Avant-Garde

Loneliness and the oppression of freedom, expressed through the denial of an individual’s space – solitary figure in a constricting environment.

A critique on crass commercialism and the breakdown of the previous order of society.

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“…spaces or voids are conventionally coded as feminine.”

Use the idea of space, enclosed, or an empty void from the feminine perspective… become that void, and relate it to whatever fills it.

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The avant-garde has, with few exceptions (e.g. Futurism) been left wing. Why? Because the power and authority in the West has been on the right; even the word ‘right’ gives it a legitimacy which ‘left’, or sinister does not. The sinister is something to be shunned and excluded because of its frightening otherness. The left poses a direct “sinister” threat to the right. Right equals conventionalism, conformity, what is just, what is ‘right’. The semantics of language pitched in favour of authoritarianism.

Anna C. Chave: - “...being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures.”

Jean Lyotard: - “Avant-garde research is functionally…or ontologically…located outside the system, and by definition its function is to deconstruct everything that belongs to order, to show that all this ‘order’ conceals something else, that it represses.”