Avaunt garde, vanguard, advance guard..
[ by Charles Cameron — a delectable DoubleQuote featuring art movements and troop movements in parallel, wedge-wise ]
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Here’s a terrific DoubleQuote:
Avant-garde: advanced force tasked w/ engaging the enemy, binding him, & ensuring liberty of action for the main army pic.twitter.com/p9aJIpHwdz
— Antoine Bousquet (@AJBousquet) June 22, 2015
It’s so neat because it lies at the intersection of the military and the artistic, a diagrammatic / graphic use of metaphor.
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The DoubleQuote in question was followed in mmy Twitter stream with this exchange:
Notable that the metaphor of the avant-garde/vanguard force gets taken up both by modern artist and modern revolutionary organizations.
— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) June 22, 2015
@stcolumbia interestingly enough, though, the notion of an advance guard has all but disappeared from Western military writings
— Adam Elkus (@Aelkus) June 22, 2015
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The two images in the DoubleQuote are, to the best of my knowledge, the works respectively of:
Marinetti, Sintesi futurista della guerra:
and
Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge:>/li>
From the mouth of Wiki:
Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge is a 1919 lithographic Soviet propaganda poster by artist Lazar Markovich Lissitzky better known as El Lissitzky, “the man through whose exertions the new Russian ideas became generally understood in Western Europe”. In the poster, the intrusive red wedge symbolises the bolsheviks, who are penetrating and defeating their opponents, the White movement, during the Russian Civil War. It is an example of Constructivism.
June 22nd, 2015 at 7:23 pm
“interestingly enough, though, the notion of an advance guard has all but disappeared from Western military writings”
And with the cultural balkanization in the age of the internets, you don’t hear too much about any artistic avant-garde either, at least in terms of coalescing into a specific movement. When there’s no main guard anymore, there can’t be an advanced one.
June 22nd, 2015 at 7:53 pm
Hi Grurray:
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Do you think the arts have gone, are going, or will go through an equivalent to the RMA, becoming networked, irregular, aymmetric, 4th gen, decentralized or whatever?
June 22nd, 2015 at 9:12 pm
Actually, I think Postmodernism corresponded to 4th gen war, and the end result was deconstruction to the simplest, smallest parts.
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The predicament we now find ourselves in these days is more akin to complexity theorists explaining everything by claiming all systems follow the same rules and everything is in a constant state of emergence. In other words, everything is fundamentally the same because everything is constantly changing. The sameness is then merely measured on a continuum or spectrum, with position assigned depending on affinity level with the overall distribution.
I’ve seem ‘Metamodernism’ used to describe this, but that seems more like a condition rather then a movement.