(4 of 6)
The only avant-garde movement in our century that can be shown to have had some formative effect on politics, and even that is debatable, acted on the right, not on the left. It was futurism, whose ideas and rhetoric (rather than the works of art actually painted by Balla, Severini or Boccioni) bodied forth some of the mythology of Italian Fascism. The futurist ethos expressed by Marinetti before World War I, with its cult of speed, male potency, antifeminism and violent struggle, supplied the oratorical framework for Mussolini's rise to power and set the stage for his appearance. But this may say no more than that the impact of technology on the more febrile nationalist-romantic minds of Italy produced remarkably similar effusions, in art as in politics.
As for the tragic fate of the Russian avantgarde: the group of artists and artisans known as the constructivists wanted to change their country through art and design, creating not just a style but a new "rational" man. All the conditions in which art can be politically effective—illiteracy, no mass media, belief in icons and so forth—were there in Russia; and yet the efforts of this supremely gifted nucleus of artists was snuffed out, by 1930, by Stalin.
Artistic avant-gardes wither in totalitarian regimes, whether of the left or the right. The collective efforts of the constructivists Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Tallin and the rest were only possible, one may surmise, because they did not realize how totalitarian Leninism actually was. Oligarchs, whether collective or single, dislike the very idea of avant-garde art because it creates new elites. As Ortega y Gasset remarked, its first effect is to divide; it splits the audience into those who understand it and those who do not. This cleavage does not necessarily run along political lines, and so it may not conform to the existing layers of power. The art of exception stands to its small audience of exception rather like a sacred text; its obscurity binds the coterie to the artist, as pupils are bound to priests. Slowly a sect crystallizes.
To seek such an audience, to think of it as the normal and proper one for avant-garde art, was to take a step back from the ideal of the artist as Public Man that had been embodied in Courbet's career. It meant running for the constituency of the exception and the misfit, not the majority. One main strand of the avantgarde, as it developed in the 19th century and bequeathed its composition to the 20th, hated crowds and democracy, wished to absent itself from the political agora, and stood on its own rights to develop in what Joyce was to call "silence, exile and cunning." It asked the question: Could one create anything at all out of democratic communion with one's age?