Design and Art Australia Online

John Gillies and the Craft of Video
Nicholas Zurbrugg
Writing in Trans-avantgarde International (1982) a mere decade ago, the Italian critic and curator Achille Bonito-Oliva argued that the whole “generalized situation of catastrophe” (p48) characterizing the late seventies and eighties had  “caused the historical optimism of the avant-garde – the idea of progress inherent in its experimentation with new techniques and new materials – to collapse” (p8).
In other words, whereas the more lucid of modernist critics, such as Walter Benjamin, understood that the greatest virtue and value of the early twentieth century avant-garde was its capacity to aspire towards “effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form” (p239), myopic postmodern theory has increasingly decreed that this kind of confident aspiration has “collapsed” ...