Diferencia entre revisiones de «1995 – A&P Manifesto Remix - Mark Amerika»

Revisión del 19:21 20 feb 2022

Texto

A. Whereas it's true that certain strains of modernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, capitalism and even marxism pervade the Avant-Pop sensibility, the major difference is that the artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents, who have much less influence over them). Many of the early practitioners of postmodernism, from Beckett to Vargas Ilosa, Borges to Silko, Davenport to Lessing, Gaddis to Garcia Marquez, who came into active adult consciousness and textual production in the forties, fifties, sixties and early seventies, tried desperately to keep themselves away from the forefront of the newly powerful Mediagenic Reality that was rapidly becoming the space where most of our social exchange was taking place. Despite its early insistence on remaining caught up in the academic and elitist art world's presuppositions of self institutionalization and incest, early postmodernism found itself overtaken by the popular media engine; out of such extremely diverse writers as Abish, Ballard, Barthelme, Burroughs, Coover, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and even Nabokov, whose Lolita is one of the first fictional Avant-Popsters, the A&P began its move toward increasing recognition.

B. Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A&P artists have had to work hard not to become so enamored by the false consciousness of the mass media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives, the single most important one of which is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would, sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. Avant-Popsters thus turn into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is. We have acquired immunity from the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry and are now ready to offer our own weirdly concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease that infects the core of our collective life.

C. Whereas Avant-Popsters are fully aware of their need to maintain a crucial avant-sensibility as it drives the creative processing of their work, and attaches itself to the avant-garde lineage from which they spring, they are also quick to acknowledge the need to develop more open-minded strategies that will allow them to attract attention within the popularized forms of representation that fill the contemporary Mediascape. Our collective mission is to radically alter Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesture that grows out of the work of many twentieth-century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch); movements like fluxus, situationism, lettrism and neo-hoodooism; and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Slint, L7, Pavement, Stereolab, Meccanormal {this list of bands constantly changes everytime the manifesto is read aloud}...

The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked experience. One way to achieve this goal is to create and expand virtual niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene and Internet. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively generated electronic publications, individually designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi-media interactive hypertexts, conferences, and so forth, Avant-Popsters and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist-author creates her/his beautifully-crafted, original works consumed primarily by the elitist art world and their business cronies who pass judgment on what is appropriate and what is not.

Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. Avant-Pop artists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with writing.

D. Avant-Popsters welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals with whom we can communicate and collaborate. The future of writing is moving away from the lone creator sitting behind a keyboard cranking out magical, mystical verse so that one day he or she may find an editor or agent or publisher who will hype her or his work to those interested in commercial literary culture. Instead, the future of writing will feature more multi-media collaborative authoring that will make itself available to hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of potential associates around the world actively internetworking in their own niche communities. Our audience will be both immediate and global, and our identities will remain forever in flux as we develop self-designed nodes of operation from which to distribute our multi-media litware. As Hakim Bey, author of the ontologically-anarchic book of guerrilla aesthetics, Temporary Autonomous Zones, recently said in the magazine Dreamtime Talkingmail, we're exploring "the possibility of an art which is by no means 'sensible' in the Civilizational sense of the word, but which is nevertheless devoted with PASSIONATE INTENSITY to COMMUNICATION, and thus to a certain kind of situational clarity and accessibility" ("Anarcho-Aesthetics and The Problem of Clarity," Dreamtime Talkingmail [Winter 1994]:12.)

Can you imagine what The Futurists would have done with an Information Superhighway?

E. The distribution formula will radically change from: Author --> Agent --> Editor/Publisher --> Printer --> Distributor --> Retailer --> Consumer to a more simplified and direct:

Author (Sender) --> Interactive Participant (Receiver)

Avant-Popsters and their pirate signals promoting wild station identifications are ready to expand into your home right now, just log on, click around and find them. Mark Amerika's own new electronic publishing enterprise, Alternative-X, can be visited by navigating your World Wide Web server or Gopher software to the site at marketplace.com.

F. One of the main tenets of postmodernism is: I, whoever that is, will put together these bits of data and form a Text, while you, whoever that is, will produce your own meaning based on what you bring to the Text. One of the main tenets of Avant-Pop writing is: I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning.

In a Data Age where we all risk suffering from Information Sickness, one cure is a highly potent, creatively filtered tonic of (yes) textual (or multi-media) residue spilled from the depths of our spiritual unconscious. Creating a work of art will depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select, organize and present the bits of raw data he or she has at her or his disposal. We all know originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual realities are always already readymade and ready for consumption!

G. The future of the book is happening now. True, the idea that books as hard or paperbound products coming back from the printer so that they can then go to the distributor who will try and convince retailers that their consumers will want to buy them is not in danger of becoming obsolete any time soon.

Nor is the lone author, cranking out her or his writing wares at home only to send them off to distant agents/editors/publishers so that his/her work can then take part in this Author-->Agent-->Publisher--> Printer-->Distributor-->Retailer-->Consumer formula. Books will remain books and bookstores will continue to sell them. Writers will continue to get single-digit royalties and the distributors and bookstores will continue to reap most of the profit. The Best-Sellers list and the New York establishment will continue to maintain their rockhard hegemony.

BUT: now there's more to communication, more to language, more to text production, than the book. There are all manner of videos, graphic novels, dissident comix, CD-ROMS, computer hypertexts, earplays, and, soon, in a universally-accessible location near you, a small black box that will sit on top of your reconstructed soon-to-be-a-computer TV that will bring into your private space all kinds of fireworks created by (yep, it's true) writers. Electronic writers. Which, it ends up, most of us already are.

H. Technology is becoming more accessible and software is getting better. Soon we can start thinking seriously of publishing ourselves in our home offices, virtual brain centers--without being accused of vanity, thanks to the growing Do It Yourself ethic that's grown out of the underground scene. Soon we'll be able to create and send multi-media non-linear narrative over the wires and into computers all around the world. And, yes, it's true, many artists will continue to depend on the institutionalized system to nurture them through their careers. The comfort of the old system will keep a lot of artists happy with things the way they are. We can hear them already saying something like "but I'm a writer, I don't have time for all this other stuff." To which we'll respond: "You can't afford NOT to find the time . . .

     "Reading through a hypertext, one senses that just under the surface of the screen is a vast reservoir of story waiting to be   found."

--Robert Coover, New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1993: 1. . . . for all this other stuff lest you be left behind."

I. The Avant-Popster is a nomadic voyager, a cultural terrorist, whose identity is constantly in flux. He/she secretly "becomes" something like Woman or the open-endedness of feminine imagination, reclaiming the terrain vis-a-vis the enactment of subliminal postures/gestures that sabotage the system's rigidity. Our strategy is to deterritorialize the institutional effects so as to generate a new level playing-field where the action of bees and bodies buzzing can once again ignite the language of our spiritual unconscious.

Our dilemma then becomes how to make the Electric real while simultaneously making the desert of our souls virtually inhabitable.

Contexto

Autoras

Fuentes

Enlaces

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19961028035137/http://www.altx.com/memoriam/pomo.html

@@ Línea 1: / Línea 1: @@
 == <small>'''Texto'''</small> ==
-'''SMELLS LIKE AVANT-POP:'''
+'''A.''' Whereas it's true that certain strains of modernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, capitalism and even marxism pervade the Avant-Pop sensibility, the major difference is that the artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents, who have much less influence over them). Many of the early practitioners of postmodernism, from Beckett to Vargas Ilosa, Borges to Silko, Davenport to Lessing, Gaddis to Garcia Marquez, who came into active adult consciousness and textual production in the forties, fifties, sixties and early seventies, tried desperately to keep themselves away from the forefront of the newly powerful Mediagenic Reality that was rapidly becoming the space where most of our social exchange was taking place. Despite its early insistence on remaining caught up in the academic and elitist art world's presuppositions of self institutionalization and incest, early postmodernism found itself overtaken by the popular media engine; out of such extremely diverse writers as Abish, Ballard, Barthelme, Burroughs, Coover, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and even Nabokov, whose Lolita is one of the first fictional Avant-Popsters, the A&P began its move toward increasing recognition.
-'''An Introduction, of Sorts'''
+'''B.''' Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A&P artists have had to work hard not to become so enamored by the false consciousness of the mass media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives, the single most important one of which is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would, sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. Avant-Popsters thus turn into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is. We have acquired immunity from the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry and are now ready to offer our own weirdly concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease that infects the core of our collective life.
-Lance Olsen & Mark Amerika
+'''C.''' Whereas Avant-Popsters are fully aware of their need to maintain a crucial avant-sensibility as it drives the creative processing of their work, and attaches itself to the avant-garde lineage from which they spring, they are also quick to acknowledge the need to develop more open-minded strategies that will allow them to attract attention within the popularized forms of representation that fill the contemporary Mediascape. Our collective mission is to radically alter Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesture that grows out of the work of many twentieth-century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch); movements like fluxus, situationism, lettrism and neo-hoodooism; and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Slint, L7, Pavement, Stereolab, Meccanormal {this list of bands constantly changes everytime the manifesto is read aloud}...
-"Terrorism is a way to health. Health is the lusting for infinity and dying of all variants. Health is not stasis. It is not repression of lusting or dying. It is no bonds. The only desire of any terrorist is NO BONDS though terrorists don't desire. Their flaming jumping
+The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked experience. One way to achieve this goal is to create and expand virtual niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene and Internet. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively generated electronic publications, individually designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi-media interactive hypertexts, conferences, and so forth, Avant-Popsters and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist-author creates her/his beautifully-crafted, original works consumed primarily by the elitist art world and their business cronies who pass judgment on what is appropriate and what is not.
-passions are infinite, but are not them."
---Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School
+Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. Avant-Pop artists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with writing.
-"May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude."
+'''D.''' Avant-Popsters welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals with whom we can communicate and collaborate. The future of writing is moving away from the lone creator sitting behind a keyboard cranking out magical, mystical verse so that one day he or she may find an editor or agent or publisher who will hype her or his work to those interested in commercial literary culture. Instead, the future of writing will feature more multi-media collaborative authoring that will make itself available to hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of potential associates around the world actively internetworking in their own niche communities. Our audience will be both immediate and global, and our identities will remain forever in flux as we develop self-designed nodes of operation from which to distribute our multi-media litware. As Hakim Bey, author of the ontologically-anarchic book of guerrilla aesthetics, Temporary Autonomous Zones, recently said in the magazine Dreamtime Talkingmail, we're exploring "the possibility of an art which is by no means 'sensible' in the Civilizational sense of the word, but which is nevertheless devoted with PASSIONATE INTENSITY to COMMUNICATION, and thus to a certain kind of situational clarity and accessibility" ("Anarcho-Aesthetics and The Problem of Clarity," Dreamtime Talkingmail [Winter 1994]:12.)
---Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner
+Can you imagine what The Futurists would have done with an Information Superhighway?
-'''ELECTRONIC DISPATCHERS'''
+'''E.''' The distribution formula will radically change from: Author --> Agent --> Editor/Publisher --> Printer --> Distributor --> Retailer --> Consumer to a more simplified and direct:
-To: reverend_amerika@kafka.central.org
+Author (Sender) --> Interactive Participant (Receiver)
-Subject: Avant-Pop & Dada's Doorstep
-Cybergreetings Amerika! Listen, I've been totally psyched about this *In Memoriam To Postmodernism* collection we've been working on and wanna open up a short e-mail rap with you about it. Namely, what I'd like to know, is do you really think that the Avant-Pop is that which supersedes pomo, as you've suggested, or is it rather a subset of pomo?
+Avant-Popsters and their pirate signals promoting wild station identifications are ready to expand into your home right now, just log on, click around and find them. Mark Amerika's own new electronic publishing enterprise, Alternative-X, can be visited by navigating your World Wide Web server or Gopher software to the site at marketplace.com.
-To: freelance@daydream.nation.com
+'''F.''' One of the main tenets of postmodernism is: I, whoever that is, will put together these bits of data and form a Text, while you, whoever that is, will produce your own meaning based on what you bring to the Text. One of the main tenets of Avant-Pop writing is: I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning.
-Subject: No Mo Po Mo
-Freelance! Great to hear from you! Hey man, please, No Mo Po Mo! I mean there's no question that Avant-Pop grows out of many rhizomatic lineages and traditions including the weird pomo fictioneers like Barthelme, Pynchon, Madeline Gins and Steve Katz (whose _The Exagggerations of Peter Prince_ is *the* Avant-Pop novel par excellence). But somehow the metafictional strategies of postmodernism got totally absorbed by the mainstream media marketeers who took pleasure in rooting out whatever avant-garde spirit may have resided in the best work. This, of course, led to the neutralizing or neutering of pomo's potentially liberating effects. The thing about Avant-Popsters is that we're putting the *avant* back into the equation. Besides, wasn't it you who said the more one reads a pomo text the less pomo it becomes?
+In a Data Age where we all risk suffering from Information Sickness, one cure is a highly potent, creatively filtered tonic of (yes) textual (or multi-media) residue spilled from the depths of our spiritual unconscious. Creating a work of art will depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select, organize and present the bits of raw data he or she has at her or his disposal. We all know originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual realities are always already readymade and ready for consumption!
-To: reverend_amerika@kafka.central.org
+'''G.''' The future of the book is happening now. True, the idea that books as hard or paperbound products coming back from the printer so that they can then go to the distributor who will try and convince retailers that their consumers will want to buy them is not in danger of becoming obsolete any time soon.
-Subject: Same Old Same Old?
-Absolutely. Remember that first head-jarring ride you took through a book like Acker's _Empire of the Senseless_? All that near-hypertextual aesthetics of trash, the broken-backed sentences, the high-grade anger, the mind-bending exploration of and delight in taboo, the extravagant pla(y)giarism, the lollapalooza lambasting of plot? Only then, when you went back and reread it, you realized that the language somehow seemed more transparent the second time around. The narratological anarchy gave way to the tight tripartite discipline of three sections which explore the different pre- and post-revolutionary universes of a world where gender and identity are fluid and heading toward terminal transformation. Writers like Acker (and Burroughs before her) have taught our generation of writers that we have to wake up in the midst of all this reality-studio dreaming. Let's face it, our society is run by control freaks like Dr. Benway whose reason for being is the manipulation of our addictions. Addictions he and his cronies create *for* us!
+Nor is the lone author, cranking out her or his writing wares at home only to send them off to distant agents/editors/publishers so that his/her work can then take part in this Author-->Agent-->Publisher--> Printer-->Distributor-->Retailer-->Consumer formula. Books will remain books and bookstores will continue to sell them. Writers will continue to get single-digit royalties and the distributors and bookstores will continue to reap most of the profit. The Best-Sellers list and the New York establishment will continue to maintain their rockhard hegemony.
-To: freelance@daydream.nation.com
+'''BUT:''' now there's more to communication, more to language, more to text production, than the book. There are all manner of videos, graphic novels, dissident comix, CD-ROMS, computer hypertexts, earplays, and, soon, in a universally-accessible location near you, a small black box that will sit on top of your reconstructed soon-to-be-a-computer TV that will bring into your private space all kinds of fireworks created by (yep, it's true) writers. Electronic writers. Which, it ends up, most of us already are.
-Subject: Onwards & Outwards
-Yeah, right! So the Avant-Pop, then, becomes a way to turn Benway and his cronies back against themselves so that they self-destruct! Sort of like one of those Jean Tinguely or Survival Research Lab experiments. Use the media to subvert the media. Become subversive *mediums*. This Avant-Pop scene still seems very much in development, which I really like. So many people want the regurgitated soundbite in order to go out and repeat the party-line. Well, there may be an Avant-Pop party going on, but there sure ain't no line! Still, though, we seem to have had a blast tracing it's possible lineage and strategies. This has been mindblower! But let's get to the meat of the matter and put this *Smells Like A-P* spirit on-line! Catch you on the fast loop!
+'''H.''' Technology is becoming more accessible and software is getting better. Soon we can start thinking seriously of publishing ourselves in our home offices, virtual brain centers--without being accused of vanity, thanks to the growing Do It Yourself ethic that's grown out of the underground scene. Soon we'll be able to create and send multi-media non-linear narrative over the wires and into computers all around the world. And, yes, it's true, many artists will continue to depend on the institutionalized system to nurture them through their careers. The comfort of the old system will keep a lot of artists happy with things the way they are. We can hear them already saying something like "but I'm a writer, I don't have time for all this other stuff." To which we'll respond: "You can't afford NOT to find the time . . .
-'''ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES'''
+      "Reading through a hypertext, one senses that just under the surface of the screen is a vast reservoir of story waiting to be   found."
+--Robert Coover, New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1993: 1.
+. . . for all this other stuff lest you be left behind."
-Even though artists like Richard Brautigan, Andy Warhol, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Velvet Underground spoke what we would later realize was the language of Avant-Pop, there was still, in our minds, something missing from much of the postmodern work produced in the sixties and seventies, something that didn't quite click with our tele-visual, compu-corder, audio-digitized viewing habits. It wasn't until the eighties, with the emergence of such edge-runners as Kathy Acker, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Sonic Youth, and Mark Leyner, that we really began to recognize texts with which we felt directly connected. The result? The appearance, or the reappearance, or the continuation (depending on your perspective and your sense of aesthetic history) of the Avant-Pop.
+'''I.''' The Avant-Popster is a nomadic voyager, a cultural terrorist, whose identity is constantly in flux. He/she secretly "becomes" something like Woman or the open-endedness of feminine imagination, reclaiming the terrain vis-a-vis the enactment of subliminal postures/gestures that sabotage the system's rigidity. Our strategy is to deterritorialize the institutional effects so as to generate a new level playing-field where the action of bees and bodies buzzing can once again ignite the language of our spiritual unconscious.
-"This blurring of the traditional distinctions between 'high' and 'pop' art becomes a central, defining feature of postmodernism itself. Today such distinctions are, if anything, even more difficult to maintain than they were only a quarter of a century ago. Should rock videos by Madonna, Peter Gabriel, or Laurie Anderson be considered mainstream simply because they are enormously popular--even though they employ visual and poetic techniques that twenty-five years ago would certainly have been considered highly experimental? Is William Gibson's 'cyberpunk' novel, Neuromancer, 'avant-garde' since it employs unusual formal techniques (the use of collage, cut-ups, appropriation of other texts, the introduction of bizarre new vocabularies and metaphors)? Or does its publication bythe genre science-fiction industry establish it as pop? Are television shows like Max Headroom, the early Saturday Night Live, or David Lynch's recent Twin Peaks 'underground' works because they utilize so many features associated with postmodern innovation---or 'pop art' because they were, in fact, 'merely' television shows?"
+Our dilemma then becomes how to make the Electric real while simultaneously making the desert of our souls virtually inhabitable.
---Larry McCaffery, "The Avant-Pop Phenomenon," in ANQ 5.4 (October 1992): 216.
-"The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors," Borges writes at the conclusion of his famous essay on Kafka's retro-influence on Browning and others. "His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." In retrospect, things shift in such a way as to make perfect sense. Turning up the amp, we can hear the first sonic chord of the Avant-Pop's buzz-clip in Eliot's vogue use and abuse of ragtime rhythms and cinematic montage in his plagiarized and pastiched The Waste Land. Or, one major tweak of the fuzz-knob and we hear Joyce's schizophrenic daydream bliss unwinding at the end of Ulysses. The feedback loop is alive and well and we can see it in dada, surrealism, Sergeant Pepper, Dos Passos's newsreels in The Big Money, Faulkner's lurid genre fiction in Sanctuary, Ginsberg in his quintessentially hip Howl, and the acidic metacommentary of Lenny Bruce. Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Nam June Paik, Gilbert and George, Joseph Beuys, David Bowie.
-Similar to cyberpunk, beatnik poetry, Generation X, and every other label you've seen hit the market in the last forty or so years, the Avant-Pop is suddenly appearing everywhere you look, like a new word you've just added to your vocabulary and now see on every page you read, or a new viral strain, one that is the genetically-engineered fusion of these two extremes: 1) the avant-garde's impulse to push the aesthetic envelope, and 2) a specific sensibility's addiction to (and usually ambivalence with) pop culture in all its manifestations--especially electronic realities. Every day, as the boundaries between those extremes blur even further, many artists who've grown up teething on TV, the computer, the camcorder, the CD, and now the hypertext, CD-ROM, and VR, find themselves increasingly exposed to an aesthetically experimental lineage found in the material taught in college courses, on the increasingly accessible databanks converging on the Internet, and through a thriving underground network of zines and performance-happenings that introduce to the always-in-formation cultural nomad a surprisingly rich variety of altered perspectives grooving in pleasure-ridden situations.
-That lineage, interestingly and appropriately enough, has its metaphorical origins in the military. The term avant-garde first surfaced at the end of the eighteenth century to designate the elite shock troops of the French army whose mission was to engage with the enemy in small, intense battles so as to pave the way for the main body of fighters. By 1830, it was appropriated by utopian socialists to refer to those people of vision--artists, philosophers, scientists--who would help usher in the new ideal society. And by 1870, it had morphed out of the realm of warriors and pure politics, become commonly used to identify successive movements of writers, musicians, artists, and other performers who, with typical in-your-face elan, were intent on developing their own formal opposition to everything mainstream.
-During the next few decades, especially from the beginning of World War I through World War II, the term became readily associated with such revolutionary streams as expressionism, futurism, and constructivism, and, in the late fifties and sixties, as many of the Avant-Popsters were just being born, and such premier postmodernists as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, and Thomas Pynchon were beginning or continuing to mine this radically opulent vein, widespread cultural and political upheavals fueled vanguard-ideas like the Death of The Novel, the Death of the Author, and the Death of the Critic--anything, in other words, that might signal the clarion call of the avant-garde tradition whose calling-card obstructionism ran the risk of stabilizing, neutralizing, petrifying, and devolving under the ever-present pressure of capitalist commodification (cf. Avant-Guard, product-name for that screen protecting you from all those evil rays emanating from your computer; or Avant-Card, the Hallmark-like gift shop in downtown Boulder).
-Instead, though, a certain group of artists who never conceived of themselves as a group of artists appropriated, embraced, pla(y)giarized, and subverted that commercial pop thrust, emblem of the extraordinary influence mass media has had over the development of myriad minds in our generation. Growing up . . .
 == <small>'''Contexto'''</small> ==