Avant Garde Quotes

“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“The world is still new . . . it seems old to us, but only seems because our lives are so short . . . our human race has been around for such a brief amount of time that the universe hasn't had the chance to detect us yet. One blink is all it needs to miss our dance through actuality.”
― Carlton Mellick III, Satan Burger

“A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me.”
― Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle and Sexuality

“[he]. . . hated God . . . actually, he just hated Christians . . . He never met God. Why should he care about somebody he never met?”
― Carlton Mellick III, Satan Burger

“The play takes place on a ramp, hanging from a ramp, below a ramp, and to the sides of a ramp.”
― Rosalyn Drexler, The Line of Least Existence and Other Plays

“O masses, o masses! When will you assume the image and likeness of your avant-garde?”
― Andrei Platonov

“The word "avant-garde," for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“Welcome to Planet Earth, find your existential avant-garde.”
― Talismanist Giebra, Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.

“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”
― Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context

“Everyone knew what the night would bring lots of D and A plenty of T and A”
― Saira Viola

“Surreal reality. Real surreality.
Imagination Opium. Reality Morphium.”
― Talismanist Giebra, Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.

“When one hears about acts of extraordinary bravery in combat, it is usually a sign that the battle has not been going terribly well. For when wars unfold according to plan and one's own side is winning, acts of exceptional individual heroism are rarely called for. Bravery is required mostly by the desperate side.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Everything changes but the avant-garde”
― Paul Valéry

“The empires collapsed to rubble. Skyscrapers dragged down to the ground. It was chaos. I could smell the end. It smells of tequila, cannabis, and strawberry shampoo. It's so cold so cold so cold. But I'm not shivering from cold. My own teeth are frigid icepicks. Carved diamond hard, I think I've cut my lip. Maybe it was someone else's teeth that nipped me.”
― Moonshine Noire

“2. i got 14 fevers/ i got 5 believers...dressed up like men
tell your mama not to worry/

2. (a) tell your mama & your pappa i'm trying to keep from dying too

3. tell your mamma & your pappa that there's nothing wrong with my jugular vein
tell your mama i love her & tell your sister Alice the same

4. when you sleep on windows & you stay up all night swallowing rocks

5. i should've sent her to Hong Kong instead of leaving”
― Bob Dylan, The Lyrics, 1961-2012

“Threading experience through imaginative material, acting out fictitious parts, or choosing a stale-mate for compromise. Under this fabrication a secret army gathers defeating those who stalk the scaffolding of comparisons. Yet they still hunt with their pale perplexities and resentful airs.”
― Ann Quin, Berg

“Nothing stays avant-garde forever; you have to keep moving.”
― Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

“Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.”
― Tristan Tzara

“FitFam do not live forever. They live to the fullest.”
― Sola Kosoko

“Why do you paint, Akram?” I asked. “What—”

“Close your eyes, Sebastian,” he said, stopping me. “Just for a minute, close them and tell me what you see.”

I did as he asked and answered, “Nothing, just black.”

He tilted my head a bit to the west. “Open them now and find the blessing of vision. This abundance, the explosion, the mixture of colors, the movement, life passing by… See the sun setting? What colors can you find in the sea? Surely there are blue and gray, but don’t you also see that darker gray, light green, even black? Look at the hues of the sun drowning in the sea, melting in oranges, reds, purples. Look at those trees over there. Look at the waves, at me, at your hands, the eyes of your friends. Now, must you still ask me why I paint?” Akram replied. He then left me and walked to the tip of the yacht to enjoy the sunset and the breeze.

“Artists,” I mumbled to myself.”
― Ahmad Ardalan, The Art Collector of Le Marais

“While architecture’s sense of disciplinary inferiority ultimately derives from the antique pyramid of expression that placed language and poetry at its lofty apex and building down amid the mud and toil of the ground, architecture’s Sisyphean effort to achieve elevation only became more futile with the development of modern capitalism on the one hand […] and avant-garde strategies of opposition on the other.”
― Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture

“The avant-garde is a connotation, every act here is a connotative value. The whole series of avant-garde movements do not signify, and yet their concepts are reconnotation.”
― Vladan Kuzmanovic

“The avant-garde is attitude, principle, set of activities, set of performances, articulatory forms, positive objects and processes.”
― Vladan Kuzmanovic

“She's tragically scarred with an avant-garde, spastic heart - yet radically guarded (anti-romantic garden) - tactless, though perhaps smarter; and so her soul carries an ego too heavy to be swept off her feet: Modernity's narcissist.”
― Criss Jami

“আভাঁগার্দ আজ সাধারণত বুদ্ধিজীবী, লেখক এবং শিল্পীদের গোষ্ঠীকে বোঝায়, যার মধ্যে ভাস্কর আর স্থপতিও রয়েছেন, যাঁরা বর্তমান সাংস্কৃতিক মূল্যবোধকে চ্যালেঞ্জ করে শৈল্পিক পদ্ধতির নবায়নের চিন্তাভাবনা করেন এবং পরীক্ষা করেন। আভাঁগার্দ কাজগুলো, বিশেষ করে যদি তারা সামাজিক সমস্যাগুলোকে সমাধান করতে চায়, প্রায়শই এমন সমাজ-কর্তাদের মুখোমুখি হয় যারা সমাধানগুলো আত্মীকরণ করতে বড়ো বেশি সময় নষ্ট করে । সমস্যা হলো যে গতকালের প্রতিষ্ঠানবিরোধিরা মূলধারায় পরিণত হয়, সরকারে যোগ দেয় বা ক্ষমতাবান মিডিয়ার মুখপত্র হয়ে ওঠে । ফলে আবার নতুন প্রজন্মের বিরোধিদের উদ্ভবের পরিবেশ তৈরি করে। প্রথম বিশ্বযুদ্ধের প্রতিক্রিয়ায় ডাডা আন্দোলন গড়ে ওঠে সেইসব শিল্পীদের নিয়ে, যাঁরা পুঁজিবাদী সমাজের যুক্তি, কারণ বা সৌন্দর্যের ধারণা মানতেন না, বরং তাঁদের কাজের মাধ্যমে প্রকাশ করতেন আপাত-অর্থহীন, উদ্ভট, অযৌক্তিক এবং বুর্জোয়া-বিরোধী প্রতিবাদী বক্তব্য ।”
― মলয় রায়চৌধুরী

“Living on the ocean, your nerves are numb. Everything has lost its meaning. If you don’t have a way to stay alert, it can be really dangerous.”
― Can Xue 残雪, Frontier

“There was a lone poppy-head in the field
that was saving its thoughts
on a pile in the wood
and when it had shaken its fear of motion
it borrowed a sugar bowl at a small train station
and dispatched this letter

I am always so alone
I miss your fine tentacles
My skin is no longer smoked
Now I belong to that order of birds
who let others hatch their eggs
Come
I send sweetest regards”
― Jindřich Heisler

“Carswell's novels, Open the Door! (1920) and The Camomile (1922) sit both inside and outside the school of urban fiction. While the spaces of Glasgow thrum in their pages and are - as is frequent in other urban fiction - characterised by their contrast with alternative locales, interest in the city is also aesthetic. Glasgow here is also a city of artistic sensibilities and aspirations, of the avant-garde”
― Glenda Norquay, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

“The most dangerous thing you can do is prove that alternatives actually work.”
― Humulis Memoriam