Avant-Garde

A brief history of AG: "The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer."

AG is also a security and facilities management company currently working in Central Scotland. I wonder how unorthodox and unconventional you're able to be in this type of business these days. Perhaps they only recruit seekers of the truth, pilgrims and existentialists for employment in their key company positions. Goals are vague and esoteric but they can still erect fences quite well. Even their signage might be said to be a proper AG piece, being weathered and interacting in it's free-form, outside exhibition space.

I first heard of "avant-garde" when I was about sixteen, it might have been used in some Monty Python episode or late night BBC2 doc. My sources were confused and random in those days and often mispronounced and badly used. I never really understood the term or liked the label but I would drop it into wavering conversations to try to look smart. It was often used to describe the music of Soft Machine or early Pink Floyd, creative dance and Hunter S Thompson books.

Just I was exploring what it might mean the name already had some serious cultural baggage and distortion added to it and although people use it to label genres it really is a much broader term ... in French it just translates as "advanced guard" in the military sense. It's meaningless really without being set in a clear context. For most people it's also understood to point to pretentious and confusing crappy art efforts that can only be described as avant-garde as a means of justifying or concealing the quality of the final work. Anyway nobody really uses the term anymore.