1.06.

2015 BOMB Magazine Bruce Altshuler's The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century by Saul Ostrow

BOMB

Art : Editors Choice

Bruce Altshuler's The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th
Century
by Saul Ostrow

Atsuko Tanaka in her electric dress, at the Second Gutai Exhibition, Ohara
Kaikam, Tokyo, October 1956. Courtesy Sinichiro osaki, Hyogo Prefectural
Museum of Modern Art, Kobe and Harry N. Abrams.
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1.06.2015 BOMB Magazine Bruce Altshuler's The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century by Saul Ostrow

Bruce Altshulers The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century
is less a history of the avant-garde than a genealogy of some of its most
significant manifestations and the countless effects these have had on the
content, form, and meaning of modern art. Though anecdotal in form, the
books message is that the conceptual schema dominating our perception of
modernism is not the whole story. The past represented is interesting not only
for its historical value, but also for the alternative models and traditions.

Touching on what are conventionally considered the major movements of the

20th century, Altshuler discards the standard linear, exclusionary, and
progressive trajectory of most such accounts. The movements, or events,
are not homogeneous in either nature or origin, nor do they subscribe to a
pattern of negation or reaction. The characteristic they do share is a
commitment to keeping art contemporary and dynamic. Altshuler explicitly
rejects the viewpropagated in the mid-1970s and early 80sthat
modernism was driven by some volitionsome abstract or historically
determined ideal such as conceptualization of visual purity.

The record of the critical and public reception to avant-garde challenges of

Western conventions fills out the details of a tradition that has controversially
and permanently altered art. Perhaps the most significant aspect is Altshulers
revised account of the 40s and 50s, when the transfer of cultural capital from
Europe to the United States was in full swing; he also gives attention to the
development of modern art in Japan in the 50s, as well as the Nouveau
Realiste movement in France, which are often dealt with as if they were
marginal. By tracing the congruence and synchronicities that during the period
formed an international economy of ideas, he presents a diverse social and
cultural context rather than a hegemonic one.

He closes with the exhibitions, January 5-31, 1959, 44 East 52nd Street, NYC
and When Attitude Becomes Form in 1969 implying that the avant-gardes end
and perhaps its triumph corresponds with the moment it became truly
international in scope.

Saul Ostrow

The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century was published last
year by the University of California Press.

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