In the Master’s Bedroom

Abstract

The argument Peter Burger makes in Theory of the Avant-Garde turns on the notion of institutional critique. If dada, surrealism, and the Russian avantgarde were truly radical, he maintains, this must be understood against the historical conditions that made that radicalism possible, conditions Burger locates in the very autonomy modernism had so painfully won for aesthetic production. For if this autonomy liberated art, it did so, ironically, only into the jail of its own institutional incarceration, freeing art from that very field of social praxis that could supply it with seriousness or purpose. The independence which the institution of art now supported and maintained — an independence from the social field of the patron, the moral one of the receiver, the objective one of the referent — was the independence of a closed and self-immured system: it was the very picture of alienation and the very rootlessness of the commodity condition. The institutional form of this autonomy consolidated itself during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening ones of the twentieth. By the end of the First World War this institution with its dealers, its system of exhibitions, its thirst for artist-authors, its marketing of the new, had emerged as an observable entity. It was this institution, Bürger insists, that the historical avant-gardes attacked.¹