Thanks very much, Richard, and thank you all for coming. I'm sorry it's going to be uncomfortable for many of you. I'll try to speak up, and I'm reading something, so it should go quickly. I'm not showing too much of my work—about four slides of my work and a video that I made a year ago, which is just going to run, while I talk, behind me. Because it's quite a theoretical text, I thought it might help to have something else going on. So if you get bored with this, you can look at that, or if that's not interesting, you can come back to me.

I always feel very nervous about lectures, so I really try to get myself in the right frame of mind by getting dressed up and having a drink beforehand. It's a talk on theories of the avant-garde, aspects of the avant-garde, with an emphasis on intoxication. I hope that it doesn't go to my head too much. But I'll put this video on [Flies, 2003], and maybe we could have the lights . . .

October, definitely the month of iconoclasm. After Richard Roth's talk, here is yet another one that proposes there might be something to gain from reconsidering the role of the avant-garde. And in the tradition of VCU responses, I welcome flyposting in the school tomorrow, but I should inform you that my penis is already very small, which doesn't leave you much opportunity for further reductions. I don't have any secure answers, really, to the question of the avant-garde, just a few propositions. Perhaps you'll be able to help me out along the way. These are really propositions rather than assertions or statements, and any feedback would be valuable. In a way, in a sense, this paper would be better if it was given in a workshop situation for discussion.

Here we go.

In the background to these thoughts also are speculations about whether what goes on in any art school really constitutes an education, whatever we decide that ought to be. I don't want to be misunderstood in this point, so I should clarify just one thing. Although I have some doubts about current art school education, I am certain that the questioning that goes on now in most schools is more productive than the kind of academic training I received at Edinburgh College of Art, where we rehearsed life drawing and life painting, still life and landscape, four out of five weekdays. We were really student casualties of an administrative and academic failure to address the implications of any twentieth-century artistic innovation, let alone respond to the intense questioning of the value of culture going on in Britain during the 1970s. Learning to draw and paint in that way is really to learn nothing.

And so to the avant-garde, the term which qualifies much of what we understand as significant twentieth-century art and whose legacy of innovation and questioning still informs the remit for significant student work. I wonder what conceptions you have of this phenomenon. You might consider for a moment what the term avant-garde means to you. Maybe you have some embarrassing recollection, like a teenage crush you'd rather forget about; as in, "Yeah, the avant-garde, wasn't it weird that that was so important once?" Or maybe you use it in a throwaway manner, where its meaning is just an empty shell, as in, "Hey, this is so avant-garde." Or maybe, maybe something ambitious with political goals in mind, as in: "By Friday, my avant-garde work will have changed . . . the world, Richmond, whatever."

The fact that it's easier to find a voice for the first two instances, for the fading away or empty versions, indicates how unlikely a plausible agenda for the avant-garde has become. Its everyday usage is awkward. We're aware, without even thinking about it, of the increasing distance between its historical importance and its current lightweight status, disengaged from real achievements.

I'm making a few assumptions in this talk. They concern the avant-garde's antagonism to society while continuing to receive its support and approval, the kind of approach which says, "I hate you, but give me a grant, please." This complicity with what it attacks is well known to anyone familiar with avant-garde studies.

Because this isn't really the time or place to go into this in much detail I'll try to be brief. The history first.

There's no doubt that from the start the avant-garde meant opposition, with the result that political engagement forms the backdrop in front of which the avant-garde has continued to perform ever since. From the Parisian Saint-Simonists in the 1830s issues the call in the first place for artists to form an avant-garde and propagandize the socialist cause. This link between aesthetic and political radicalities remains evident for the rest of that century. Without actually calling themselves such, there are nineteenth-century artists working oppositionally like an avant-garde. In fact, until the 1870s the term had somewhat dilettantish connotations. But how was their opposition expressed?

Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, lithograph, 1834

How was this opposition expressed? T. J. Clark shows how Daumier's work [slide 1: Rue Transnonain, lithograph, 1834; slide 2: Saltimbanques] forms a compelling attack on French institutions.

And here is the work called Murders or Massacres at Rue Transnonain, which was Daumier's representation of the murders by government troops on innocent occupants of a house that happened to be next door to a barricade. The soldiers thought a shot had been fired at them from that house, and they massacred apparently all the men in the house, a lot of the other people, too.

Or his drawings of the traveling clowns, the Saltimbanques, who became, in the nineteenth century, a persecuted entertainer, and would really find it very hard to make a living. So Daumier's work was one example.