In an indeterminate place

Leop­ards break into the tem­ple and drink to the dregs what is in the sac­ri­fi­cial pitch­ers; this is repeated over and over again; finally, it can be cal­cu­lated in advance, and becomes part of the ceremony.

– Franz Kafka

(Trans­la­tion: Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)

Kafka’s para­ble of leop­ards in the tem­ple has always struck me as a per­fect alle­gory of the avant-garde in that it points out the tru­ism that in art the trans­gres­sive is ulti­mately absorbed into the canon. The fact that we can speak of a “tra­di­tion of the avant-garde” or of “avant-garde art” at all says as much. One is reminded of Susan Sontag’s obser­va­tion that “The his­tory of art is a sequence of suc­cess­ful trans­gres­sions,” as well as of the fol­low­ing lines by Quentin Crisp:

In an expand­ing uni­verse, time is on the side of the out­cast. Those who once inhab­ited the sub­urbs of human con­tempt find that with­out chang­ing their address they even­tu­ally live in the metropolis.

One won­ders in fact whether the trans­gres­sive is actu­ally any­thing more than a dop­pel­gänger of the canon­i­cal which, by its very nature, it needs and implies. As there can be no anti-novel with­out a novel, no meta-cinema with­out a cin­ema, no dode­caphony with­out dia­tonic har­mony, etc., that would seem to be the case. But does not the canon­i­cal, by virtue of the qual­i­ties and char­ac­ter­is­tics that con­sti­tute its speci­ficity, like­wise imply its oppo­site, i.e. a par­al­lel sys­tem that would fur­ther define and val­i­date it by the very chal­lenge of its exis­tence? That many anti-traditions are nearly as old as the tra­di­tions they seek to sub­vert seems to con­firm that supposition.

What­ever the case may be the two are clearly bound into a dialec­tic so tightly con­structed that they appear to be two dis­tinct yet inter­de­pen­dent modal­i­ties of a sin­gle activ­ity, as Henri Béhar plainly stated in a com­ment on Tris­tan Tzara’s early poems (and on Dada art gen­er­ally speak­ing): “There is no such thing as anti-art,” he wrote, “only artis­tic man­i­fes­ta­tions against art.”

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• The Kafka Project
• Susan Son­tag, “The Aes­thet­ics of Silence”

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Adden­dum [2.6.10]:
I just stum­bled across a review of the show “Leop­ards in the Tem­ple, Sculp­ture Cen­ter, New York” by Ariella Budick. Refer­ring to Kafka’s leop­ards, she writes: “As a metaphor for the art world, this lit­tle tale feels espe­cially apt. The avant-garde sys­tem­at­i­cally infil­trates the canon; yesterday’s out­rage devolves into tomorrow’s plat­i­tude.” Indeed. If you wish you may read the review here.

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Tagged: anti-art, Franz Kafka, Susan Sontag, the avant-garde

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