Negative Tactics: the architectures of Dada and Surrealism

In his 1974 work, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger developed a sociological argument that the practices of the historical avant-garde had emerged as a systematic challenge to the hegemonic institutionalisation of bourgeois aesthetic taste. For Bürger, art had, since the Renaissance, gradually freed itself from societal pressures or responsibilities culminating in the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of a bourgeois institution of art that was characterised by the autonomy of the art object and its economic worth. The avant-gardiste work functioned as a negation of this autonomy, reconnecting art with the praxis of life.

Investigating the collapse of medium that is central to Bürger’s thesis. this paper argues that architecture was an important strategy for the historical avant-garde and especially in the context of Bürger’s avant-gardiste work. In Dada and surrealism, architecture functioned as an objet trouvé (found object) that, like the readymade, was employed in order to negate the aesthetic and autonomous claims of the institutionalised work of art. Architectural space was recreated through experimentations across the range of creative practices in the 1920s, finding a rejuvenated and polemical role in the the readymade, drawing, collage, montage and photography. While this spatiality is not central to the concerns of Bürger, it is a recurring theme in the investigations of the historical avant-garde in the period since his work was published and especially in the investigations of the Octoberist critics.

While both Dada and surrealism produced little that could be considered architecture (in its traditional disciplinary form) there is undoubtedly a spatial and architectural consciousness that accompanied all of these strategies. This paper will argue that the historical avant-garde discovered architecture and deployed it for polemical effect, as a fragment torn from life and discovered through experience. With an understanding of the historical nature of Bürger’s work, the paper will explore the role and appropriation of architecture in the avant-gardist strategies of Dada and surrealism and the collapse of medium that this entails.