The avant-garde as a movement towards the present

Abstract

_{This text attempts to reconsider the threads of topicality and happening as the factors defining the artistic avant-garde movement, understood as a creative formation with identifiable common assumptions that transcend disciplinary divisions and historical classifications. I have decided to assume that a large part of modern art remains faithful to the distinctive avant-garde aspirations. It seems that today, as at the beginning of the 20th century, the present appears to the artists as still difficult to grasp. This phenomenon manifests itself in both the discussion of art’s own borders in the contemporary context, and in its attempts to understand and interpret the changes in the modern life. The intensive focusing of art on the present can be viewed as a lack of reflection, but also as a response to the process of modernisation, i.e. as being unable to separate from it. Some philosophical and anthropological investigations concerning time and the idea of the present (including, above all, the concepts of the “absolute present” of Karl Heinz Bohrer, "modern Constitution" by Bruno Latour and the suspicions concerning the present of the so-called "philosophy of suspicion") will in turn allow for probative diagnoses of the potential causes for anxiety concerning the directions of the contemporary development of art, which can still be observed in its colloquial reception.}