THIS essay seeks to explore meaning of in work of two Chilean artists, novelist Roberto Bolano and filmmaker Raul Ruiz. Political exiles working in different mediums, their works share in reflexive exploration of relationship between art and praxis of life. I seek to illustrate avant-garde ethic at heart of their works by showing that both artists problematize concept of individual creation through disruptions and repetitions. Related to this, line between producer (artist) and recipient (reader or spectator) blurred when recipient invited to actively contribute to production of meaning. I argue that artists' performance of avant-garde gestures and their direct references to avant-garde histories open a space for reflexivity, an instance of recuperation. In this space artwork not a product but a process. Art becomes a life-process. In this way their work seeks to recuperate and continue avant-garde's project: to question autonomous status of art in society. My understanding of avant-garde draws from Peter Burger's theorization of term and from Paul Mann's arguments about importance of discursive intervention on avant-garde. Burger draws attention to historical basis of avant-garde and to its relationship with institutions of art. He discusses how historical avant-gardes--the French and German literary and visual avant-garde of 1920s--launched an attack on status of art in bourgeois society (49). According to Burger, bourgeois art is objectification of self-understanding of bourgeois class. Production and reception of self-understanding as articulated in art are no longer tied to praxis of (47). This means that bourgeois art mirrors a bourgeois view of self as split from praxis of life. The effect of this dissociation gives false perception that work of art totally independent of society. The avant-gardists undertook an assault against such art precisely because they saw it as an institution set off from praxis of life (86, 83). Burger identifies three areas that generally characterize autonomous art--purpose, production, and reception--and explains how avant-garde sought to challenge them (50). Instead of disjoining work from praxis of life, avant-gardist purpose sublation of art into praxis of life. (1) In terms of production, whereas individual artist (the creative genius) produces bourgeois art, avant-garde act radical negation of category of individual creation (51). For example, ready-made: Duchamp's signature on a mass-produced object mocks all claims to individual creativity (52). In terms of reception, avant-garde seeks to erase antithesis between producer and recipient (53). Burger contends that, ultimately, historical avant-garde failed in its attempt to do away with distance between art and life while culture industry has successfully promoted a false fusion between art and life (50). Nevertheless, I want to recuperate Burger's categories to talk about what I see as a current avant-garde ethic. I do not mean to undermine established historical basis of avant-garde, but instead argue for a historically informed continuation of avant-garde gestures that aim to engage relationship between art and praxis of life. Shortly, I will look at categories of production and reception in works of Bolano and Ruiz to show specific manifestations of avant-gardist gestures. While Mann would agree with Burger that historical avant-gardes ultimately became institutionalized through movement's commodification, he also argues that importance of avant-garde not so much its oppositional stance but its potential for discursive intervention: the death of avant-garde one means by which this economy [of discourse] endures. …