Reorienting the Avant-Garde: Novel Objects, Queer Sociabilities

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Joblin, Jessica
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 13, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Christopher Gervais Reed, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Christopher Gervais Reed, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Janet Wynne Lyon, Committee Member
Lisa Ruth Sternlieb, Committee Member
Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Outside Member
David Andrew Loewenstein, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- avant-garde
modernism
queer
sociability
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Marcel Duchamp
Duncan Grant
Virginia Woolf
Vita Sackville-West
Bryher - Abstract:
- This project contends with a few prevailing notions about the historic avant-gardes. I counter habits of viewing avant-garde creativity as the accomplishment of male mavericks or self-styled leaders. Relatedly, I trouble anti-domestic narratives of the historic avant-gardes that view the home as a source of complacency requiring escape or standardization to be sufficiently modern. I take issue with presentations of the avant-garde that see it as synonymous with virility or agitation, and I ask us to resist conflation of the avant-garde with certain experimental styles and aesthetics—bold typeface, minimalist interiors, scatological sculptures—seen as embodying those qualities of individualistic, masculine aggressiveness. This project contends with approaches eager to fossilize the avant-garde in certain canonic objects said to produce shock or rupture; instead, it turns us towards the possibilities for pleasure and play created by the interpretive irreconcilability of avant-garde objects. Such objects, I argue, served as pleasurable prompts for talk, speculation, flirtation, and artistic ripostes, which cohered the clusters of individuals we now consider avant-garde. Granting that shock might constitute an original affect produced by such objects, I argue that such a narrative suffices neither as explanation for the longevity of certain avant-garde groups nor for our continued interest in their creative output. Where museum display and art-historical canonization typically silo avant-garde creations as individual totems meant for serious contemplation and indulgence of authorial intent, I have placed certain avant-garde creations back into their original contexts in homes, on sidewalks, and in offices and cafes in order to demonstrate how these ambiguous objects embedded in everyday contexts elicited the pleasures and play of improvisation and irreverence. In short, I show how avant-garde groups used unconventional objects and domestic décor as prompts to invite unconventional sociability and cultivate subversive subcultures. Put differently, I consider the avant-garde’s most notorious creation to be itself, the very idea of the avant-garde. My analysis is animated by early twentieth-century sociologist Georg Simmel’s conception of “sociability,” which I put in conversation with the more contemporary body of thought known as queer theory. In Chapter 1, I highlight this overlap between theories of sociability and queerness in order to conceptualize both as forms of affinity based on irreducible difference rather than kinship or likeness. I argue that this is the ethos by which we should come to recognize key avant-garde groups. These groups reveled in ambiguous codes, signs, identities, and relationships, the kind endemic to queer subcultures and receptive to misreading, play, and variations on a theme; this openness to playful exegesis encourages conversation by keeping critical possibilities in play. In Chapter 2, I show how Dada creations, most specifically those of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Marcel Duchamp, and Richard Boix, serve as prompts, even fool’s errands, galvanizing interest in the activities of other artists and drawing them into relation through shared associations and scintillating sexual suggestions. I show how such artists incorporated associations apparent to those “in the know” to encourage speculation, foment interest, and sanction subversive sociability and sexualities. Chapter 3 examines how Bloomsbury, particularly Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West, embellished space to converse with possible queer pasts; their domestic interventions, I show, riddle epistemological certainties about gender and sexuality to sanction queer possibilities for relating in the present. In Chapter 4, I examine the public, semi-domestic space of a lesbian-run tea-room in London, as described in Bryher’s memoir The Days of Mars, 1940-1956 and her novel Beowulf. These texts serve as testament to a lived site of sociability and coded affinities for sexual dissidents and members of an avant-garde. Together, these chapters challenge the conventional narrative of the avant-garde artist as an individual who achieves heroic transcendence of the everyday. It shows instead the way that the avant-garde navigated everyday, domestic spheres, and how their object play helped constellate sociable spaces inclusive of alterity and generative of strange affinities. Throughout this project, the avant-garde comes to look less like any particular experimental style and more like a kind of stylized sociation put into motion through its objects.