The 1970s: from vanguard to post vanguard

Abstract

This paper describes the 1970s as the period of the latest artistic vanguard and the first manifestations of post vanguard art. Referring to culture critics Peter Burger, Fredric Jameson and Andreas Huyssen, it specifies changes in the artistic imagery in this decade. It shows that for Burger, although the political intentions of the vanguard have not survived, this decade’s artistic legacy cannot be ignored, for these manifestations would have placed a plurality of means, techniques and procedures at the disposal of post vanguard artists. It also highlights the characterization of the postmodern art by Jameson as a combination of absurd signs gratuitously collected from the past, thus paradoxically resulting in historical amnesia. Finally, the paper shows that Huyssen considers this gaze turning, from the future to the past, as progressive, that is, as the historical consciousness that allowed to recover the continuum in time after the successive ruptures with the artistic tradition decreed by the vanguards. It is in art as singular accomplishments that several artists, working from the end of the 1970s on the ruins of modernism - stressing aesthetics and politics in structured artistic forms - meet both the needs of politics and aesthetics. The 1970s showed, as the article concludes, that politics has been produced since the end of the vanguards by the artist’s non-programmatic aesthetics.