Hal Foster

Even though I dislike minimalism (Donald Judd, Flavin etc), I recently recommended Hal Foster's "Return of the Real" to discussors on the Harriet Blog. So then I started rereading it myself. Here's an interesting quote in his discussion of art of the abject:

"But there is a third option as well, and that is to reformulate this vocation, to rethink transgression not as a rupture produced by a heroic avant-garde outside the symbolic order but as a fracture traced by a strategic avant-garde within the order. In this view the goal of the avant-garde is not to break with this order absolutely (this old dream is dispelled) but to expose it in crisis, to register its points not only of breakdown but of breakthrough, the new possibilities that such a crisis might open up." (157)