The Academy and the Avant-Garde: A Relationship of Dependence and Resistance

This essay examines what was called the academization of the North American avant-garde in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing for a material historical understanding of the role that academic institutions played in sustaining avant- garde distribution co-ops, regionalizing exhibition, publishing criticism, providing employment, and developing future generations of artists, critics, and audiences. This essay argues that the study of fiat colleges and universities has been central to the post-1960s North American avant-garde fi lm world. 1 Compared to narrative, documentary, or animation, avant-garde fi lm depends on the academy. Since the exponential rise of fistudies as a discipline in the mid-1960s, universities have supported avant-garde fi lm production, sustained its distribution co-ops, and served as its primary site of exhibition in North America. Furthermore, because sales and rentals to universities are the primary market for avant-garde fi lm, scholarly criticism—serving a de facto publicity function—has had a decisive impact on the avant-garde fi lm world in a way that is unthinkable for narrative feature-length fi lm- making. Yet the avant-garde fi lm world has largely ignored the university's function as its material base, perceiving universities at best with ambivalence and at worst with hostility. This was true especially during the 1970s and 1980s, when there was an outcry against the academization and institutionalization of the avant-garde. The reticence of avant-garde fi lmmakers, critics, and supporters, including academics, to address the centrality of the academy in the avant-garde fi lm world 2 refl ects a larger disavowal of the institutional and economic matrixes that undergird, however meagerly, this marginal sphere of cultural activity. This disregard testifi es further to the existence, especially in the 1980s, of a romanticized notion of the avant-garde as an anti-institutional, revolutionary political praxis that constructs the academy as an organ of simple ideological co-optation. A more material—and modest—understanding of avant-garde cinema as a tradition of heterogeneous independent artisanal fi lmmaking, 3 disseminated through university and art school education, might better recognize the salutary and indeed disproportionate impact that avant-garde fi lm has had in expanding fi lm aesthetics, broadening patterns of fi lm spectatorship and reception, and integrating high art and popular culture. 4 In light of the present, extraordinarily healthy moment of avant-garde fi lm practice, the Michael Zryd is an assistant professor in the Department of Film at York University. His research concentrates on experimental and documentary fi lm and other forms of alternative media in North America. He is writing a book on Hollis Frampton's Magellan project.