The Text and the Myth of the Avant-Garde

Abstract

This essay defends the assumption that the avant-garde text most importantly served to perpetuate the avant-garde’s own mythic basis in culture. This author, in analyzing a sample of little magazines, identifies the paradigms consulted by the artists and through which they felt they could, based on these paradigm’s cultural pervasiveness, most effectively secure a viable social standing and reception as art. Rarely involved in contributing to substantial aspects of the cultural perspectives they appropriated (politics, science, etc.), they were nevertheless of heuristic value to the avant-garde which translated them into expanded and challenging artistic spaces. Arguing that they were intentionally offered primarily to arts and humanities audiences, the paper maintains that traditional interpretations of them as efficacious crossovers between the arts and other dimensions of culture confuses the myth they mean to perpetuate in text. Their purposes should, consequently, be reexamined.