for the Abstract Expressionist movement in 1943, with the following line: “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.” Ironically the Ab-Ex genre is frequently enjoyed by corporate culture because its meaning can be removed enough for people to simply ignore it. Does that count as nothing?

Bible(s)
A spilled can of paint. A brush, with drips.


NOW
Origin story
These days, labeling artists or artwork as avant-garde runs the risk of discrediting those who choose to utter the words. Though it doesn’t have to, the term often implies a fixed practice, which is the kiss of death to anyone working in today’s fractured field. What’s more, artists are expected to be critical and self aware of their success, which pretty much stymies many people’s interest in owning the term “avant-garde.”

Apostles
Well, see above… Though a case could be made for Terry Richardson — along with VICE and Ryan McGinley — introducing a transgressive aesthetic to the mainstream. Is the American Apparel ad on the back of this magazine the end product (literally) of a hedonistic counterculture expressed (or created) through snapshots? Was it ever avant-garde? Discuss.

Holy Works/Apocrypha
In theory, the avant-garde challenges the terms under which we evaluate art. It’s doubtful that one group of artists does this more than any other, though it can be observed that the interest in originality, even among those who work more traditionally, is all but gone. Says net artist and VVORK curator Oliver Laric, to Lumen Eclipse “…I’ve kind of come to the point right now where I don’t see any necessity in producing images myself — everything that I would need exists, it’s just about finding it.” (For more on new media and the problem of originality in contemporary art, see Art Fag City on page 63.)

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THEN
Foundation Myth
Late in his life, Andy Warhol entered in his diaries: “I realized today that if I had gotten back all the security deposits I ever forfeited and saved them, I could convert that money to dollar coins and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck. Liza came by with some coke.”

Holy Works
A friend of ours went to many of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable parties and kept inviting us to come with, but we were always “oh, too tired” or “too much work” or “going to see the Godard movie “ or “my parents are in town.” Whoops!

Apostles
Andy Warhol: Pop artist, filmmaker, scenester. Died 1987 (medical malpractice resulting in heart attackfollowing routine gall bladder surgery). Billy Name (Billy Linich): photographer. Lives in birthplace, Poughkeepsie, New York. Ondine (Robert Olivo): actor, speed freak, met Warhol at an orgy. Died 1989 (liver disease). Edie Sedgwick: model, actress, poor little rich girl, muse. Died 1971 (barbiturate overdose). Paul America (Paul Johnson): hustler. Died 1982 (struck by car). Nico (Christa Päffgen): singer, chanteuse, heroin addict. Died 1988 (bicycle accident). Viva (Janet Susan Mary Hoffman): actress, porn actress, experimental filmmaker, memoirist. Lives in California. Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne): artist. Lives in New York. Joe Dallesandro: actor, hustler, pin-up. Lives in Los Angeles. Candy Darling (James Lawrence Slattery): pre-op transsexual, actress. Died 1974 (leukemia). Taylor Mead: poet, filmmaker. Lives in New York, reads at the Bowery Poetry Club every Friday at 6:30pm.

NOW
Origin Story
While legendary locales of the 60s and 70s — The Factory, Studio 54 — served as geographical focal points for their respective scenes, a lot of the cutting edge of millennial New York nightlife has been a very moveable feast, with itinerant events like Motherfucker, the MisShapes and Shindig! defining the scene since 2000. But there is one NYC nightlife institution of the last 15 years that has managed to survive its own legendary underground status: Rubulad. Started in 1994 in a raw South Williamsburg space as an independent party/venue, Rubulad has consistently been one of the freest spaces in the city, fostering creativity, individuality and authentic art without yielding to the temptations of mainstream accessibility or commodification. Also, plenty of absinthe.

Apostles/Apostates
Larry Tee (“started” electroclash, sort of); Michael T, Justine D, Johnny T and Georgie Seville (Motherfucker, respectively); Geo, Leigh Lezark and Greg.K (MisShapes, respectively); Brion Issacs and Franco V (Shindig!); also, photogs Nikola T. and Merlin Bronques, fabs about town Sophia Lamar and Richie Rich, promoter Andy Shaw, and DJ Jess.

Holy Works
As is often the case with anything underground, the moment it breaks through to widespread notoriety is both wonderful and sad… To wit, when Madonna showed up to DJ at MisShapes in October, 2005, it was both very cool and very un-. Go figure.