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There is a moment when artistsgestures of rupture, which are not able to become acts(effective interventions in social processes), become rituals. The original impulse of the

vanguards brought them into association with the secularizing project of modernity; theirincursions sought to disenchant the world and desacralize the conventional, beautiful, complacentways in which bourgeois culture represented it. But the progressive incorporation of theirinsolence into museums, their reasoned digestion in the catalogs, and in the official teaching of

art, made the ruptures into a convention. They established, then, that the artistic production of thevanguards should be subjected to the most frivolous forms of ritualism: vernissages, the

presenting of awards and academic consecrations.

But vanguard art was also converted into ritual into a different sense. To explain it, wemust introduce a change in the generalized theory about ritual. It tends to study them as practices

of social reproduction. It is assumed that they are places where society reaffirms what it is,defends its order and its homogeneity. In part, this is true. But rituals can also be movements

toward a different order, which society still resists or proscribes. These are rituals for confirmingsocial relations and giving them continuity (celebrations attached to natural acts: birth,

marriage, death), and others are designed to effect in symbolic and occasional scenarios,impracticable transgressions in real or permanent form.

In his anthropological studies of the Kabyle, Bourdieu (1990a) notes that many rituals donot have the sole function of establishing the correct ways of acting, and therefore of separating

what is permitted from what is prohibited, but rather also of incorporating certain transgressionswhile limiting them. The ritual, cultural act par excellence (210), which seeks to impose order inthe world, fixes which conditions are legitimate necessary [end of p. 23]and inevitable

transgressions of limits (211). Historical changes that threaten the natural and social ordergenerate oppositions and confrontations that can dissolve a community. Ritual is capable of

operating, then, not as a simple conservative and authoritarian reaction in defense of the oldorder, but rather as a movement through which society controls the risk of change. Basic ritualactions are de facto denied transgressions. Ritual, through a socially approved and collectively

assumed operation, must resolve the contradiction that is established by constructing, as separate

and antagonistic, principles that have to be reunited to ensure the reproduction of the group(212).

In light of this analysis we can look at the peculiar type the vanguards establish. The

literature on ritualism is concerned chiefly with rites of entry or of passage: who, and with whatrequirements, may enter a house or a church; what steps must be fulfilled in order to pass fromone civil status to another or to assume an office or an honor. The anthropological contributionsto these processes have been used to understand the discriminatory operations in culturalinstitutions. The ritualization that museum architecture imposes on the public is described: rigid

itineraries, codes of action to be strictly represented and performed. Museums are like lay templesthat, like religious ones, convert objects of history and art into ceremonial monuments.

(Canclini, pp. 23-24)

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One ofthe most severe crisis of the modern is produced by this return of ritual without

mythsIn lacking totalizing accounts to organize history, the succession of bodies, actions, andgestures becomes a different ritualism than that of any other ancient or modern society. This newtype of ceremonialism does not represent a myth that integrates a community, nor theautonomous narration of the history of art. It does not represent anything except the organicnarcissism of each participant. (Canclini, p. 25)

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But then how do we go from each intimate and [end of p. 25] instantaneous explosion to thespectacle, which presupposes some kind of ordered duration of images and dialogue with the

viewers? How do we go from loose pronouncements to discourse, form solitary pronouncementsto communication? From the artists perspective, performances dissolve the search for autonomyof the artistic field into the search for the expressive emancipation of the subjects and, as thesubjects generally want to share their experiences, they fluctuate between creation for their ownsake and the spectacle; often this tension is the basis for aesthetic seduction.

This narcissistic exacerbation of discontinuity generates a new type of ritual, which is intruth an extreme consequence of what the vanguards came to do. We will call them rites of exit.

Given that the maximum aesthetic value is constant renovation, to belong to the art world onecannot repeat what already had been done---the legitimate, the shared. It is necessary to initiate

noncodified forms of representation (from impressionism to surrealism), invent unforeseenstructures (from fantastic to geometric art), and relate images that in reality belong to diverse

semantic chains and that no one had previously associated (from collages to performances). Noworse accusation can be made against a modern artist than to show repetitions in his or her work.According to this sense of permanent escape to be in the history of art one has to be constantly

leaving it.

On this point I see asociological continuity between modern vanguards and the

postmodern art that rejects them. Although postmodernists abandon the notion of rupture---key inmodern aesthetics---and use artistic images from other epochs in their discourse, their method of

fragmenting and dislocating them, the displaced or parodic readings of traditions, reestablish theinsular and self-referential character of the art world. Modern culture was formed by negatingtraditions and territories. Its impulse is still guided by museums that look for new audiences, by

itinerant experiences, and by artists who use urban spaces that are culturally dissimilar, produce

outside of their countries, and decontextualize objects. Postmodern art continues to practice theseoperations without claiming to offer something radically innovative, incorporating the past---butin an unconventional way---with that which renews the capacity of the artistic field to representthe ultimate legitimate difference.

Such transcultural experimentation engendered renovations in language, design, urbanforms, and youth practices. But the main fate of the vanguards and of the disenchanted rituals ofthe postmodernists has been the ritualization of museums and of the market. Despite thedesacralization of art and the artistic world and the new open channels to other audiences, the[end of p. 26] experimentalists accentuate their insularity. The primacy of form over function, ofthe form of saying over what is said, requires from the spectator a more and more cultivated

disposition in order to understand the meaning. Artists who inscribe in the work itself the

questioning about what the work should be, who not only eliminate the naturalist illusion of thereal and perspective hedonism but who rather make the destruction of conventions, even those oflast year, their method of visual enunciation, are assured, on the one hand, Bourdieu says, ofdominion in their field, but on the other hand, they exclude the spectator who is not disposed to

make his or her participation in art an equally innovative experience. Modern and postmodern artpropose a paradoxical reading, since they presuppose the dominion of the code ofcommunication that tends to question the code of communication (1971, 1352) .

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Are artists really assured of dominion in their field? Who remains as proprietor of theirtransgressions? By having accepted the artistic market and the museums, the rites of exit, and

incessant flight as the modern way of making legitimate art, do they not subject the changes to aframework that limits and controls them? What, then, is the social function of artistic practices?Have they not been assigned---with success---the task of representing social transformations, of

being the symbolic scenario in which the transgressions will be carried out, but within institutions

that demarcate their action and efficacy so that they do not disturb the general order of society?

It is necessary to rethink the efficacy of artistic innovations and irreverences, the limits oftheir sacrilegious rituals. Attempts to break the illusion in the superiority and the sublime of artare in the final analysis, according to Bourdieu, sacralizing desacralizations that scandalize noone but the believers. Nothing demonstrates better the tendency toward the self-absorbed

functioning of the artistic field than the fate of these apparently radical attempts at subversion,which themost heterodox guardians of artistic orthodoxy finally devour(1977, 8). (Canclini,

pp. 25-27)

Notes:

1. Pierre Bourdieu writes extensively on this topic

Works Cited

Canclini, Nestor. "From Utopias to the Market." Canclini, Nestor. Hybrid Cultures:

Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minessota

Press, 1995. 12-40.