In 1916, poets Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck took to the stage of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, shouting pugnacious nonsense verse at the top of their lungs at an often bewildered audience, accompanied in their performance by bells, whistles and the beat of a tom-tom.
In 1958, French painter and provocateur Yves Klein invited the public to attend an exhibit of nothing at all — no paintings sullied the blankness of the gallery’s bare white walls.
In 1971, conceptual artist Chris Burden paid a friend to shoot him in the arm; two years later he pushed live electric wires into his chest — all in the name of art.
In the ’80s, performance artist Karen Finley . . . well, we can’t tell you what Karen Finley did. Suffice it to say that it involved canned yams and that it made Sen. Jesse Helms very, very unhappy.
Stefania de Kenessey, for her part, says enough is enough.
“I believe it’s virtually impossible to do anything new to shock the public,” she says. “I think it was possible and fun to do in the ’20s, the ’30s and the ’40s, and maybe even in the ’50s and ’60s, but this is 1997.”
Nevertheless, she notes sadly, the avant-garde — or those who take themselves to be the avant-garde — still haven’t gotten over their rebellious posturing. De Kenessey, a classical composer and professor of music at the New School for Social Research in New York, is simply bored with it all — with all those dissonant symphonies and unreadable poems and all that extravagantly ugly conceptual art.
“It seems to me quite possible in this day and age when you’ve seen as many abstract canvases as you possibly could want to see, and seen everything smashed on a canvas from plates to dead fish, that it might be really interesting to try to just paint a painting that shows something,” she remarks, a note of exasperation creeping into her voice. “After a century of complete and utter experimentation in all the arts, I firmly believe that the only way to actually go ahead is to use elements of the past, not simply because one wants to return to the past, or because the past is perfect, or somehow more perfect than the present, but because the avoidance of the past is no longer interesting at the end of the 20th Century.”
And so, in an attempt to conjure up a different kind of art, one that looks to the past as a way to find a route to the future, De Kenessey decided to found her own art movement, the whimsically named “Derriere Guard.”
Rather than attempting to shock the bourgeoisie, De Kenessey and the other Derriere Guardists want to challenge those who’ve become convinced that art has to be “in your face, unpleasant, conceptual. What we’re trying to show is that one can be equally provocative by doing things that can offer pleasure — and that can still be quite challenging and sophisticated. Shocking not on the surface, but much more profoundly revelatory, and perhaps even shocking, underneath the surface.”
The weapons of choice for these new traditionalists? “Contemporary classical music that actually has melodies and harmonies and all those `old-fashioned’ things,” De Kenessey says, “and painting which uses realistic and figurative techniques.” Architecture with classic lines.
Poems that have meter and rhyme.
Last spring in New York, the group dropped a small bomb into the heart of the art establishment, holding a four-day festival of the arts featuring painting, music, poetry — and a keynote address by author Tom Wolfe, who, delighted with the very idea of a “Derriere Guard,” waived his normally considerable speaking fee for the evening.
The event was held in the belly of the beast, as it were — in the dark cavern of a performance space known as the Kitchen, the home turf of the contemporary avant-garde, and where Finley herself used to ply her curious trade. Wolfe was just the icing on the cake. His appearance there, De Kenessey recalls with satisfaction, “was lovely, not just because he’s a lovely man and a hilarious speaker, but because he has this penchant for wearing white suits, and we did (the event) at the Kitchen, which is a very grungy, downtown space, painted all black. So the visual contrast was quite striking.”
The festival enraged a number of critics. It also sold out all four days. Next spring, the Derriere Guard is planning to drop a similar bomb here in Chicago — in the form of another four-day festival, to be held in March, organized by De Kenessey and by Chicago composer Robert Ian Winstin.
What is traditional?
As with most art movements these days, the Derriere Guard has its own manifesto. “Novelty itself has finally grown old and shopworn,” it boldly proclaims. “What was once profoundly revolutionary (modernism and its successor, postmodernism) is now the ruling orthodoxy; or, to put it another way, the avant-garde has become the status quo.”
The “real cutting edge,” the Derriere Guardists insist, are those young (and semi-young) artists, writers and musicians “who are actively re-engaging history . . . fusing tradition with innovation.”
The serious music of tomorrow, in other words, could well be as catchy as Hanson; the most radical painting of the new millennium might well be a gentle landscape.
De Kenessey is not the first, of course, to have noticed that what was once the avant-garde has now become old hat. Back in 1959, art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote of the way in which the art establishment, leaping “from vanguard to vanguard,” had “accepted revolution as a tradition.”
“The `latest’ styles in art have been with us from birth,” he wrote. “The famous `modern break with tradition’ has lasted long enough to have produced its own tradition.”
The Derriere Guard has had its share of detractors. After the New York festival last spring, Village Voice music critic Kyle Gann dismissed the event’s musical offerings as “a pompous attempt to claim validity for incompetence.” And Gann was being gentle. Whitney Museum Director David Ross told a reporter for Reason magazine the Derriere Guardists were “a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative (expletive deleteds).” Even neoconservative art critic Hilton Kramer, not exactly a reliable booster of all things avant, derided the Derrieristas as talentless publicity seekers.
True, the Derriere Guard is not exactly publicity shy — when dropping off information on the upcoming Chicago festival, festival co-director Winstin managed to include, in addition to a small booklet on the event, two separate Robert Ian Winstin fact sheets, two glossy photos of Robert Ian Winstin, an advertisement for a Robert Ian Winstin CD, and two copies of the desktop-published, eponymously titled Robert Ian Winstin newsletter (which, in an “editor’s note,” declares “the music of *Robert Ian Winstin* (to be) exciting, original, and accessible. Audiences throughout the world have been entranced by RIW’s spectacular music.”).
This isn’t nostalgia
The Derrieristas, though, take the criticism in stride, seeming to regard the uncharitable remarks of Gann and Ross and Kramer as the knee-jerk reactions of old fashioned avant-gardists afraid of any big changes in the art world that might unsettle their own relatively comfortable positions.
“If I were perpetuating an art form that was so unpopular with the general public as modern art tends to be, as modern music certainly is, and I made my living from that, I would be very worried that the tide would turn against it, and I would be very defensive about it,” Winstin remarks. “I think it’s almost impossible to defend 80 percent of what is created under the so-called category of modern art as art.”
But, Winstin and de Kenessey both make clear, one should not view their movement as simply a reactionary return to the past. Both have paid their postmodernist dues: De Kenessey studied with new-music maven Milton Babbitt, and Winstin notes that he spent 15 years composing experimental music, following in the footsteps of such unlistenable modernist giants as Schoenberg and Webern. The experiment, such as it was, turned out to be a failure. “I came to the realization that for me and for the average listener, it didn’t work,” Winstin says.
Now, like the brothers Gallagher in the Brit-pop band Oasis, Winstin finds his inspiration in the music of The Beatles. “I have gradually come to the realization that The Beatles knew more about simple harmonic rhythm, and the effects that a stunning musical line can have on your emotions, than I did (as an experimental composer),” he wrote in the concert program for his Symphony No. 5. “Perhaps John, Paul, George & Ringo should be credited with my epiphany: Music can touch both the heart as well as the brain.”
Important vs. self-important
While many art movements of the past have filled their pronouncements with apocalyptic rhetoric, De Kenessey and Winstin look upon the future with a certain quiet optimism. They are not afraid to evoke corny words like “beauty”; they are willing, even, to joke a little — as the name Derriere Guard suggests. It’s hard to get too strident when the name of your movement contains a reference to the human posterior. “One of the things that irks me about 20th Century movements in general is that they are very self-important,” De Kenessey says. “And I think it’s quite possible to be doing things in the arts that are quite important without being self-important about it. Art has the potential to be both serious and lively at the same time.”
And so, while many of her contemporaries worry about the shrinking audience for serious music and art, De Kenessey is more hopeful. “I think there’s a potentially enormous audience” for serious, if not somber, art and music, she says. “Quite a lot of people, for example, who don’t read poetry, who don’t go to contemporary art galleries, who don’t go to new music concerts, would if given a chance to hear something that is pleasant to listen to, something that has a certain degree of sophistication but that is still agreeable on a first listening. They would read more poetry if they could understand what it was talking about.
“I think it’s possible to do what Shakespeare and Mozart did, which is to create art that is incredibly sophisticated on repeated examination but really wonderful the first time around too. That’s what we’re trying to go for.
“Of course,” she adds, her modesty taking a moment to catch up with her, “that’s pretty tough competition, Mozart and Shakespeare. But we’re trying.”
