avant-garde

avant-garde, a peculiar word i came across, long ago, while reading beyond-good and evil by Friedrich Nietzsche(yes the guy with the big mustache), i wrote a post back then, but decided to research a little further on it today, it may not feel very structured cuz its just a collection of thoughts and learnings;

i got to know its a term widely used in fashion industry, cinema, literatur3, very new to a sprouting-youth like me- can be used to depict an idea very much opposite to the current beliefs, to the point its considered idiotic: something contemporary, new, a logical end to our great values/thinking/identity; marks the end of something old being replaced by something new/radical, the transitioning phase where the old doesnt exactly accept the change is avant-garde; literally translates as “before, or advance-guard”. Something after the time period would be termed as arrier grande, people in the creative field tend to be referred by this word cuz they carry the burden of creation - its an obligation of artists to “serve as the avant-garde of the people”;

many art forms adequately represented are dadaism -> Anti art movement -> soon became a way to protest against the ww1, where artists willingly started created absurd figures which by no definition was considered as art acc to those times; a very good incident was Marcel Duchamp putting a urinal in an art gallery and calling it art; While Dadaism itself was short-lived and fragmented, it laid the philosophical and creative groundwork for later major movements, most notably Surrealism, Pop Art, etc.

For me, even picasso paints absurdly, spouting non-sense(in a literal way), saying that a true artist paints like a child, painting different subconscious representations of objects, announcing that a child paints without knowing any rules, an oddly great defence.

Now coming to the whole topic of discussion- from the book; the exact phrase which i vaguely remember was around the idea-

A woman painting with menstrual blood and calling it patriarchal decay

lemme accept, this statement itself deserves a great philosophical discussion, afterall Nietzsche said such a great phrase just like that: accords to me, its him being satirical, about the fact that the very thing, the menstrual blood, which makes up the biological identity of a women will act as a form of confrontation to the patriarchal society. the very sign of fertility, disgust(in many regions) will prove as a weapon against the oppressors.

i feel somewhat - avant-garde is subjective, interpretation based, varied from person to person; like for me, adolf hitler reading Nietzsche is not avant-garde cuz the very idea of Nietzsche proposing the Ubermensch or the master-morality-system or the life based on meritocracy, rather than free-will or equality is exactly what hitler was aiming at, but the catch was an authoritarian govt is needed for achieving this kind of goal/order for which defies the very idea of meritocracy in the first place, like who judged ur merit type of thing, but i am sure it represents a new age/appolonian or dionysian, doesnt matter which but something has to be there;

Nietzsche Ubermensch(a man of higher order concept) itself is avant-garde a dying need of the world which the people/herd currently is not realizing, its very ahead of time, is not even comfortable to listen to cuz it involves breaking the old shackles, its like the very thought of his, is ahead of mankind collectively as a specie also its avant-garde only till the time the herd-mindset exists, a paradox.

Some men are born posthumously, infact every wrong man is! cuz every wrong man becomes right after a period of time.

ps: i am very convinced by a reddit user saying that the concept of ILLuminati would have been Nietzsche’s wettest dream as ILLuminati was believed to be a group of highly intellectual people guiding the world towards, dono what, something, but surely avant-garde;