James Meyer The Fate of the Avant-garde

To the age its art; to art its freedom. The famous maxim of Ludwig Hevesi over the entrance of the Vienna Secession shines forth as a classic expression of avant-garde consciousness. It makes the visitor understand that the art, which awaits him here, is new and at the height of its time. The hundred-year existence of this praiseworthy institution could be a reason to recall the historical significance of Hevesis maxim and to interrogate its contemporary implications. The original concern of the Secession to put the academically frozen historicism of the nineteenth century in its place, in order to validate the call for new aesthetic forms, which are connected to modern life put forth in the early twentieth century finds its continuation in the present-day practice of the Secession in advancing contemporary art. In the conviction that a specific style corresponds to every historical epoch, the motto of the Secession stands for a conception of art as contemporary and progressive. Just as the founding generation of the Secession struggled against the values of fin-de-siecle Viennese society, the following generations would also work on an art, which was either appropriate to their time or ahead of it. Above all the belief in absolute artistic freedom speaks from the avowal of the freedom of their art. The basis for it was a model, according to which art should be the product of a sensibility unchallenged by social norms a ver sacrum of unconscious appetites and libidinous energies, from which modern art would spring forth like a fountain of youth. The countless critics and collaborators, to whom the model of the avant-garde was exposed in the last hundred years, are all too familiar to us, such that Hevesis maxim today appears wonderfully idealistic, but at the same time outdated. Some of us look back with a certain nostalgia at the unbroken conviction, which is manifest in it at that utopian belief in artistic progress. We marvel at the attempt of the Seccessionists to change society through the formation of new living environments an undertaking which Le Courbusier, De Stijl and the Bauhaus took up and extended. However today we put in question the concept of progress as well as the idea of a linear, temporal development. In light of the rise of National Socialism and Stalinism, the avant-garde fantasy of an improvement of social conditions no longer seems only naive, but also all too careless. At the same time the concept of artistic freedom proves itself more and more indigestible. The unconscious is no longer seen as a source of free desires, but rather is considered socially encoded. The self is not a unviolated monad, but rather a subject fixed in the all-encompassing order of global capitalism. In the late nineties one can no longer indulge in the illusion that an artistic practice or expression stands outside this system. It is also clear that the historical avant-garde formed within the parameters of industrial capitalism in the early twentieth century. As the American critic Clement Greenberg put it in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, an umbilical cord of gold tied the historical avant-garde to its bourgeois patrons. The founding generation of the Secession doubtless drew on this dialectical dependence, the close intertwining of avant-garde and industrial capital, which reveals itself in the patronage of wealthy industrial magnates like Karl Wittgenstein, for its needs. However considerable structural differences exist between then and today between nineteenthcentury industrial capitalism at its zenith, which was based on a national economy as well as technical innovations like the steam engine and the railroad, on the one side, and the

multinational capitalism of the end of the twentieth century, which is supported by information technology, mass media (publicity), and mass distribution, on the other. As the economist Ernest Mandel and the culture theorist Fredric Jameson have elaborated, late capitalism characterizes that moment in which capitalism appears in its full maturity. The ideas, which Mandel and Jameson formulated in the early eighties, seem to have first come fully into effect in the global economy of today, which proliferated uncontrolled after the collapse of Communism. The cultural repercussions of the transition from industrial to late capitalism were harsh. If every time has its art, then the art of our time at least for the United States is clearly mass culture. The classic condition of dependence between the avant-garde and the bourgeois, who established social institutions in the name of the public, began to disintegrate to a certain degree, as profit became the only criterion of success. In a world in which advertising and acts effecting the public dominate the public sphere, the avant-garde no longer has any footing. It is therefore also no longer astonishing that certain artists have adopted the systems of production and division of labor from popular culture in order to challenge them on their own terrain. Thus Jeff Koons could be the key artistic figure of the eighties. He issued an update to the Warholian identification with mass culture and became an international art star. With help from publicity consultants and production assistants Koons transformed the avant-garde vocabulary of erotic self-exposure and vulgar iconography in order to become a parody of the shocking avant-garde artist, whose public is long immune to those kinds of appeals. The goal no longer consisted in criticizing or changing the dominant conditions, as the 68 generation of neo-avantgardists (ex. Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers) had tried to do, but rather to drain the avant-garde strategies of tonnement and critique through flat repetition. With this ironic simulation of avant-garde strategies however the concept avant-garde lost its historical connotation of opposition and resistance: in the late capitalist art world of the eighties such values no longer seemed to have a place. It was much better simply to join in, because as Peter Halley, a colleague of Koons, asserted, there was no ground on which to stand outside of a system against which one couldnt oppose anything anyway. The relevance of Halleys position becomes clear if one brings to mind the careers of the critical artists Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger, whose photographic works and texts contributed much to questioning the commercial orientation of the New York art world in the eighties. Much-lauded by left critics like Douglas Crimp and Benjamin Buchloh, their work opposed itself in an emphatic fashion to the expressionist production of a Julian Schnabel or a Sandro Chia. However Kruger and Levine were quickly absorbed by the system against which they campaigned. They landed in the gallery of Mary Boone, the trade center of Neoexpressionism, and appeared on the cover of Art News. Since the late eighties the clear boundary between a critical postmodern, as Crimp and Buchloh represented it, and the apparently conformist postmodern of Neoexpressionism was blurred. In the globalized art scene of today the concept of an avant-garde or critical practice remains problematic, not on account of the threat of assimilation by the market (which still never recovered from the 1989 crash), but simply on account of dominant indifference. The traditional critical impulse to criticize existing conditions is not repudiated ( la Koons), but rather simply ignored. The critics in the eighties argued for or against certain artists or made comparisons between them; these days theorists and curators hardly make critical distinctions between different practices anymore. A work, which is connected in a basic way to the social, is not valued higher than any other: anything goes. It appears even more clearly in an art world which becomes more and more ungraspable in its structure and definition. In the lost battle with the culture industry visual art has become a category amongst others in the menu of production.

Differentiations between high and low, between art and mass culture are nearly irrelevant. Madonna, Mondrian, fashion, MTV and the internet: it is all one. An art magazine like Artforum has in recent years adopted the design methods of high-circulation magazines as its own. With the destruction of artistic autonomy art criticism, too, forfeits its specificity; the place of the strictly critical essays of the sixties and seventies has been taken by those formats characteristic of criticism under the conditions of mass culture, including opinion polls, scales of popularity, question and answer columns as well as endless interviews. Indeed, other influences, many of which are welcome, have also changed the cultural landscape in the ways described above. In the academic sphere, the discipline of cultural studies inclines in its overlap of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and queer political backgrounds towards the perspective that the avant-garde is a historical and elitist model of production. The attention of cultural studies is directed therefore towards more popular and populist cultural forms. It could be that as a result of these different developments the dominance of mass culture, the blurring of high and low and the differences between media, the present academic and political trends as well as the sense that a radical distance is impossible the concept of the avant-garde, which in the sixties and early seventies could still lay claim to validity, has lost any plausibility. Even with those who still consider criticism a concern, no agreement dominates about the form presently appropriate to it. As Frazer Ward recently remarked, it has become harder and harder since the sixties to think of art as other than exhausted. In any case it is without question that since the middle of the nineties nothing has arisen which may be thought of as a movement, which could fulfill the function of the avant-garde. Let us take a look at the present situation or the fate of the avant-garde at that which we today characterize with the term avant-garde in order to test how this concept redeems itself or rather whether it still exists at all. In the attempt to answer this question, we will turn to the theories of the avant-garde of three critics who have fundamentally devoted themselves to this phenomenon: Peter Brger, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster. Through the reconstruction of this debate we will find out whether the concept still applies today and how to evaluate Wards observation that no movement is in the position to fulfill the function of the avant-garde. I would stress that a few artists still perform a critical function in so far as they produce works through which the social field is scrutinized; however they are producing in a time in which a critical standpoint counts for little. In a world in which culture always means mass culture, difficult works only mutedly come to recognition. They are neither repressed nor censored (as often befell the historical avant-garde), but simply ignored. Younger artists like Andrea Fraser, Renee Green, Mark Dion and Christian Philipp Mller are taking over the function of an avant-garde in a time which criticism does not rate particularly highly. The semantic complexity of their work, the neo-conceptual stress on the idea compared to visual solutions and the impulse to work against the reification of the art work into a commodity guarantee them a relative anonymity in the American art world. As I hope to demonstrate further below, the penetrating power lacking from these works is exactly what makes them interesting. If one follows Theodor W. Adorno, the prominent theorist of mass culture, then the negative or avant-garde praxis proves itself precisely in its failure to affirm the existing circumstances. Its critical moment lies in its discomfort with the values in effect, even if it is aware that it cannot change the world, of which it is a part, in the slightest. According to Adorno, the avant-garde work records in its form everything that it cannot resist. I will try to show that one can still meaningfully apply Adornos concept of the

avant-garde, which he formulated fifty years ago in the face of a culture industry in formation, to the critical art of today. The first as well as the best-known conception of the phenomenon of the avant-garde was formulated by Peter Brger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). In this classic representation, he describes the development of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century as the moment in which art began to question its ancestral institutions radically and to change them. If the modernists had been concerned with reflecting on the aesthetic quality of the medium, the avant-gardists like the Dada movement or the Surrealists assert aesthetic ideas in real life. For Brger the transition from modernist to avant-garde practices lies in the transition from a model of art-for-arts-sake (an autonomous art) to an art which coincides with life praxis. Burger states that this transition could first occur after art had established its autonomy a development he traces back to Kants aesthetic and the development of bourgeois ideals in the nineteenth century. These ideals found their expression in the institution of the modern museum, whose seemingly neutral display of art works underlined the autonomous status of art, in which the work was detached from everyday life. At the same time this seeming autonomy was completely integrated into the capitalist relations of exchange. Because, as Marx asserted, the elevated, autonomous art work is a commodity, which does not acknowledge its commodity status but lures in the collector with its promise of transcendence and makes him believe it can save his soul. According to Brger, Duchamps Readymades, the Dada collages and performances, the poetry of the Surrealists as well as Russian Constructivism destroyed the autonomous art work of bourgeois aesthetics and revealed its institutional frames the gallery and the museum. In their radical attempt to alter the production and reception of art in the most varied ways, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Constructivists were concerned with joining art and everyday life. Burgers analysis is extremely useful, because it provides a coherent representation of the avantgarde as an integration of art and practice, which was aligned against the aesthetic conventions of the bourgeoisie and their institutions. It is also, however, in many respects problematic; a complete volume of critical reactions appeared at the same time as Brgers publication in the mid-seventies. I will refer exclusively to Hal Fosters critique of Brger, which he formulated in his recently published collection of essays The Return of the Real. Brgers theory is analyzed here in a way, which is also relevant to my view of contemporary art. For Foster, the problem with Brgers theory lies in the disjunction between the historical avant-garde of the teens and twenties and the so-called neo-avantgarde of the fifties and sixties. As Foster shows, Brger considers the historical avant-garde as original, while the neo-avantgarde seems pure repetition to him. If Duchamp invented the Readymade, then Warhols Brillo Boxes and Soup Cans strip the Readymade of its radicality and transform it into a symbol on a painted canvas. It is the same with contemporary (neo-Dadist) performances, such as Happenings, which sought to continue the tradition of the avant-garde movements. These attempts, to quote Brger, are no longer able to achieve the protest value of the Dadaist performances, independent of the fact that they want to be more perfectly planned and executed than these. This is explained by the fact that the methods employed by the avant-gardists have lost a significant part of their shock value in the meantime. While the historical avant-garde still aimed to destroy the autonomy of art, the neo-avantgarde reflects art as again institutionalized and autonomous. For the neo-avantgarde, the means by which the avant-gardists hoped to bring about the annihilation of art had acquired the status of art work. Brger even goes so far as to claim that the neoavantgarde negates the original avant-garde intentions. The neoavant-garde institutionalizes the

avant-garde as art Neo-avantgarde art is autonomous art in the full sense of the word, and that means it negates the avant-garde intention of returning art to life praxis. Hal Foster puts Brgers negative teleology in question and does not share its assessment that the historical avant-garde acted more radically (even if unsuccessfully in the end) than the neoavantgarde, which simply parroted it. Foster correctly criticizes the evolutionary aspect of Burgers model: the construction of an original avant-garde whose radicality is supposedly lost as well as the conception of a before and after. Brger conceptualizes the historical avantgarde as an absolute origin. Its aesthetic transformations are in every respect meaningful and effective. Moreover Foster questions Brgers ontologically naive conviction, according to which as if there is autonomy here and reality over there the historical avant-garde was in the position to lead art into life. The decisive point for us is above all his critique of Brgers negative perception of the postwar avant-garde. Here Foster is essentially more confident. While Brger is only prepared to assign an authentic radicality to the historical avant-garde, Foster inverts Brgers conception and maintains that the neo-avantgarde brings into effect the potential which was only established in the historical avant-garde. Instead of taking leave of the project of the historical avant-garde, the neo-avantgarde grasps for the first time the avantgarde objective. How can that be? Foster uses psychoanalytic theory in his explanation. The relationship between the two avant-gardes appears to him analogous to Freuds representation of traumatic events: If the original avant-garde moment was a traumatic one (in which the public felt a shock), then the full significance or radicality of this intervention first becomes available belatedly if it is repeated or worked through. In other words, the neo-avantgarde first makes visible the avant-garde critique of art institutions. While Brger ascribes an authentic radicality to Duchamps Fountain, Foster believes that the critical significance of the Readymade exists only latently in this work. Duchamps gesture, marking a urinal with a false signature and displaying it on a pedestal in an exhibition, is in no way an analysis, much less a deconstruction The Readymade does not question the relationship between museum and gallery at all. For a compelling critique of art institutions we must wait, according to Foster, for the neo-avantgarde activities of Fluxus, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke and others, even if they, unlike the historical avant-garde, are no longer trying to destroy the institutions. One might ask however, whether Foster himself avoids the kind of teleological reading he criticizes so vehemently. As Charles Harrison notes in his review of The Return of the Real, Foster still assumes that a causal dependence exists between the historical and the neoavantgarde, even if he describes this relationship more as a traumatic delay and forestalling than as a rupture. Through the simple inversion of Brgers model with the thesis that the historical avant-garde made possible deconstructive testing via the neo-avantgarde Foster further assumes a dialogical relationship between the two, in which the neo-avantgarde plays the role of a quasi new-testament executor. Yet one cannot simply pass over either Fosters or Brgers construction of the interrelation of the avant-gardes. One of the advantages of the concept avant-garde is the awareness that the artists working with such a program do so with full consciousness. And while this history is being written, new influences and connections become visible. Foster thinks that the work of many contemporary artists like Renee Green, Christian Philipp Mller, and Andrea Fraser resembles the neo-avantgarde of the sixties and seventies Haacke, Broodthaers, Smithson, Bochner more than the historical avant-garde. This correspondence is visible in the pictures of Matthew Antezzo, which engage with fleeting postminimalist process art and seventies performance art, in Greens recently produced reflections on

Robert Smithsons Partially Buried Woodshed, in Mllers project for documenta X, which referred to earlier documenta installations by Beuys and De Maria, in Burrs reworking of Smithsons non-site in his American Garden, as well as in Frasers attempt to develop the concept of service as an art form, in which she used the writings of the Art Workers Coalition in the sixties as her source material. Another question raised by Fosters representation: In what way does the neo-avantgarde grasp for the first time the duty of the avant-garde? What historical premises are fulfilled in the present, which illuminate the strong critical dimension of the above named works, and: In what institutions do they have an effect? What do their effects consist of? To put it another way, Foster does not address the concrete material and the discursive conditions, which underlie contemporary art. In contrast, in Brgers negative representation the boundaries which define the late capitalist institutions of the avant-garde are at least clear. The historical avant-garde did not succeed in the end in integrating theory and praxis, and nothing else is left for the neoavantgarde to duplicate this gesture (of failure). Although a transformation of the art institution no longer seems possible (if it ever was), a limited critical element within the institution itself could become visible. There can no longer be an authentic avant-garde, yet it seems to me that a post or critical avant-garde was developed in its place. At the beginning of these remarks I raised the question as to whether the concept avant-garde still plays any role in a culture defined by mass entertainment and global capital. I am concerned with showing how the absorption of critical postmodern art by the market makes sure to remove the resistant sting from this art or how the pseudo-avantgarde gestures of a Koons have exposed the context of the gallery and the museum in his use of the mechanisms of the culture industry. In the nineties a critical standpoint has become problematic, or problematic in a new way. While we have seen how meaningful it can be to view the avant-garde as a tradition and to read different phases of critical intervention in diachronic sequence, it now seems appropriate to move to a synchronic approach and to examine the historical character of contemporary critical praxis. Now I would like to discuss the last theorist I am dealing with, Benjamin Buchloh, who proceeds in a strongly historicizing way in his research, insofar as he always works off of the paradigm of the neo-avantgarde by means of specific case studies. In his analyses he simultaneously praises and criticizes artists depending on how they react to the historical situation in which they work. He neither condemns the neo-avantgarde, like Brger, nor praises it without reservation, like Foster. While he stands up for Haacke, Buren and Broodthaers, who actively reflect on the institutional frameworks in which they work, he is critical of Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys, for example. According to Buchlohs assessment they misuse avant-garde forms like the Readymade or the monochrome for mythical purposes. The status of Warhol is ambivalent, whose icons of commerce and representations of film stars make a merciless affirmation of capitalism recognizable. To a large degree his evaluation of sixties conceptual art, which he depicts as a radical, anti-aesthetic undertaking which prophesies its own assimilation, is paradoxical. The conceptual critique of the pathos and handmade quality of abstract expressionism as well as of the voyeurism desired by the bourgeois aesthetic, have been enthroned by new masters, such as Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt, who could be recognized by their highly individual hands and therefore were easy to market. Above all Buchloh shows that the conceptualists critique of the logic of late capitalist rationalization, as articulated in the famous Index by Art and Language or in Dan Grahams Homes for America, laid the ground for the incipient instrumentalization of knowledge as a commodity in the eighties.

Conceptual art anticipated the process of cashing in artistic forms in Neoexpressionism, in the course of which its own radical element of social critique was negated. The achievements of conceptual art, writes Buchloh, mean at the same time a great and irreparable loss The triumph of conceptual art, its altered conception of the public and its alternative idea of channels of distribution including the rejection of the object character and the commodity form, will only be of a short duration and will clear the field for the spectral recurrence of the displaced paradigms of painting and sculpture. The regime of visibility, which conceptual art according to its own perspective had overthrown, soon pushed its way with new force to power again. It should be clear by this point that in his representation of the neo-avantgarde Buchloh proceeds with historical specificity, but remains ambivalent. Though his perspective on the neoavantgarde may in general be negative, it is characterized by a high degree of awareness of the complex attendant circumstances and limits, with which critical art finds itself confronted today. In this respect it resembles Brgers Post-Avantgarde, which fulfills a restricted critical function within a precisely calculated framework. One could also speak here about a dialectical negativity in terms of the Frankfurt School. Above all in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer analyzed the relationship of mass culture and the avant-garde under the conditions of the late capitalist economy and provided a description of its inescapable, contradictory logic. In a world in which the parameters of knowledge, expression and even resistance are always fixed, the project of the avant-garde, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, can only fail. However, this failure is not only negative, but rather in the case of critical art, which remains without social effect, is something positive dialectical negation. While Brger depicts the failure of the avant-garde claim to change society as really a failure, for Adorno it represents a success. In the true sense of the word, only art such as Socialist Realism, which affirms the social order, fails; art may not directly intervene in the social field, but should comment on it at a distance. Only by retreating from the world can it negate a society of which it as completely a part. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself... Adorno writes, [art] criticizes society by merely existing There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly by its own immanent law, that does not implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society, in which everything is only for something else. I stressed earlier how necessary a historical description of critical art today and of the relations between context, production and consumption, within which it operates, seems to me. Along with this it is necessary to observe that Adornos model is also historically limited. As a supporter of Schnberg and an admirer of abstraction he represents a modernist point of view, according to which the avant-garde has no role other than to investigate the medium. The possibility of a referential political art was thereby excluded. His insistence that art withdraw into a sphere of autonomy leaves no room for activist or pedagogical interventions like those practiced by younger artists now (for Adorno every instrumentalization of art was an act of violence). However his interpretation of critical art as dialectical negation an interpretation which also influenced Buchlohs view of the neo-avantgarde allows us to read some of the more interesting of these contemporary practices as successful failures. I have already mentioned the inability of artists to take over the function of an avant-garde, which became apparent in the late nineties. On the one hand they find themselves up against an all-

encompassing culture industry, and on the other they work in an art system in which the value of mass culture are prevailing more and more strongly and which reacts with increasing boredom to critical practice. Precisely its inability to intervene in such a world is for me an index of the critical substance of these works. While they reveal the parameters of the network of galleries and institutions within which they work, they dialectically show a large social whole of which they are a part. I would like now to address two projects, which can be interpreted in this fashion. The 1993 exhibition I organized for the American Fine Arts Gallery, What Happened to Institutional Critique?, was an attempt capture the avant-garde character of the work of younger artists. It was concerned with showing how contemporary critical works have taken up the agenda of the earlier institutional critique (such as in Haacke and Broodthaers) and reworked it, in order to be able to apply it to present-day politics, social institutions and an increasingly globally oriented art world. As becomes clear in the projects of Fraser, Mller and others, the approach of institutional critique has expanded in past years: in the place of the reflexive analysis of the art system, as the neo-avantgarde had performed it, it enters into a more widely applied investigation of the framing conditions. These include, amongst others, museums of natural history and zoos (Dion), nondescript public places like toilets and parks (Burr), anthropological collections (in the photos of Zoe Leonard) as well as the identities and histories, which arise from these institutions. In response to the writings of Foucault and Deleuze, to feminist and postcolonial theory, and also to contemporary forms of activism like ACT UP, these artists, who swap one social or project-related setting for the next, have prepared themselves for a nomadic practice of artistic critique. Renee Green is one of the artists, who have dealt with this theme in the greatest detail. In a series of projects created in the last few years, Green constructs historical episodes, which have travel, as well as the identities of travelers and the background of their mobility, as a subject. In Secret, a work produced for two different exhibitions - for Project Unit, curated in 1993 by Yves Aupetitallot in Firminy, and for the previously mentioned exhibition at American Fine Arts - Green deals with the mobile mode of existence of a wandering artist in the global art system. Secret is presented as an autobiographical narrative. The work consists of a series of photos, which could be stills from a film, and reflects the experiences, which Green had within the limits of Aupetitallots site-specific requirement, a housing project by Le Courbusier. Like the other participants in the exhibition, Green received a small, assigned apartment, in which she erected a tent which served as her sleeping quarters for the duration of the exhibition. This refuge within a sheltering building referred to the emergency situation of the nomadic artist who does not have a home. Green made clear that as a producer in a global art world one is constantly in transit. The conditions of an art, which refers to the context, are anything but optimal. The artists are compelled to act within the parameters of exhibition concepts, which are often unclear. Frequently they are not paid for their activity; they make a living sporadically, and then only poorly. Above all the relations between the respective residents and the intruders from the art world can prove to range from antagonistic to indifferent. In fact, Greens work registers the lack of contact between the artists in the Unit and the Algerian worker families who live there - a scenario, which Foster criticized as ethnographic. Greens representation of Secret at American Fine Arts established a vectorial or functional relationship between Firminy and New York, in

which the mobility of the artist, who travels from one context-oriented exhibition to the next, was foregrounded. Arranged in a box were copies of Emile Zolas novel Germinal, which deals with the structure of the working class in Firminy in the nineteenth century. This alluded to both the Unit exhibition and Greens own experience, because she had read Zolas portrayal of Firminy during her time on site. A piece of paper with the inscription, For James, best of luck with the group exhibition, closed the circle of the narrative and provided the connection for the New York exhibition back to the project in Firminy. For Adorno the success of a critical praxis reveals itself in its negativity: it does not allow itself to be reconciled to the existing circumstances. Greens praxis is negative insofar as it operates on a stage, which it can only reject. By working with the material bases of todays site specific art, Green brings to light the historical character of her own mobility within the mobile and increasingly global art scene. In the case of Andrea Fraser this negativity is taken to its extreme. One of Frasers recent projects, A Project in Two Phases, which she did for the Generali Foundation in Vienna, is her most radical attempt so far to develop a practice of project or service art. Frasers concept of service is a new formulation of the conceptualist post-object art of the sixties, which sought to oppose the normal production of commodities. Frasers services contacted individual clients, museums and foundations with brochures. The character of each one of these projects is necessitated by the commission and the specified by the research connected to it. For Genenrali Fraser produced an intervention on various levels, including an exhibit as well as a dossier, which was published in the form of a business report. On the basis of detailed interviews with the director and the senior staff of the Generali Foundation, with the executive board of the firm and their personnel, Frasers report analyses in detail the cultural patronage of a multinational concern with offices in Triest and Vienna, whose cultural function increases in importance as the public demand for art on the part of the social democratic administration decreases. As Fraser shows, the motto of the insurance company, We stand by our responsibility, reflects the self-conception of a business, which, like the government itself, acts in the public interest. The company is not cold and faceless, but rather concerned about consumers. Fraser can make clear, moreover, the relationship, which exists between the interest in supporting contemporary art in the first place, which guided establishment of the Generali Foundation in 1988, and the image of a corporation, which wishes to be regarded as futureoriented. As an executive in Frasers report asserts: Every person in Austria knows that EAGenerali is a large, old, wealthy and traditional company. Many people believe or used to believe that EA-Generali is, at the same time, a sluggish, petrified, inflexible company. Because of this we are engaged not with the art of the middle ages, but with the art of the present. The support for contemporary art, in contrast to more popular fields, is also a means to promote its own products and achievements. From the contemporary art it is assumed that they appeal to an elite. A news item, which Fraser reproduces in her report, lists the priorities of the company in this area. Since its establishment the foundation has assembled an extensive collection of contemporary art, which it displays in its offices as well as in the Viennese Administration Building. Alongside this, it funds a well-invested exhibition program. Fraser shows that the collection should create an innovative image within the company as well, even though most of the employees admit they do not particularly like modern art. A further beneficiary of the foundation is the Secession. The interview with an advisor at the foundation, who is also involved with the Secession, is revealing. The Secession, one is told, began, on account of a lack

of support from the city of Vienna and the state, to court Generali. It was forced to rent its premises to others. In order to be able to continue to play its historical role as an independent artists association, it finally resorted in the eighties to sponsors from private enterprise. Fraser could work out how the type of patronage for this classically avant-garde institution shifted - the sponsorship of a multinational corporation, which thereby polished its image, stepped into the place of the individual bourgeois industrialist at the turn of the century. A few years later Generali called its own foundation into being and brought avant-garde activities under its wings. With its support from critical artists, of which Fraser herself is one, Generali proves its open and innovative character. If the avant-garde was always tied to capital by an umbilical cord of gold, then the dynamic of this connection has gained another trick ever since capital has circulated worldwide under changed conditions. By analyzing the obstacles, to which contemporary aesthetic practice considers itself exposed, and reflecting on the impossibility of their own freedom, Green, Fraser, Mller and others maintain in their work a negativity, which allows no illusion of authentic radicality. They are taking on a critical - or post-avantgarde function, long after the avant-garde itself entered the annals of history.