Expressionism

For although expressionism has been labeled the historical modernist movement par excellence, besides its modernist characteristics - such as its shift from transparent, realist representations of a common world, towards abstraction, obscurity, and the investigation of subjectivity and the unconscious - it also shares many of those key features, in particular the revolutionary, counter-discursive and anti-institutional functions, by which Burger defines the historical avant-garde.

This overlap is itself significant. For the various contradictory impulses within expressionism illustrate that the avant-garde is a much more ambiguous and heterogeneous phenomenon than Burger - with his narrow focus on dada and surrealism - would sometimes have us believe. More typically the avant-garde serves as the political and revolutionary cutting-edge of the broader movement of modernism, from which it frequently appears to be trying with difficulty to free itself. Modernism and the avantgarde often seem to be locked into a dialectical relationship in which the avant-garde questions the blind spots and unreflected presuppositions of modernism, while modernism itself reacts to this critique, at least in its later stages, by attempting to take into account its own poetics some of the spectacular failures and successes of the historical avant-garde.

The current debates on postmodernism and its relation to modernism and the avant-garde have not only renewed interest in early twentieth-century art then, but have provided both fresh perspectives with which to re-read the texts of this period, as well as new questions and theoretical strategies with which to approach their characteristic problematics. The goal in re-reading expressionism through Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde and in the light of the recent discussion on the modern (and postmodern) period is thus twofold.

Firstly, it is important to interrogate Burger's influential work and to develop his argumentation by testing it against a broader range of avant-garde and modernist phenomena than Burger's own examples provide in order to discover the extent to which the various methodological categories which make up his theory are capable of distinguishing between the contemporaneous phenomena within the modernist period. For example, to what degree does expressionism fulfill the avant-garde's role of producing a fundamental re-thinking of the artist's social practice, together with a full-scale interrogation of the social and institutional conditions of art? To what extent does it remain caught within modernism's predilection for aesthetic autonomy and its drive for purely technical and formal progress?

Secondly, by re-reading the texts of expressionism in the context of some of the new questions which have been thrown up recently by the postmodernism debate as well as by the related discussion surrounding Burger's theoretical model, it is possible to observe the extent of the "epistemic" or "paradigmatic" shift which has taken place between the progressive movements of the early twentieth century and the contemporary culture of postmodernity. Re-examining expressionism in this light forces us to reconsider both the degree of real innovation brought about by postmodernism, as well as allowing us to appreciate the extent to which the expressionist avant-garde preempts postmodernism in deconstructing and re-writing the established images and constructions of the world - the anticipatory effect that Jochen Schulte-Sasse has called a "postmodern transformation of modernism. "