Book Review: ‘How to Be Avant-Garde,’ by Morgan Falconer

HOW TO BE AVANT-GARDE: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art, by Morgan Falconer

In July 1915, on the shores of Lake Garda, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti mounted his army-issue bicycle to perform military drills alongside the rest of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists. In the hot Italian sun they raced their bicycles up hills under an enemy bombardment simulated by “a hail of vegetables.” Six years earlier, Marinetti had published the Futurist Manifesto, declaring, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”

A desire for danger and destruction was quickly extinguished by the reality of trench warfare; several Futurists were killed or badly injured in World War I, including Marinetti’s close friend Umberto Boccioni, who died after falling from a horse in 1916.

Marinetti is the first character we meet in Morgan Falconer’s cultural survey “How to Be Avant-Garde.” The book rushes readers at a velocity Marinetti would have enjoyed through Futurism, Dada and Surrealism of the early 20th century to the Situationists of the 1960s. Falconer’s motivation for lightly treading such well-worn paths was a trip to the annual Art Basel art fair in Miami Beach, where, wandering the halls of the local convention center, he confronted work that “felt new in some unimportant way. … There were emotive, vulnerable portraits of rappers, and paintings collaged with advertisements for melons from a German grocery store.”

Dismayed by what he saw — “Was I going to be sick?” he asked himself — Falconer, an art historian who teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, repaired to a nearby beach and recalled the Futurists’ famous vow to “destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind.”

Despite declaring himself “a person who likes art,” Falconer seems inexplicably exasperated by it. He apparently conceived “How to Be Avant-Garde” as a guide to historical movements that sought to “end art,” or at least radically reinvent it, with a view to finding inspiration for how we might do the same today. Yet he never makes quite clear how Marinetti’s dream of “an art of the future,” or the Dutch artist (and member of the de Stijl movement) Piet Mondrian’s of merging art with everyday life, should galvanize artists working now.

Falconer clearly finds it easier to write about people than ideas. Marinetti emerges as a kind of anarchic scout leader and André Breton, Surrealism’s founder, comes across as a work-shy dilettante. What’s fascinating in Falconer’s brief studies of these avant-gardists is how, in stark contrast to many artists today, their art-making seemed to exist outside the context of the market. (Of course, there were far fewer collectors or speculators at the time.)

In one of the book’s more illuminating passages, Falconer describes how Marcel Duchamp went years without producing much of anything, preferring instead to play chess. His most famous work, “Fountain” (1917), a urinal he signed with the name “R. Mutt,” remained virtually unknown for nearly 30 years. When the artist Georgia O’Keeffe visited Duchamp’s New York studio in 1922 with her future husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz — one of the first people to photograph “Fountain,” thereby, Falconer writes, having “the work baptized as art” — she recalled, “The room looked as though it had never been swept. … The dust was everywhere so thick that it was hard to believe.” A far cry from the pristine, laboratory-like studios of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.

Because “How to Be Avant-Garde” has no clear conceptual through line, however, context and detail are often missing. World War I haunts the book, as do the politics of communism and fascism, but their effects on the art are never sufficiently analyzed. Freud warrants a few paragraphs on the occasion of Breton’s meeting with him in Vienna in 1921. Breton decried the doctor as a “little old man with no style … in a shabby office worthy of the neighborhood GP.” But there is no mention of the rather barbed correspondence about dreams that the men shared in 1932, and we are left wanting more about the interaction between these two giants of 20th-century culture.

“How to Be Avant-Garde” is, as Falconer writes of Breton, full of “ambition and half-formed ideas.” In his final pages, the author laments the kind of fair, now ubiquitous in the art world, that prompted him to write his book. “What is most sad, though,” he reflects, “is how the fairs elevate and celebrate the most conservative modes of art and do so with little or no interest in bringing change to art.” It’s a shame that he did not write a book about this: how the fairs, with their one-stop-shopping homogeneity and brazen commodifying, are slowly rotting away the spirit of contemporary art. That would have been truly avant-garde.

HOW TO BE AVANT-GARDE: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art | By Morgan Falconer | Norton | 276 pp. | $32.99