The promise of the avant grade in the  first third of the twentieth century (Dada and surrealism) was a rupture with the  art institution and art's autonomy in a world dominated by the means end rationality of capitalism's exchange value. The avant-garde's attack  focused on autonomous art represented by aestheticism as a necessary step in its project to overcome the separation between art and life. 

  Modernism, as it was usually presented in Australia, was a purely internal artistic phenomenon. Modernism's  claims to novelty, negation and non-trivial experimentation in the late 20th century had  finally diminished in their impact as they have become exhausted. The avant-garde’s attack on the art institution had failed. The art  institution had demonstrates its strength by embracing its attackers and assigning them a prominent place in the pantheon of great artists. Avant-garde categories such as rupture and shock gained admittance to the discourse of art, while at the same time concepts such as harmony and coherence  became suspected. The model of heroic transgression against repressive authority has lost its credibility. 

It is  the art  institution, rather than a work’s intrinsic qualities, that defines what counts as art. So artistic genius is not the source of aesthetic value. The art institution only allows a a few  photographers inside the gate it guards. 

We were driving back to a rust bucket Adelaide from Woomera and Andamooka when I saw this tree in the middle of nowhere. It was the Xmas decorations that caught my eye. The decorative signs humanise  the  empty landscape--what many see as the dead heart of Australia.  Hence the snapshot.

The market ideology of the new has filled the vacuum. We now live with  the consumerist assimilation of art into the capitalist “everyday”,  the erosion of an older notion of modernist autonomy,  the hegemony of an instrumental economic reason and the aestheticization of everyday life of late capitalist society.  If there is an  neo-avant grade in art photography exploring experimental possibilities,  then it has become an enervated tradition in a culture dominated by the art gallery/museum and the mass media.   Art  has become no more and no less than an ensemble of diverse artistic and non-artistic practices and skills with the exchange value of the marketplace.  

Could art emerge from its current heteronomy? More specifically, could photography negate its part in creating images for selling commodities-cars, fashion, food, architecture? Can this promise be reinscribed?  The reinscription suggests that when art abandon’s the possibility of the ‘new’ it falls back into heteronomy and the academic. In this way there can be no renewal of art without art resisting, reworking, dissolving what has become tradition, and duly, therefore what has become heteronomous. The link between the ‘new’ and value should not be confused with conventional modernist notions of formal ‘advance’ or stylistic supersession in art, or nihilistically, with the destruction of tradition tout court.

 Rather, the ‘new’ here is the restless ever vigilant positioning on art’s critical relationship to its own traditions of intellectual and cultural formation and administration.