'Quotes': Experimental & Expanded Film/Video

Avant-garde: Quotes

Here are some quotes from a variety of critics, artists and philosophers that may assist your perspective or viewpoint on experimental or avant-garde art. They may help you to form a more critical interpretation of the films we have studied for this topic.

Some certified nut
Will try to tell you it’s poetry,
(It’s extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense)
But watch out or he’ll start with some
New notion or other....
John Ashbury (Poet)

There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?
W.H.Auden (Author)

An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.
Eugène Ionesco (Playwright)

Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.
Harold Rosenberg (Art Critic)

The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new—whether it be the settlement of new lands or the initiation of new ways of life—is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.
Eric Hoffer (Philosopher)