Avant-gardes and Postmodernism: The Reception of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde in American Art Criticism

Abstract

Although seldom discussed in France, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde has had a major influence in the United States since it was translated into English in 1984, mainly through the writings of art critics linked to the journal October (Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens). For these authors, the discussion of Bürger’s theses was a way, first, of redefining their own postmodernist position at a time when it had been weakened by the emergence of a postmodernism that was considered reactionary and, second, of revising their conception of the history of modern art by counterposing Clement Greenberg’s formalist, depoliticized modernism with a re-evaluation of the critical or utopian dimension of the historical avant-gardes. However, the context in which the original German version of Bürger’s work had been published a decade earlier was completely different, marked by a crisis in literary studies and a renewal of Marxist aesthetics. This article attempts to retrace the conditions of this intellectual transfer, from the obliteration of the book’s original context to its repositioning in the American postmodernist debate. It also offers a key to reconstructing the theoretical and strategic issues that confronted postmodernist art criticism from the 1970s to the 1990s. Finally, it shows how these debates contributed to a lasting redefinition of the major categories of twentieth-century art historiography.