Tainan Natinal University in he Arts
May 2008 , the 6th
The artistical and literary avant-gardes of the beginning of the last century in Europe refused the transcendent value given to art by prior movements like romanticism and symbolism. As André Breton stated : “ it would be an error to consider art as an end in itself”.
They called into question the aesthetical boundaries of art, as well as the traditional relationships between art and culture. They also questioned the long-time established hierarchies between fine arts and practical arts n Europe.
These avant-gardes refuted the autonomy of art and its evaluation according to aesthetic criteria only.
I
If one considers the utopia or the conceptual framework common to these movements, they may be summarized according to a double hypothesis :
the first hypothesis, I would define it as the socialization of literature and the arts,
and the second one, the hypothesis of the literalization of society.
The socialization of literature is the idea that everyone should write poetry (poetry should be written by everyone). According to Breton, for example, the automatic message had “beyond any aesthetic consideration, a value of a document satisfactory in itself”.
The literalization of society means that poetry is everywhere (can be found not only in poetry, but beyond its domain). The idea that poetry is everywhere leads to a generalization of literature outside the institution of literature. Marinetti expresses this tendency when saying : “the universe will be our vocabulary”; Maiakovski : “the streets are our paintbrushes”. The end result overturns the aesthetic ends which were the priorities of the symbolists, in France as well as in Russia. Breton expresses it in the first Surrealist Manifesto : “ I claim that the world would end not in a beautiful book but in a beautiful advertisement for Hell or for Heaven”.
In this literalization of society, the new Metropolis (die Grosstadt in Germany), plays en eminent role. The exaltation of the urban space as a symbol of modernity allows for a redistribution of the relationships between prose and poetry, art and popular culture. The central role accorded to the city by the avant-gardes is to be understood in constrast both to nature (as the traditional model for beauty in European aesthetics since 18th-century) and to the role allocated to the museum or to the book.
Whatever form it took, the avant-garde wanted to capture in the city the image of present-day life and the ephemeral nature of beauty : the polychromatic visual and sonorous dimensions of the street with its posters, its billboards and storefronts as much as the simultaneity of its perspectives.
In his “poèmes-conversations” (poems based on overheard conversations), for example in Lundi rue christine, the city allows Apollinaire the collage which integrated the newspaper in poetry. Breton wrote that “it was even permissible to call POEM what one obtains by an assemblage - one which is as gratuitous as possible - of titles and fragments of titles cut out of newspapers” (Complete Works, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, vol. I, p. 341).
Rodtchenko, in his desire to convey the activity of the city, discovered his technique of the two focal points which characterized his photographic images in the 1920’s. As he explained : “In photography, there are two focal points, man’s point of view as he stands on the earth looking around him. It is what I call photography from the belly buton, camera in the stomach. The modern city with its tall buildngs, industry, shop windows on two or three floors, trams, cars, multicoloured advertising (…) all this has brought about a change in the psyche of visual perception (…) the most interesting aspects of contemporaneity is looking from below up and from above down (Rodtchenko, Photography, 1924-1954, Köneman, Köln, 1995).
These two hypotheses - socialization of literature and literalization of society - are complementary. Socialization of literature and literalization of society signify that literature is a specific use of language, which should not be estranged from common usage, but also that the status of literature, its specificity, is no longer a question.
This presupposes the de-sacralization of literature and of poetry and, to some extent, a dissolution of the very notions of literature and art. The Russian constructivist, El Lissitzky, uses another formula. He coined it in the following way : “we are all creators”.
This double hypothesis forces us to go beyond the representation of literature: every discourse remains unique, without this uniqueness being deemed as a literary uniqueness. There is no longer any exemplary poetry, but any discourse can be poetry. This means, at the same time, that there is no longer any exemplary literary or artistic figure, no individual figure that would have the unique right to (or power upon) literary discourse or artistic production.
The avant-gardist hypothesis of socialization of literature and of literalization of society supposes the refusal of art as an end in itself, therefore of art as an occupation (whether this occupation is defined by crafts or as a professional one), that is to say, at the same time as a tradition and as a career. It implies abandoning literary or artistic identity defined as genius (as it has been the case since romanticism).
II
Basing their findings on Harold Rosenberg‘s work on abstract expressionnism, sociology of art, in Europe and elsewhere, has insisted upon the charismatic ideology of modern art and the self-definition of the artist by his vocation, two criteria which would lead, according to that sociology, to what it has called, in reference to Harold Rosenberg’s book, the present “de-professionalization” of art.
This description is far from being acurate and convincing for the period whih concerns us. On can obviously observe how the avant-gardes attributed an heroïc role to the artist at the same time as they claimed a privileged status for art. But the refusal of the artistic activity in the traditional and ‘skilled’ sense of the term did not mean its refusal in the “technical” sense. From this type of reasoning, the Russian constructivists derived the concept of the artist-engineer. Far from recovering a self-definition of artistic practices, the avant-garde stressed the importance of technical devices and procedures, material foundations, principles of organization, new understanding of the nature of the medium as opposed to inspiration and other concepts derived from romanticism.
We owe to the different movements of the Russian avant-garde the idea that the work of art is an object (predmet) and a thing (veshch). The concept derives originally from the refusal to define the work of art in terms of an ornamental or decorative function. It thus resulted from discussions concerning the form and function of art.
It was, in the second place, a consequence of the accent placed on the material and professional performance, against art understood as the expression of feelings, ideas or emotions. The construction, in this fashion, was thus described as the integration of technique and beauty previously separated: “construction excludes, Stepanova said, all aesthetics and all taste by taking its support on the notion of technical necessity”.
In her lecture on constructivism in December 1921, she examined how art can survive its religious, philosophical and aesthetic outgrowths. She explains that material foundations remain, whose principle of organization is construction, in which experimental thought and technology take the place of aesthetics. She writes the following: “For the first time in all art history, the problem of artistic form is treated independently of our ideal representation of beauty”. The development of industries and technologies, she continues, “has destroyed the idea of an harmonious beauty which comes from nature. The invention of devices and new objects that have no link whatever with natural forms, and are centered on overtaking nature, create the possibility in a work to construct a new artificial artistic form. The appearance of contrasted and dissonant forms unlikely to be found in nature destroyed the conventions of composition in art”.
Added to this new paradigm of the work of art as an object, one must evidently attach another concept, that of faktura, one of the most important within Russian futurist theories in art and literature as early as 1912. No matter what differences of emphasis among the diverse authors, faktura signified from the beginning the visible and palpable result of the physical treatment of the medium. Faktura as the critical element in the progress of art and the “professionnalization” of the artist, was a recurring leitmotiv in the manifestoes written by the Russian artists around 1920. In 1919, when Rodtchenko was painting his black canvases for the Tenth State Exhibition, Popova wrote, in the catalogue of the show, that “faktura
The concept, first worked out by painters and art critics, was subsequently borrowed by the linguists and used in the verbal sphere to define the literary work. As we all know, the linguists of the Formalist school made faktura the dominant artistic standard. In his 1919 text entitled “Futurism”, Roman Jakobson defined works of art as objects that were autonomous through their faktura: “a clearly perceptible faktura needs no further justification: it becomes autonomous, and requires new methods of design and new materials; the picture is pasted over with paper or sprinkled with sand”.
V. Chklovsky defined faktura as the essential characteristic of art in general in his article “On faktura and counter-reliefs ”: “Faktura is the main distinguishing feature of the particular world of specially constructed things which, in their entirety, we call art (…) the work of the artist-poet and the artist-painter ultimately aims at creating a permanent object that is tangible in all its details, a faktura object”. Chklovsky refers to Tatlin’s material compositions, emphasizing the properties of the materials and, thereby, differentiating and intensifying the tangible values of faktura, as the most convincing examples of his definition of art.
III
The double hypothesis of socialization of literature and literalization of society is derived from the manner in which the historical avant-gardes wished to think about art as an activity which produced objects, documents or artefacts, rather than artworks.
French surrealism and Russian constructivism (my two main exemples for this lecture, besides Italian futurism) found it necessary to define their artistic activities without this reference and proposed, in the case of surrealism, the notion of invention, and in constructivism, the notions of creativeness and productivity.
Invention should not be understood as a simple opposition to tradition, as a synonym of the new, but as a way of superceding the romantic concepts of creation and originality. Breton would use one after the other the terms such as invention, research, experimentation.
Written and plastic productions were no longer organized with respect to individual creativity or originality but in terms of invention (and chance) in the case of surrealism, and production and creativeness in the case of the constructivists.
The Russian constructivists considered creativeness in contrast to creativity, as one of the principle axioms of their ideology : creativeness was not the exclusive property of the artist but was present in all aspects of everyday activity.
Through creativeness and the desire to extend the cultural domain to all of life, the constructivists engaged themselves in the most diverse artistic practices - books, posters, photography, film, theatre, architecture, design, fashion, ceramics and furniture. The ideology of creativeness overlaps the opposition between contemplation and construction or the opposition between art of invention and art of imitation evoked by Breton.
IV
The ideas of invention and production must be seen in relation to the considerable interest accorded to techniques and technologies by the historical avant-gardes. Whereas modernist art rejected technology, the avant-gardes relied on it to reintroduce art into culture.
Beyond the much discussed futurist ideology of the machine or the constructivist utopia that links art and industry, there is an awareness that the ties between technlogies and humans are now in rivality with the ties between humans presented by literature and art.
Technique and the disruption of the notion of space are used in order to create unexpected comparisons and juxtapositions. Instead of an integration of judgments about beings, there is a series of sensations relative to color, movement, noise, which are brutally associated together. The Futurist ‘parole in liberta’ are examples of this type of juxtaposition.
The heterogeneity of techniques is used in two clearly distinctive directions:
1) The technical objects trace, on the backdrop of space, an intertwining of channels of mutual influence detached from surroundings to which they are literally indifferent. The far becomes the near. New ties are established, freed from the constraints of ordinary space. Such is the idea of simultaneity, which derives artistic results from the mutation of sensibility produced by the technical revolution. Sensorial simultaneity and that of memory used by the futurists follow the disintegration of the object in the cubist painting.
One of the fundamental motifs here is the desire to hold together and reassemble time and space. Marinetti explained in one of his manifestoes : “We are preparing in this manner the ubiquity of man multiplied. We arrive by these means at the abolition of the year, the day, the hour”. Herein lies the futurist concept of art as a vital function as opposed to the concept of art as a finished work which is always a fixed, if not a dead, form captured in the space of the book for the written text, or in the space of the museum for the plastic arts.
2) Thanks to technology, art achieves access to the innovation it aspires to. The technical object is in the real world. It functions. It lives. It is nod dead like the works of art in museums. As the poet Blaise Cendrars explains in one of his texts dedicated to Henry Ford, “The Principle of Utility” (written in 1924) : “See the first airplane, its volume, weight, bearing surface, form, lines, colors, matter… all is meticulously measured. It is not a museum piece. One can get inside it and fly”.
Technical innovation is oriented towards the transitory, and that is what gives it its value, as opposed to works of art that one tries to conserve: "Machines surge ahead, pass, leaving the field free for new inventions” (Cendrars).
Varvara Stepanova wrote in her 1921 lecture on Constructivism:
“The monumental character of the work of art created an idea of eternal beauty outside time. The essential particularity of the current era is the provisional and transitory (…) the notion of monumental style was the result of an artisan’s long work on each new form and each new object. Now that the word of order (keynote) is the precarious and the transitory, it is no longer possible to have a monumental style in the sense in which there would be a contemporary global form characterized by conventional traits”.
The transitory object produced by technical innovation becomes the oposite of the immortal masterpiece ( the passion for the eternal things denounced by Marinetti) and allows to formulate the concept of the ephemeral creation - from futurism to the architecture of constructivism.
V
The notions of montage and collage proliferate in the wake of this validation of the machine and of technology. Beyond the disparity of their respective places of origin in cubist painting and in cinema, these new terms designate simultaneously :
technical procedures,
creative devices and
the end result of the work undertaken, that is to say : the product.
From its origins, as everyone knows, montage was closely linked with the universe of technology. The Dadaist Raoul Hausmann explained that, when they wanted to give a name to their technique, the members of the Berlin Dada group had selected the term photomontage because of their aversion to playing the role of the artist and thinking of themselves as engineers: “we meant to construct, to assemble (‘montieren’ in german) our works” (Courrier dada, 1958, Paris).
The film theorist, Bela Balazs, has explained it in this manner : “The French concept of montage (…) is in fact a kind of assemblage. When the director assembles the separate images in a pre-determined series in such a manner to achieve a predetermined and desired effect, he acts as an assembler who puts together the different parts of a machine in such a fashion as that machine becomes productive” (Der Film, Werden und Wesen einer neuen Kunst, 1972, p.103).
Hanna Höch said of photo-montage : “Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art”.
Collage and montage have developped in a particularly brilliant fashion during the 1910’s and the 1920’s in the plastics arts, in photo-montage and film, in the novel and theatre, notably in scenic forms. Both as technical procedures and as creative methods, they are transversal, transgeneric and trans-semiotic. They allow for cross-breeding between the arts.
They thus contributed to establish new hierarchies between them; each art was evaluated according to its own capacity to be transformed by these new manners of producing works.
In futurism, film, painting and music replaced literature, chiefly drama and the novel. Poetry remained present because it was associated with the sonorous and visual-graphical qualities of the word. As such - it may sound like a paradox for us today - poetry was always considered in opposition to the book and to literature. Surrealism valued poetry for the same reasons: “poetry is the opposite of literature”, Breton and Eluard declared in their “Notes on Poetry” (Notes sur la poésie, Complete Works, vol. I, p. 1095).
Surrealism, for its part, integrated photographs in the novel in lieu of description. One finds confirmation of the futurist and surrealist choices, notably the idea of replacing literature by the visual, in the work of the Russian formalist Boris Eichenbaum : “One can affirm that our era is less than ever verbal in so far as one speaks of art. Film culture opposes, so far as a pure sign of the era, the culture of the word, in the form of books or theatre which dominated the previous century”.
VI
Those who thought of themselves as inventors, engineers or producers more than artists or individual creators were particularly receptive to the collective and anonymous dimension of technology. And this directly brings us to the film.
For the period, which concerns us, film is most evidently the invention that had the most important effects on the arts and their relationships to culture. The place it holds in the reflection of the historical avant-gardes and the role that these movements have taken, at least initially, in its development are, from this point of view, very meaningful.
For the avant-gardes (just think about their fascination for silent movies and Chaplin), the cinema condensed several elements and points of interest:
It was anonymous, at least in its beginnings, collective and technical;
It appealed to a mass audience;
It turned upside down the hierarchy between the arts and also the relationships of the totality of the arts with respect to culture.
The avant-garde artists and writers, in the same way as the first film theorists later on, all noted how much the cinema was an art arising outside the system and the hierarchy of the arts, how it has won over an audience which was not an audience for art and, finally, how it has introduced a revolution in the aesthetic relationships between the audience and the work.
In his famous article “Style and Matter of Cinema” (first published in 1934), the great art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote that it was the only art whose development took place “under conditions which were opposite of those of the preceding arts; it is not an artistic necessity which led to the discovery and implementation of a new technique, but a technical invention which led to the discovery and perfectioning of a new art”. Its fundamental trait derived from the fact that “the pleasure provided by the cinema did not come originally from a collective interest for a specific matter (material), even less from the aesthetic interest that one can try to put a certain material into a specific form”.
The Hungarian theorist Bela Balazs (Evolution and Essence of a new art, 1948) explicitly associated the territory upon which the cinema has developed with the absence of artistic tradition:
“Why were the forms of expression specific to the new art discovered in Hollywood rather than in Paris ? (…) In the shadow of the conservative French academy, two steps away from the historic treasure of the Louvre (…) Such innovation would have much more difficulty to catch on than on the virgin territory of Hollywood”.
The same authors contrasted the collective dimension of cinematographic production with the individualistic creative process at work in the major art forms.
In 1933, in a comparison often used at that time, the Russian director Poudovkine, brought together the collective dimension of a film and the collective dimension of industrial production:
“The technical director cannot do anything without the heads of the team or the technicians, and their collective effort will lead to nothing if each of the collaborators limits himself only to the mechanical accomplishment of his restricted (narrow) function. Team work is that which makes of each task, even the most insignificant, an integral part of the living work and ties it again organically to the whole of the task” (Film technique, London, 1933).
This validation of cinema by the avant-gardes finds its explanation in the distances commonly shared in front of the notion of the individual artistic creation.
As a form of art that seemed to be able to put an end to the separation between high art and culture, but also to achieve the integration of the arts (from literature and theatre to painting and architecture and then music) cinema was often described 1) as the modern Cathedral, 2) as an alternative to the wagnerian Gesamkunstwerk they rejected from an artistic as well as from a political perspective as a reactionary form : a new mystifying pot for the old and most archaïc dimensions and collective contents of art (theatre and mythology).
All these authors considered film to be the only popular form of art. The word 'popular' here has two different meanings. In the most current one, it refered to that art which reached an incomparably larger audience than the other arts, but also an audience deprived of any artistic culture. Thinking of the success of what he called, in very provocative words, “the only lively visual art along with architecture and commercial design”, E. Panofsky indicated:
“The movies reestablished the dynamic contact between artistic production and consumption which is gravely compromised, when it is not totally destroyed in many other fields of artistic activity (…) in today’s life, the films are what the majority of other forms of art have ceased to be, not merely an ornament but a necessity”.
The conditions of the invention and development of cinema as well as the nature of its success also compelled to revise the sociological model prevalent at that time which required that the diffusion and evolution of the arts and of culture, generally speaking, were accomplished according to the top-bottom model : from high to low (from high culture to mass culture).
VII
In conclusion, one knows that the avant-garde and high modernism adopted profoundly different attitudes towards techniques and technologies.
Modernism, for the most part, stressed on the inherent hostility between high and low, and made a categorical distinction between high art and mass culture. On the contrary, as Andreas Huyssens has written in After the Great Divide :
“No other single factor has influenced the emergence of the new avant-garde art as much as technology, which not only fueled the artist's imagination but penetrated to the core of the work itself.” .
Technology emerged as a pivotal factor in the avant-garde’s fight against the aesthetics of modernism, in its focus on new modes of perception, and its perhaps deluded dream of an avant-gardist mass culture.
Theodor Adorno, the great theorist of the division between high art and mass culture in his Aesthetic Theory developed his theory of modernism as the same time Clement Greenberg did for the history of modern painting .
The political impulse behind their work was to preserve the dignity and the autonomy of the art work from the totalitarian pressures of fascist mass spectacles, socialist realism and commercial mass culture in the West.
When, after the avant-gardes, in the thirties and most notably after 1945, the techniques became only understood as participating in an inauthentic mass culture, the practices of the historical avant-gardes, their attempts to go beyond the separation between high and low, the idea of technique as a mediation between art and culture, have become for a moment more difficult to discern.
歐陸的藝術位階傳統與歷史上的前衛運動
上一世紀肇始，歐陸的前衛運動拒絕了自浪漫主義以及象徵主義中藝術優位性的價值，如同布列東所言：「將藝術視為其自身的終結無疑地將是一種錯誤」。
如同傳統中藝術與文化的關係一般，前衛運動者喚起了對於藝術在美學界域的問題。他們也同時質疑一個長久以來建立於純美術與實用藝術在歐洲的位階傳統。這些前衛運動拒絕藝術的自治權以及其僅根據美學準則而來的評價方式。
一、
如果我們考量到這些前衛運動其概念架構或者烏托邦的想像，則應該可以得出這些概念架構或想像乃是根據以下的雙重性假說而來。第一重的假說我在此將其定義為：社會化的文學與藝術，而第二重則是文學字義化的社會。
社會化的文學乃是基於每一個人都應該寫詩（或者說詩應該被每一個人所書寫）。舉例而言，根據布列東（Breton）對自動訊息的說法：「必須超越任何美學的考量，文件其價值必自足於自身之中。」
而文學字義化的社會則意指詩歌乃是無所不在的（其不僅可以在詩作裡被發現，並且可以超越其文字治域。）詩歌無所不在的概念誘導出了一個文學可自外於文學制度的結論。針對文學可自外於文學制度的傾向，馬里內蒂如此說道：「宇宙整體將成為我們的字彙」；而馬雅軻夫司基則說：「街道就是我們的畫筆」。無論是法國抑或俄羅斯前衛運動的終極結果就是整個翻轉了象徵主義其美學優位性的結果。布列東在其首次的超現實主義宣言中提到：「我聲言世界其並非終結於一部美觀的書籍裡，而是終結於一個美麗的天堂或者地獄的廣告中。」
在這個文學字義化的社會中，新興的大都會（德文稱為die Grosstadt），扮演了至關重要的角色。昂揚的城市空間猶如一個現代性的象徵，其允許將散文與詩歌、藝術與大眾文化之間的關係進行重分配。城市這個前衛運動中的核心角色，必須以相對於自然（一如自十八世紀以來歐陸美學傳統的範式一般）以及那些部屬於美術館或者書籍中的角色來理解。
無論前衛運動採取了哪一種形態，其真正想要的乃是捕捉城市其日常生活的影像以及那稍縱即逝的美麗；那些伴隨著海報、告示板、展示櫥窗等等同時呈顯在其視野中，那色彩繽紛的視覺與街道那熙來攘往的喧囂。
在圭勒摩‧阿波里奈爾（Apollinaire）其著作《詩-對話》中例如（克莉絲蒂星期一的懊悔）中，城市給予了詩人以報紙拼貼整合成詩的可能。布列東寫到：「甚至我們允許那些由個人以蒐集、聚合來成的文字稱之為詩-越省時省力越好-無論是從報紙剪下的標題抑或者是標題的殘句皆可。」(Complete Works, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, vol. I, p. 341).
羅申軻為實現其傳遞表達城市活動的渴望，在1920年代發現了塑造其攝影作品性格的雙焦點攝影技術。如同他解釋到：「在攝影之中存在著兩個焦點，一個是人類立足大地環顧四周的焦點。此乃是我稱之為肚臍眼攝影，相機的位置乃是胃部。現代城市伴隨著其高聳的建築、工業、二或三層樓的商品櫥窗、電車、汽車、彩色印刷的廣告…這所有的一切誘發了視知覺的心靈變化…當代性最有去的視野乃是從上往下抑或者是由下往上的觀看。」(Rodtchenko, Photography, 1924-1954, Köneman, Köln, 1995).
社會化的文學與藝術與文學字義化的社會此一雙重性的假說乃是彼此互補的。無論是社會化的文學與藝術抑或文學字義化的社會其意味著語言的一個特定用法，亦即文學不應該疏離於日常用語之外而與此同時文學其獨特性狀態亦不應該再是一個問題。
對於此去神聖化的文學以及詩歌，甚或某個程度上展延至消蝕文學與藝術的觀念的假定。俄羅斯構成主義藝術家艾爾‧李希斯基（El Lissitzky）使用了另一個說法，他創造了如下的一句話：「我們所有人都是創作者。」
此一雙重的假說迫使我們去超越文學的表現性：任何一個論述都是獨一無二的，缺乏獨特性亦被視為一種文學的獨特性。再也不存在任何範例式的詩歌，而是任何論述都可以是詩歌。與此同時這也意味著不再有任何範式的文學家或者藝術家的身影，在文學的論述或者藝術的生產上不再有任何個人擁有獨特的權利（或者力量）。
前衛運動者其社會化的文學與藝術與文學字義化的社會的假說，推想拒絕藝術做為其自身的終結，也因此藝術將成為一種職業（無論這個職業是由工藝或者一如其他專業一般被定義），也就是說與此同時藝術一如傳統與終身的事業一般。而這也意味著其棄絕了文學或者藝術其天才的本體定義（猶如自浪漫主義以來的事實一般。）
二、
奠基於哈落德‧羅森伯格在其著作中對於抽象表現主義的發現，歐陸以及其他地區的藝術社會學，根據那涉及哈落德‧羅森伯格著作的的社會學則將導引出兩項準則，其一乃是依舊堅持著現代藝術中的神逸式意識型態（charismatic ideology）以及那些以個人職業自我定義的藝術家；再者則是當前“去專業化（de-professionalization）”的藝術
以上的描述不僅遠非精確的更難以說服身處當下的我們。當然我們可以明顯的觀察到前衛運動當他們同時在聲言藝術其特許地位的同時，是如何的讓藝術家歸結成為一個英雄式的角色。但是其對於傳統中藝術性活動以及“技巧熟練（skilled）”感的拒斥，並非意味著其亦拒絕對於“技術”的體認。依此推論則俄羅斯的構成主義演繹出藝術家-工程師的概念。遠離於回復自我定義的藝術性實踐，前衛運動覺察到了科技裝置流程、物質基礎、組織原則、認識新媒材性質的重要性，這一切皆相對於由浪漫主義所演繹出的各種概念與想像。
我們應該要理解俄羅斯前衛運動在其不同的運動中對於藝術作品的概念，一則是客體（object）一則是東西（thing）。上述的概念導源於拒絕將藝術的作品視為是僅具妝點抑或襯飾的功能。由是其產生了對於藝術的形態以及功能的探討。
此亦即從第二方面來說結果就是以對於物質以及專業性表現的強調，對抗將藝術理解為一個情感、概念抑或心緒的表現。構成在這個風尚中也由是被描述成一個整合先前彼此分離的技術與美觀。史蒂潘諾娃說道：「構成摒除了所有的美學以及品味而代之以支持其技術性需求的觀念。」
史蒂潘諾娃在其1921年12月構成主義的講稿中，她檢視了藝術如何得以使其自身的宗教、哲學以及美學的自然發展存留的可能。她解釋到藝術的物質基礎將得以保存，而其組成的原則乃是構成，在構成中實驗性的想法以及科技將取代美學的位置。她寫下了如下的字句：「這是所有歷史上第一次，面對藝術性形態的問題，我們得以獨立於我們對於美的理想之外進行處理。」她續寫到：「工業與藝術的發展，已然摧毀了一個源自於自然的和諧美觀。設備的發明以及新的物件全然無涉於任何自然的形態，並且已然取代自然成為中心，其創造了在一個新的、人工的藝術形態中作品構成的可能。那顯露對立且不和諧的形式不同於發現於自然者，已然隳壞了藝術在傳統手法中的組成。」
加諸於此一新典範上的乃是藝術作品乃是一個物件，而藝術家明顯地必須去觸及另一種概念，一種早在1912年左右及存在於俄羅斯未來派理論中，稱為“faktura”的概念。無論不同的作者對於“faktura”的定義有多少差異，其皆指涉了媒材從一開始在物理性處理中其視覺與觸覺的結果。做為藝術進步以及 “專業化”藝術家的重要元素，“faktura”在1920年代乃是俄羅斯的前衛藝術家其宣言中被一而再反覆的主題。1919年當羅申軻為第十屆國家畫展創作其《黑色畫布black canvases》，帕波娃（Popova）於展覽目錄中寫到：「“faktura”乃是繪畫表面的基本要素。」
率先由畫家與藝評人想出的概念“faktura”，隨後被語言學家採借並應用於語言的界面上以定義文學作品。如同眾所周知的，形式主義學派的語言學家將“faktura”變成主宰藝術性的標準。羅曼‧雅各布申（Roman Jakobson）在其1919年名為〈未來主義〉的文章中將藝術作品定義為：透過其自身的“faktura”而獲得自治權的物件。他如是寫到：「一個明顯可感的“faktura”無須任何更進一步的辯護；作品變成自主的，並且要求新的設計方法以及材質；圖像乃是由塗佈糨糊的紙張抑或噴灑的砂礫所組成。」
維多‧波利索維奇‧史克羅夫斯基（V. Chklovsky）在其文章〈關於faktura 以及反疏壓On faktura and counter-reliefs〉中將“faktura”定義為所有藝術所不可或缺的特質。他如是寫到：「Faktura乃是由那些總體被我們稱之為藝術的特殊組成物其特定世界的主要辨識特徵…藝術家-詩人以及藝術家-畫家的作品最終乃是朝向去創造出一個恆久的客體，而此一客體其所有細節乃是可觸知的一個faktura物件。」。在此史克羅夫斯基所指涉的乃是塔特林的物質組成，由於塔特林的物質組成強調了物質的特性也因此具有強化與鑑別faktura其可觸知的價值，因此成為作家筆下對於其藝術定義最具說服力的例證。
三、
社會化的文學與藝術與文學字義化的社會的雙重性假說，其乃是起源於歷史性的前衛運動冀求將藝術思考為一項生產物件、文件以及人造物而遠非藝術品的活動。
法國的超現實主義以及俄羅斯的構成主義（本文中兩個主要的例證此外尚有義大利的未來派）發現到，將他們的藝術性活動定義在不涉及提出相關藝術品概念乃是必要的。在此處超現實主義所涉及的觀念是創新，而構成主義則是創造性與生產性。
發明在此不應僅僅如同其同義字“新”一般，被簡單的理解為傳統的對立面，而應該將其視為一個替代創作與獨創性其浪漫式概念的方法。若是布列東的話，他將會一個接著一個的使用諸如：發明、研究、實驗等。
在超現實主義以及構成主義中，書寫與造形藝術不再是與個人的創造力與獨創性有關的事物，而是被汰換成超現實中的發明（或機遇）以及構成主義中的生產與創造性。
做為構成主義運動本身其意識型態的公理法則，在俄羅斯的構成主義者想法中，創造性（creativeness）乃是創造力（creativity）的相對詞；所謂創造性並非去排除藝術家的內在資產而是將此一資產表現在所有日常生活的各種活動面向上。
透過創造性以及對於將文化展延至生活所有面向上的渴望，構成主義者由是促使他們自己去接觸最廣泛的藝術實踐諸如：書籍、海報、攝影、電影、劇場、建築、設計、時尚、陶瓷以及家具。而創造性的意識型態也同時交疊了那介於構成與冥思抑或如布列東所言的那介於發明的藝術與擬仿的藝術之間的對立面上。
四、
關於發明以及生產的概念，我們必須將其視為其與歷史性前衛運動對於調和自身與技術及科技的高度興趣有關。有鑑於現代主義藝術排斥科技，前衛運動其所倚賴的方式乃是透過將藝術重新引介入文化之中。
跳脫那許許多多探討未來派意識型態中對於機器以及構成主義者那與藝術、工業聯結的烏托邦，在此處前衛運動有著一個覺醒，亦即以科技與人類之間的聯繫如今已經成為過往那文學或藝術與人類之間聯繫的競爭者。
技術以及那已然崩解的空間觀念被使用來創造一個不可預期的對照與並置。取代了對於存在一個完整的評斷，這裡有的僅是一涉及將色彩、運動、喧囂等粗野參雜一起的感官序列。未來派其“文字解放（parole in liberta）”即是此種並置的範例。
科技的異質性被使用於兩個鮮明而特殊的方向上：
1)科技物件的軌跡，在空間的布景中一個由各種彼此影響的通道所交織出的編織，這些通道從那平淡無奇的環境中脫離而出。原本遙遠的轉變成鄰近的。從原本平凡的空間釋放後建立起新的聯繫。這即是同時性的概念，由同時性的概念衍生了那藉由科技革命所生產的知覺變異裡產生而出的藝術性結果。知覺的同時性以及未來派所應用的技藝其皆是循著在立體派繪畫中那已然崩解的客體的軌跡。
在此處一個最基本的主題是對於重新將時間與空間聚合並保持一致的慾望。馬里內蒂在其個人的一篇宣言中解釋到：「我們正準備以普遍性的複數形的人體表現方式，藉以讓我們得以實現棄置年月、日夜以及時分的可能。」於此文中展現了未來派其藝術的概念，乃是將藝術視為一個生命性的函數（vital function）而相對於將藝術視為一件完成的作品（finished work），後者總是固定不變如果還沒死亡的話，其也總是被捕捉進入書籍裡那書寫的脈絡中亦或者囚禁於那專為展示造形藝術的美術館中。
2)感謝科技，藝術得以獲得那其自身對於創新的渴望。科技物件存在於真實世界中，他不同於那些已然死亡的藝術作品，它運轉的、活著。如同布萊斯˙桑德拉爾（Blaise Cendrars）在其獻給亨利‧福特的文章〈功利的原則〉（寫於1924年）中解釋到：「看吶首架飛機，它的體積、重量、受風面、形態、線條、色彩以及材質本身…所有的這一切全都被精心的測量過。它可不同於那些美術館裡的老古董，我們大可以跳進坐艙並乘風遨翔。」
猶如藝術作品總是嘗試留存的相對面一般，科技總是朝著短暫性的方向發展，而這正是其價值所在。「機器奔騰向前、穿越並遺留下那自由的曠野給未來的新發明。」（桑德拉爾Blaise Cendrars）
維瓦拉‧史特潘諾娃（Varvara Stepanova）在其1921年構成主義的講稿中寫到：
「紀念碑特質的藝術作品創造了一個對於自外於時間的永恆美感的概念。而現時其基本的特質卻在於短暫與瞬息…對於紀念碑式的藝術作品的觀念，乃是一個藝術職人（artisan）其長時間工作於一個新的形態與對象的結果。而如今秩序（基本主旨）這個字眼乃是危險且稍縱即逝的，其不再有可能而擁有一個紀念碑式的風格，若非如此則當代將可能出現一個因襲傳統軌跡的全球性形態。」
從未來派乃至於構成主義的建築，由科技創新所生產出那稍縱即逝的物件由是成為那大師不朽傑作的相對物（馬里內蒂甚至鄙夷那對永恆事物的熱情）其並且允許將那轉瞬消亡的創作的概念公式化。
五、
蒙太奇以及拼貼的觀念拓展了對於機器與科技確認的醒覺。超越了他們彼此不同的領域，在立體繪畫以及電影中這些新手法同時地標示出：
科技的流程創意的裝置以及作品最終著手的結果，也就是說：生產
眾所周知的蒙太奇從其一開始便與科技的領域有著十分親近的聯繫。達達藝術家勞爾‧浩斯曼（Raoul Hausmann）如此說明；當他們想嘗試為他們所發明的技術取個名字時，這群柏林的達達藝術家們已然選擇了攝影蒙太奇這個字眼，因為他們鄙夷去扮演藝術家的角色，並且他們也將自己視為工程師。浩斯曼（Raoul Hausmann）說：「我們意在構成，組裝(德文‘montieren’ )我們的作品」《達達書信Courrier dada》(, 1958, Paris).
電影理論家貝拉·巴拉茲（Béla Balázs）曾經針對蒙太奇技法如此說明：「法國概念中的蒙太奇…事實上乃是一種聚合、組裝（assemblage）。當一個導演將一個個分離的影像，依據預先設定好的序列並依據蒙太奇技術進行組裝以達成其預想的效果與結局時，導演的行動即如同一個裝配員一般，他將機器的不同部分依據一定的方式置放一起，而在這種組裝方式下機器得以生產。」(Der Film, Werden und Wesen einer neuen Kunst, 1972, p.103).
當漢娜‧厄許（Hanna Höch）提及攝影蒙太奇時曾說：「我們所有的意圖就是將從機器世界而來的物件以及從藝術世界而來的工業彙整起來。」
拼貼與蒙太奇在1910年代至1920年代間在造形藝術、攝影蒙太奇以及電影、小說、劇場特別是布景形態等領域中締造出一段輝煌的風潮。二者在科技流程以及創意方式上都具有相似性。他們都是橫向發展的、都類似轉錄遺傳基因也都是符號學變譯的，二者亦都允許跨藝術領域的雜交。
拼貼與蒙太奇由是有促成了在他們二者之間建構起一個新的藝術位階；任何種類的藝術其衡量的標准乃依據評估該藝術種類在這種轉換的方式中生產作品的能力。
在未來主義中電影、繪畫以及音樂則被置換成文學，主要是戲劇以及小說。詩歌由於其語音以及視覺圖像性的特質而保留其表現。就此而論，對於身處今日的我們當聽到；詩歌總是被視為是書籍與文學的對立面時，或許會感到矛盾。但超現實主義其評價詩歌的方式即是以此相同的理由。布列東以及艾呂雅（Eluard）在他們的《詩歌筆記》中宣稱：「詩歌乃是相對於文學的」。(Notes sur la poésie, Complete Works, vol. I, p. 1095).
超現實主義就其自身的部分而言則是將攝影照片整合進入小說的敘事中。關於未來派以及超現實主義運動者以視覺取代文學的概念，在此我們可以從俄羅斯形式主義學者波利斯‧艾契邦（Boris Eichenbaum）的說法：「任何人都可如此聲言，一旦提及藝術時我們這個時代乃是比其他任何時代都更缺少言說的詞彙。電影則恰好相反，其做為對抗那過往數世紀以來由傳統書籍形式或者戲劇形式所主宰的文字文化，電影文化至目前為止乃是一純然的時代標誌。」獲得確證。
六、
那些將自己視為是發明家、工程師抑或製作人更甚於是自己為藝術家抑或獨立創作者的人們，他們善於接納科技領域那集合且匿名的向度。而這也將我們引領至電影中。
在這個與我們有關的時代，電影乃是對各種藝術以及藝術與文化關係最具影響力的鮮明發明。至少從電影在一開始發展的時候，即扮演了這些前衛運動中被採用的角色，其佔據了反映歷史性前衛運動的地位，從以上的觀點來看，電影是對於前衛運動十分具有意義的。
對於前衛運動（思考一下他們對於默片以及卓別林的迷戀）而言，電影凝縮了許多的元素以及趣味性的觀點：
首先至少在其初期電影總是匿名的、集合的以及科技的；其次電影總是呈現給大多數觀眾的；最後電影它翻轉了各藝術之間的位階，並且也翻轉了與文化相關的藝術族群其全一性的關係。
前衛運動的藝術家與作家如同稍晚的電影理論家一般，他們全都注意到了電影在傳統藝術位階與系統外如何地竄升，電影又是如何地贏得了那些非藝術的觀眾，最後電影又是如何地引領出一個介於觀眾與作品之間的美學關係革命。
偉大的藝術史學家厄文‧潘諾夫斯基（Erwin Panofsky）在其著名的文章〈電影的風格與要素〉（最早發表於1934年）寫到，電影乃是唯一一種藝術其發展發生於：「一個全然相對於先前藝術發展的環境中；其並非是因為基於藝術性的必須而導引出新技術的發現與實踐，而是一個新技術的發明從而引領了對於新藝術的發現與改進。」。電影的基本特徵衍生於這樣的事實：「電影所提供的歡愉並非來自於一個對於特定要素（物質）的集合趣味，甚且更少是來自於那我們得以將其加諸於特定媒材、特定形態的美學的趣味性。」
匈牙利電影理論家貝拉·巴拉茲（Béla Balázs）在其著作《一門新藝術的本質以及演化,1948(Evolution and Essence of a new art, 1948)》一書中明確地將電影與那些過往藝術傳統中發展空白的領域聯繫起來：
「為何那些新藝術發現的特殊表現形式是在好萊塢而非巴黎發現？…籠罩於法蘭西學院保守陰影中，以及兩步之遙外羅浮宮的歷史性珍稀…上述的創新其更難發生於相較於好萊塢這個全新的處女地上。」
貝拉·巴拉茲（Béla Balázs）亦比對了電影製作的集合性面向與主流藝術形式其個人性的創作過程。1933年俄羅斯導演普多夫金（Poudovkine）也做了類似的對照，他將電影製作的集合性面向與工業生產的集合性面向進行了如下的對照：「科技的導演在缺少團隊領導人或者技術人員時無法進行任何工作，並且如果團隊中的每一個合作者將自己限制於僅在於其嚴格功能上的機械性的技能時，他們聚集的努力也將會毫無所獲。團隊工作乃在於促成每一個挑戰，甚至是最細微的部分，一個活體工作的部分，也會再一次有機地聯繫起其與整體的挑戰。」《電影技術，倫敦，1933》(Film technique, London, 1933).
上述的比對核實了電影透過前衛運動，其發現到自身自外於那些通常共享相同觀念的個人性藝術性創作的解釋。做為藝術的一種形式，電影似乎具有終結高雅藝術與文化彼此分離狀態的能力，並且得以實現對藝術整體的整合（從文學與戲劇以至於繪畫與建築然後是音樂），電影經常被描述為猶如當代的大教堂亦或者是華格納式的綜合藝術（Gesamkunstwerk），他們受到來自於藝術性的排斥如同來自政治看待反動派一般：「電影是一個將老舊以及集合藝術內容於一鍋的全新的魔法鍋（戲劇與神話）」。
上述所有的作者都認為電影將成為唯一的“popular”形式的藝術。在此“popular”有著雙重的意義。在最近的一個意思中“popular”指涉了某種藝術可以傳遞至其他藝術無與倫比的大量觀眾眼前，但是同時觀者與將被剝奪掉任何藝術性的文化。讓我們回想一下厄文‧潘諾夫斯基（Erwin Panofsky）以極度煽動性言詞來形容電影的成功；「電影是除建築與商業設計以外，唯一活生生的視覺藝術」。潘諾夫斯基指出：「電影重建了介於藝術性生產與消費性之間的活力，當它不僅僅是摧毀其他許多領域的藝術性活動時…在今日的生活中，電影乃是凌駕於其他形式藝術的主流，其已然不僅是一種增添而是一種需要。」
電影的發明與發展一如其成功的本質，同樣的迫使當時流行的社會學模型必須進行修正，他們必須重新思考關於藝術與文化其擴散與演變的方式，總的來說即是修正那由上至下的傳播的模型（從高雅文化至大眾文化）
七、
總而言之，我們知道前衛運動與高雅的現代主義他們對於接受技術與科技的有著深刻的不同態度。現代主義，在絕大多數情況下緊繃那介乎高雅與低俗界分的與生俱來的敵意，並且在高雅藝術與大眾文化之間強作出一個清晰的區別。相反地如同安德利雅‧胡珊（Andreas Huyssens）在其著作《在大分裂後》中寫到的：「在沒有任何單一因素可以如同科技對於新前衛運動出現那樣具有影響力，科技不僅點燃了藝術家的想像，甚且直接戟刺了作品的核心…。」
科技的出現猶如前衛運動的樞紐要素用以對抗現代主義美學，當其聚焦於新的知覺形式時，它或許也遮蔽在前衛運動的大眾文化夢中。
阿多諾（Theodor Adorno）這位以界分出高雅藝術與大眾文化的分野，而著名的偉大美學家在其著作《美學理論Aesthetic Theory》中發展了自己的現代主義理論，與此同時葛林伯格（Clement Greenberg）正在著手現代繪畫的歷史。
隱藏於他們作品後的政治衝動，乃是執意從法西斯其極權主義高壓的大眾奇觀以及共產社會寫實主義與西方商業性大眾文化裡，去保持藝術作品的自治權與尊嚴。
當前衛運動之後，在稍晚的30年代特別是1945年以後，科技變成為僅能被理解為參與一個不真實的大眾文化，歷史上前衛運動的實踐，他們嘗試去超越那切分高雅與低俗、那科技的概念猶如介於藝術與文化之間的沈思等，已然成為一個模糊難辨的往日時光。
Philippe Roussin
Directeur de recherche
Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage
Centre national de la recherche scientifique/
Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales
Paris
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