The Avant Garde

After hearing Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music at a piano concert in 1909, Wassily Kandinsky produced several paintings and the play The Yellow Sound, all of which, in turn, sparked experiments with abstraction in both painting and theater. Half a century later, Allan Kaprow called for blurring the boundaries between art and life, and between the arts, basing his arguments on Happenings, a new form of visual work that would inspire a new understanding of live art in the following decades. It is not surprising that both Kandinsky and Kaprow were painters. They were just two among a great number of visual artists who revolutionized avant-garde theater. Conventional periodization of the avant-garde establishes a sharp division between the historical avant-garde, from the turn of the twentieth century until World War II, and the neo-avant-garde, from the late 1940s onward. In this iteration of the class on the avant-garde, we will look beyond the discontinuities between the two avant-gardes to focus on continuities, returns, and the ways in which artists and movements built on one another's work. To do so, we will focus on one prominent aspect of the avant-gardes: their interdisciplinarity and, more specifically, the contributions of painters and visual artists to avant-garde theater, which transformed both live art and painting. While the contributions of avant-garde painters to stage design were transformative, they are not the main focus of this class. Instead, we will consider painters and visual artists who chose the "live" as their medium and, in the process, expanded the very idea of what theater and painting could be. From the Italian Futurists and the Soviet Constructivists to action painting in the United States and Japan, performance art, and the activities of a group of painters and sculptors in Dakar, Senegal, more than a century of experimentation transformed the concept of live and time-based art. These artists rejected the two-dimensionality of painting and the immobility of the art object. Throughout this exploration, we will focus primarily on primary sources and works by the artists themselves.