Avant Garde Quotes

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. ~ Clement Greenberg

No matter how much people in fashion think we're so cool and avant-garde, for most fashion people, creativity is quite taboo. ~ Riccardo Tisci

Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. ~ Timothy Keller

A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me. ~ Ramsay Burt

The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics

While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf 's writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on the other, this would be to simplify things too far.
Many critics were attempting to make sense of and connect her feminist politics with her modernist practices. Such investigations coincided with the explosion of theory in literary studies, and once again the work of Virginia
Woolf was central to the framing of many of the major theoretical developments in literary critical engagements with feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In the context of the rise of 'high theory'
and the questioning of old-school Marxist, materialist, humanist and historicist literary theories, Woolf studies wrestled with the locating of her radical feminist politics in the avant-garde qualities of the text itself, and its endlessly transgressive play of signifiers, with the Woolfian inscription of radically deconstructed models of the self and of sexuality and jouissance. ~ Jane Goldman

It is surely the following kinds of question that would need to be posed:

What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: 'Is it a science'? Which speaking, discoursing subjects -which subjects of experience and knowledge - d you then want to 'diminish' when you say: 'I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist'? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse. ~ Michel Foucault

The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde. ~ Simon Reynolds

Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything. ~ Jeff Tweedy

I'm really attracted to music that sort of toes that line between pop and avant-garde, that pushes the envelope of what you can get in a pop song. ~ Patrick Stump

The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage. ~ David Mitchell

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. ~ Seamus Heaney

Cleverness in itself is useless. It's like a peacock's feathers – an extravagant display used by those who crave attention.
The mind's worth is revealed when clever solves real problems. ~ Sola Kosoko

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

When I came to New York in 1949, there was already an entire fresh avant-garde film movement blooming in New York and California. It was a very, very exciting period! ~ Jonas Mekas

In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned. ~ Ravi Shankar

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.' ~ Jonas Mekas

Orna Davidzon : the avant-garde queen of private art collection ... ~ Imran Shaikh

I think I give far more space and play to avant-garde writing than any other contemporary textbook author. I want students to be able to decide for themselves which aesthetics are closest to their own. Still, while I try not to be a nostalgist myself, I suppose I am drawn to those poignant moments in our lives, rendered clearly and artfully. ~ David Starkey

The transgressive quality of love is the transgressive quality of art ... From the Pre-Raphaelites till now, the avant-garde has always been characterized by radical views of love and sex. ~ Rod Dubey

I have nothing but a great head to offer.
Is that enough? ~ Sola Kosoko

The play takes place on a ramp, hanging from a ramp, below a ramp, and to the sides of a ramp. ~ Rosalyn Drexler

[ ... ] a familiar art historical narrative [ ... ] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [ ... ] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. ~ Grant H. Kester

When you talk about avant-garde cuisine, the surprise factor is really important. For example, I love looking at blogs and the photos, but I'm not that keen on other people taking photos of my dishes. ~ Ferran Adria

Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower. ~ Ryan Kavanaugh

I am neither in the past, nor avant-garde. My style follows life, ~ Coco Chanel

In avant garde drama ... primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best? ~ C. D. Innes

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is
excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. ~ Ray Bradbury

It is clear, for example, that many Americans did not like the idea of avant-garde art, especially in relation to women's fashion. Many people were particularly indignant about what seemed to them the deliberate obliteration of sexual attractiveness, which they identified with the tightwaisted dress and the hourglass figure. ~ Valerie Steele

Everything changes but the avant-garde. ~ Paul Valery

You are not censors but sensors, not aesthetes but kinaesthetes. You are sensationalists. ~ Kodwo Eshun

I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level. ~ Steven Soderbergh

I expect the hip-hop audience to be avant garde. I want them to be where I'm at or beyond where I'm at. ~ Nas

As a child, my clothes were always tailored to be oversized, because I quickly outgrew them and then needed bigger ones. As an adult, I still don't cut my coat according to size ~ Sola Kosoko

Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved. ~ Martin Filler

As a teenager, I wanted to be sophisticated and avant-garde, and I was really judgmental. But when you're a teenager, you're fearless because you don't know the repercussions to anything. ~ Gia Coppola

Everyone knew what the night would bring lots of D and A plenty of T and A ~ Saira Viola

Wild Times
Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920's and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were "Fellow Travelers" and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party's existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, "Frida," who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico. ~ Hank Bracker

It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design. ~ Michael Foley

We will have to create an avant-garde ... We could have a Union for the enlarged Europe, and a Federation for the avant-garde. ~ Jacques Delors

Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny's great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn't rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic. ~ Ferran Adria

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory. ~ Harmony Korine

I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring. ~ Bjarke Ingels

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence
putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply
if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block. ~ Edward Albee

Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

I didn't have any set idea of what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to tell stories that meant something to me, but I never said I was going to be the weird, avant-garde guy. ~ Richard Linklater

We should all be involved in the avant-garde as long as we look toward the past. ~ Jose Andres

Avant-garde, adj.
This was after Alisa' show, the reverse-blackface rendition of Gone With the Wind, including songs from the Empire Records soundtrack and an interval of nineteenth-century German poetry, recited with a lisp.
"What does avant-garde mean, anyway?" I asked.
"I believe it translates as favor to your friends," you replied. ~ David Levithan

There is nothing more profitable than the extreme avant garde. ~ Silvia Hartmann

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it. ~ Brian Eno

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape. ~ Gyorgy Ligeti

There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself
the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen. ~ Jonny Greenwood

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her. ~ Yayoi Kusama

Avant garde has become a ubiquitous label, eclectically applied to any type of art that is anti-traditional in form. At its simplest, the term is sometimes taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward. ~ C. D. Innes

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18. ~ Roy Harper

Yes, I am Aboriginal but I have the right to be avant-garde like any white artist. ~ Tracey Moffatt

In almost every book I've written, there is a reference to a movie - legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen. ~ Denise Duhamel

I'm not commercial, I'm not for Special K cereal and I'm not a Wheaties boy; I'm a little bit more avant-garde, a little bit more out there. ~ Johnny Weir

It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde. ~ Phyllis McGinley

I first of all have a problem with the term 'avant-garde'. Because it is a military term, it means the guard that runs before the rest of the soldiers. And if I want to see myself presented in military terms, I don't want to be part of that. I want to be one of the deserters. I want to be in the woods, maybe. ~ Blixa Bargeld

Teachers who are accountable to principals who are, in turn, accountable to school communities are likely to be more professionally 'grounded' and less susceptible to avant garde fashions in curriculum and pedagogy. School ~ Tony Abbott

I once told a very serious writer/poet I knew about how obsessed I was with various women's lives. I think I was talking about Vivien Leigh at the time, as I was working on a book dealing with former screen legends, that I have since abandoned. Or perhaps the mad wives. I don't know. This poet was very serious, very pure. Derrida in the AM. Pronouncing his name correctly. That sort of thing. She fixed me with some look - this was maybe 7 years ago - and said - more than a bit dismissingly - oh, you're very interested with lives. Or maybe she said: Oh, you're very interested in these women's lives. And I said, yes, I guess I am. I remember feeling guilty - like this wasn't a writerly thing to be interested in, the subject of others' lives. That this was gossip. That being unliterary, somehow. This devouringness. I have since realized that most of the works I'm interested in, are about absolute obsession with other people's lives, often real-people's lives, and these works become unserious biographies, avant-garde acts of gossip, while still working within the structure of the novel. ~ Kate Zambreno

Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it. ~ Anton Chekhov

I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop. ~ Autre Ne Veut

In a city, it's very hard to do a restaurant, an avant-garde-cuisine restaurant, where each year you need to change the whole menu. ~ Ferran Adria

Life is like Avant Garde. It will make you uncomfortable, and leave the room. But always remember to come back and watch the artist bow. ~ Valerie Cruz

Experiment - exercising to see the result. We planned Europa not as an experiment in this sense but as a work of art. Yet The Eye and the Ear was done as a consciously designed experiment. Not every avant-garde dealt with experiments and not every experiment equalled avant-garde. ~ Stefan Themerson

More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth. ~ Rosalind E. Krauss

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely. ~ David Foster Wallace

There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground. ~ Michael Eisner

The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde. ~ Ed Benguiat

I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean? ~ Eugene Ionesco

It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics - how, if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes. ~ Richard Prince

More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre. ~ Patrice Pavis

I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness. ~ Bat For Lashes

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules ... Mathematicians are more like classical composers. ~ Brian Greene

TV taste is an aftertaste. Whatever gets on the tube is always a foregone conclusion, a fait accompli. That is, any new ideas or social changes have already been fought for in the real world of the streets, or in the bedroom or even the law courts long before they reach the screen. By the time you see it on prime time, it's usually all over and done with, whatever it was. Television by definition is not avant garde. It is often reactionary and always sentimental. ~ Jennifer Stone

On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work. ~ C. D. Innes

I've said it since the day he made the sacrifice to hit the campaign trail: Voters crave the anti-status-quo politician. Everything about Donald Trump's campaign, it's avant-garde. He is crushing it in the polls. ~ Sarah Palin

The Avant Gardener feeds flowers to his manure and charges prices he believes are not to be sniffed at ~ Dean Cavanagh

It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts... and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody's apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant garde theatre and Viet Nam. ~ David Lodge

When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful. ~ Twyla Tharp

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the "avant-garde" - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored. ~ Mircea Eliade

It's very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things. ~ Andy Partridge

The empires collapsed to rubble. Skyscrapers dragged down to the ground. It was chaos. I could smell the end. It smells of tequila, cannabis, and strawberry shampoo. It's so cold so cold so cold. But I'm not shivering from cold. My own teeth are frigid icepicks. Carved diamond hard, I think I've cut my lip. Maybe it was someone else's teeth that nipped me. ~ Moonshine Noire

Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary. ~ Archie Shepp

Apparently the Ministerium Tenebrae had decided to conquer the region using the unusual twin-pronged attack of zombies and avant-garde artwork. ~ Jonathan L. Howard

Once you got Hollywood doing these kinds of movies and having all the, how you say, the tools to do it, and also to keep on finding new ways of doing it becomes - Hollywood can be avant garde on what concerns action. ~ Violante Placido

The avant-garde makes more sense to me. ~ John Cale

Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are deconstructed and post-individual. ~ Patrice Pavis

Others can't stand to revise; instead they decide they're avant-garde, so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now ... well, garde.) ~ Mary Karr

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new. ~ Robert Morgan

My dad was this sort of avant-garde guy who did all kinds of weird things. He was a true original and anybody who met him never forgot him. ~ Paul Thomas Anderson

It's easy to make something avant garde. To do something in the traditional way is much more brave in the sense that you're - your technique is so much more exposed because there's not all this flashy stuff to distract the viewer. ~ Cary Fukunaga

Someone who knew Barbara Loden well told me: 'She said it is easy to be avant-garde but it is really difficult to tell a simple story well. ~ Nathalie Léger

There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it. ~ J. C. Chandor

There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art? ~ W. H. Auden

To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture's uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents. ~ Martin Jay

Pain is our salvation 'cos when it's dark enough, a star will reveal itself. ~ Sola Kosoko