© Martin Lang 2017
Re·bus Issue 8 Spring 2017 24
Counter Cultural Production: A Militant Reconfiguration of Peter
Bürgers Neo-Avant-Garde
Martin Lang
Abstract
This article re-examines Peter Bürger’s negative assessment of the neo-avant-garde as
apolitical, co-opted and toothless. It argues that his conception can be overturned through an
analysis of different sources – looking beyond the usual examples of individual artists to
instead focus on the role of more politically committed collectives. It declares that, while the
collectives analysed in this text do indeed appropriate and develop goals and tactics of the
‘historical avant-garde’ (hence meriting the appellation ‘neo-avant-garde’), they cannot be
accused of being co-opted or politically uncommitted due to the ferocity of their critique of,
and attack on, art and political institutions.
Introduction
Firstly, the reader should be aware that my understanding of the avant-garde has nothing to do
with how Clement Greenberg used the term.
1
I am aligning myself with Peter Bürger’s position
that the ‘historical avant-garde’ was, primarily, Dada and Surrealism, but also the Russian
avant-gardes after the October revolution and Futurism.
2
These are movements that Greenberg
saw as peripheral to the avant-garde. Greenberg did, however, share some of Bürger’s concerns
about the avant-garde’s institutionalisation, or ‘academisation’ as he would put it.
I borrow the term ‘neo-avant-garde’ from Bürger, but with some trepidation. In Theorie der
Avantgarde (1974 – translated into English as Theory of the Avant-Garde 1984) he describes