Endings and Continuities: Avant-Garde and Meaning-Making
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v48.i1.01Keywords:
contemporary art, avant-garde, cultural narrative, meaning-making, Rothko, Mark, Goldsmith, Kenneth, UbuWeb, Godard, Jean-LucAbstract
This article thematizes avant-garde’s meaning-making and temporal disruption, emphasizing their role in reconfiguring cultural narratives. Case studies include UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith’s radical digital archive, democratizing access to avant-garde works, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a cinematic intervention destabilizing meaning through fragmented narratives. The analysis incorporates Mark Rothko’s artistic formula, which underscores the tragic, sensual, and ephemeral dimensions of meaning-making, and Antonin Artaud’s assertion of madness as a legitimate worldview challenging societal norms. By engaging with the materiality of media, from text and images to virtual and AI realities, the paper examines how avant-garde practices end and continue, fostering new modalities of perception and creation. Ultimately, it argues for archives and art as active agents of transformation.
References
Artaud, Antonin. “Lettre aux médecins-chefs des asiles de fous.” Lettres 1937–1943, edited by Simone Malausséna, Gallimard, 2015, pp. 31–32.
Brown, Wendy. Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber. Harvard University Press, 2023.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press, 2016.
Godard, Jean-Luc, director. Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle. Argos Films / Anouchka Films / Les Films du Carrosse / Parc Film, 1967.
Godard, Jean-Luc. 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle: découpage integral. Éditions du Seuil, 1971.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb. Columbia University Press, 2020.
Goldsmith, Kenneth, et al., editors. UbuWeb. 1996, https://www.ubu.com/.
Kristeva, Julia. “Qu’est-ce qu’une époque théorique?” Avec philosophie, hosted by Géraldine Muhlmann, France Culture, 3 May 2024, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/avec-philosophie/qu-est-ce-qu-une-epoque-theorique-1205000.
Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Éditions de Minuit, 1979.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Saint-Simon, Henri de. Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles. Paris, Galerie de Bossange Père, 1825.
