This collaborative research initiative seeks to explore how we can decolonize the post-1945 history and idea of the avant-garde.
Both a key concept and a significant artistic formation in modern art, the avant-garde has often been characterized as a typically Western phenomenon. If the early 20th-century ‘historic’ avant-garde (expressionism, cubism, Dada, surrealism, constructivism, among others) operated mainly from European cities such as Paris and Berlin, the post-1945 ‘neo-avant-garde’ (abstract expressionism, pop art, fluxus, cobra, the situationist international, etc.) further moved into New York and Northern America more generally. Often seen as the advance guard of modernism in the West and as synonymous with a white, imperialist, if not outright racist ‘primitivizing’ artistic undertaking that apparently held that only the West is equipped with a cultural advance guard, the . . . → En lire plus
