What is the avant-garde? The questionnaire as historiography

• Main Author: Lori Cole
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Art History, University of Birmingham 2011-12-01
• Series: Journal of Art Historiography
• Subjects: questionnaire; magazines; historiography; Revista de Avance; transition; Americas
• Online Access: http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/cole.pdf

In 1928 the Cuban magazine Revista de Avance issued a questionnaire asking, ‘What should (Latin) American art be?’ while the same year the expatriate magazine transition based in Paris, polled its North American contributors asking: ‘Why do Americans Live in Europe?’ and surveyed its European writers to ask: ‘How are the influences of the United States manifesting themselves upon Europe?’ By examining these questionnaires issued across the Atlantic in the same year, I examine the way the genre structures the artistic and political stakes of modernist print communities and illuminates the relationships these magazines establish between aesthetics and the Americas. Questionnaires functioned as print proxies by implying through their reproduction of multiple individual responses a much larger community of writers and readers. Both questionnaires work to interpellate the magazines’ dispersed communities and to emphasize the effects of their dis/location on their artistic purpose, ultimately forming a patchwork historiography of the avant-garde.