Why Brilo Box?
---Towards a general theory of avant garde.


Let us begin this discussion with a simple question: what have we learnt from DADA? Is it just that DADA is the formal enterprise of the art critics who have robed the ‘work of art’ of its context, the traditional domain of aesthetics and turned it into semantics of nothingness? So, let us put forward a certain hypothesis. It is that, the coming of the modern in art (renaissance) is marked by the omnipresence of an aesthetic of philosophy. The renaissance painting (‘modern’) is the break where an aesthetic of philosophy (capitalism: Francastel), broadly generalized as ‘occularcentrism’ (Martin Jay) took hold of the formal processes. The quarto cento perspective framed man as a subject within the walls of the cosmos. The universe metamorphosed into an inverted pyramid.

Vermeer is the highpoint of such a modern who had used science (camera obscura) to facilitate the rise of the bourgeois world view-which when grossly generalized would take up the nomenclature of philosophy. Self reflexivity in art (modernist), Velasquez ‘s Las Meninas, Holbien’s Ambassador and Goddard’s Passion, as offhand examples , are moments of an oblique intrusion of a radical philosophy (modernism)within the frame of the aesthetic. Holbien’s Ambassador with its anthropomorphic skull is the moment when the ‘subject’ is led from the domain of aesthetics to that of philosophy.

The myriad history of modern art movement can be read as the gradual process where by philosophy tightens its grip on the aesthetics. Lines turn jagged. Colours splurge on the canvas. Eyes become expressive. The painting starts to scream at the horror of its aesthetic poverty. Grosz.!

A striking parallel of such a trajectory of change can be traced in ‘writings’ from Rousseau to Barthes.

The line that we have drawn is not continuous; there are moments of disjuncture, rupture and fissures. This transition is not unidirectional nor is it teleological in nature. Rather, there are moments in time when an art form of a distant epoch arises out of the placid depth of mundane avant gardism. The avant garde that had become the norm of the day loses its futuristic quotient, turns sterile(MTV). Where as the art from yesteryears in all its nostalgic hue is avant garde(The Good German:Steven Soderbergh,2006). What I have in mind is the reception of classical Hollywood Cinema (films like: Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon and other cult classics – Umberto Eco) in the age of home theaters, DVDs and pay channels. Why does such commercial enterprise find favour even among the intellectuals? As Jameson has indicated: because it can offer an illusory sense of time travel to retrieve our lost selves.

Why Casablanca a cult classic ? Back to the Future.

Therefore we can reconsider the commonplace definition of avant garde – tomorrow’s art today (Peter Burger) to ‘alifi’ (Borges) an illusory point where art from all epochs, past /future and beyond traverse each other and some (art form like ‘’bell bottoms and boot cut trouser) return owing to its ‘datedness’.

The word modern (root: modernus) dates back to the second century A.D. The classic (Hellenic) in art is always modern. Likewise avant garde is just a disjuncture in the continuous flow of narrative (occurrence of serialized events)- a disruption of the linear continuity in the domain of ideas, both in past participle and future continuous.








Notes: A collage.



Philosophy of aesthetics (DADA, Surrealism, cubism, pop art, neo dada and etc)




“ He (Rene Magritte) disliked being called an artist, preferring to be considered a thinker who communicated by means of paint. While many painters whose work holds philosophical implications are not self consciously involved with ‘ideas’ “. James Harkness ,

This Is Not A Pipe: Michel Foucault. University of California Press, 1983.





2. “ A day will come when , by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series ,the image itself ,along with the name it bears , will lose its identity .Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell .” --- Michel Foucault , This Is Not A Pipe.