The Weakness of Images. Avant-garde, Survival, and Repetition: A Debate that Returns

Abstract

Between 2021 and 2023, a series of essays were published in Argentina with the aim of rethinking the temporality of the "avant-gardes," prompted by inquiries arising from contemporary art and culture. Works such as Qué será la vanguardia. Utopías y nostalgias en la literatura contemporánea (Premat, 2021), La vanguardia permanente (Kohan, 2021), Lo que sobra (Tabarovsky, 2023), and El surrealismo rosa de hoy (Villanueva, 2021) scrutinize the categorical and often historiographical issues that the term continues to raise, as well as the persistence and challenges it still holds. Taking this short corpus as a starting point, this article aims to recover some of their hypotheses and to evaluate them from a less explored perspective: one that reconsiders the question of the avant-gardes no longer as a dilemma between “obsolescence" and "survival", but in terms of "self-impugnation" and "repetition". Through this displacement, the objective is to maintain an unstable yet necessary distinction between the kind of act inaugurated by the avant-gardes —as that which can be repeated or revealed— and their effects. To accomplish this, the perspective of Boris Groys regarding the "low” and “weak” visibility of avant-garde images is revisited.