Changing and persisting notions of the Avant-garde
Brisbane's 1993 Music Biennial showcased the plurality of forms of contemporary music: from international avant-garde (Cecil Taylor), to experimental theatre (Doppio Teatro), to world music, mainstream rock, Murri works, and classical. The concurrent Brisbane Fringe Festival contained an equally pluralist program, creating a space for other art forms to participate in the Biennial sound artists, visual artists, theatre, and works which played across many of these generic distinctions. The Fringe Festival, then, did not operate in an avant-garde versus mainstream relationship to the Music Biennial, despite the fact that this was its underlying structure and original brief. This year's Fringe program revealed how, in a culture of pluralism, the avant-garde is not able to be defined by stylistic or generic qualities alone. The Fringe supported work which was largely experimental, but which was also local and I or radically political, mobilising a multiplicity of audiences and venues. It was a festival alive to the economy of representation and practice in contemporary culture. The Music Biennial occurred simultaneously with the exhibition Surrealism: Revolution by Night at the Queensland Art Gallery. The artists involved in the Fringe Festival took up the full potential of the interstitial space between these major art events to explore the intermedia dialogue between: music and the visual arts; between social, performative, and gallery space; between high and low culture; and the range of levels of legitimation, appropriation, and political effect available in this exchange or dialogue. In discussing issues of avant-gardism in a postmodern culture and their importance for contemporary visual arts practice I will focus on three major events at the 1993 Brisbane Fringe Festival:
Mental Kultura (Princess Theatre); Brentlte (Institute of Modern Art); and the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline