著者

外山 紀久子

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美學 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.45, no.4, pp.45-55, 1995-03-31

---

This is an attempt to decipher some representative discourses on the "failure of the avant-garde" and presume a latent structure of denial/repression/exclusion under the origin of modern art, a structure as the other side of self-formation of art with a newly gained myth of autonomy. In order to establish itself as a sublimated domain of high culture, art might have had to throw away everything that could not comfortably fit in with its self-definiton. Since moderinized "arts" fell into a generic category "Art, " this Art seems to have been increasingly marginalized and impoverished, and at the same time given more privileges (if only symbolic ones) in compensation. While the dualism between "high culture" and "low culture" is no longer grounded in reality as firmly as it was once, a renewed device, modernism, was invented to secure imaginary boundaries and to continue the process of autonomization ; a more refined and reinforced device of repression, which also is to include the rebellious avant-garde as a momentary release of the repressed. The interrelatedness of modernism and the avant-garde, then, will appear as a conflict between an aesthetics for control and an aesthetics for anarchy.