What is Art? What is the purpose of Art? Leo Tolstoy argues that it is not a form just to embrace beauty. Consuming art is like consuming food: people who eat food just to seek the pleasure for its taste do not understand the real meaning of eating. For Tolstoy, function is the most important thing.
Then, What is Avant-Garde Art? Based on Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock’s analysis: it is a concrete cultural phenomenon, that is embodied by its practices and manifestation, where the artist reflects themselves in a new effective method and where others validate the works by agreeing that they have fulfilled ‘an avant-garde’s function’.
So, When is Avant-Garde Art? According to Peter Burger, avant-garde starts and stops during Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism because they failed to function and serve its purposes in post-modernism. It will only be an endless repetition of the same production. Hal Foster detest it by saying avant-garde needs a new narrative. By exploring the possibilities of neo-avant-garde as a productive reworking of the original avant-garde.
The Case of ’Ready-mades’ • All of ‘ready-mades’ objects obtained its art status through the process of selection and presentation. ‘Ready-mades’ as a Manifesto • Marcel Duchamp’s The Fountain, Hannah Hoch’s Cut With the Dada Kitchen Knife, and Ai Weiwei works (Sunflower Seeds, Straight, Good Fences Make Good Neighbours). ‘Ready-mades’ as a Storyteller (Reflective Practice) • Aim to inform others about the essence of being an avant-garde artist through Marcel Duchamp’s invention of a ‘ready-made’. • Illustrating the manifesto of a ‘ready-made’ artwork using moving images, by incorporating founded images and sounds using technology. Producing a short animation called ‘The Blind Man’.
Self-Evaluation
 This investigation has become an important part of me personally. As a creative practitioner, the first thing that I hold onto is the intended message that I wanted to communicate to the audience. My practice needs to serve a purpose. Throughout the whole project, I explore the definition of art itself and what makes it avant-garde. It came to a conclusion that those artists who considered being avant-garde, respect the concept of art more than just producing it for aesthetic reasons. I connect with it in a straightforward way, and it makes it even personal for me because of its correlation. Although I found a difficulty in compiling the essay to define its complex term, I enjoyed the whole process of doing research. It gave me a new perspective of how each individual approached art, each of them are unique yet if you understand the intention it is relatable somehow. Because of this research, I also started to explore about the potential of illustration in the future. Reflecting on my own practice, I see the enhancement of this industry with the help of technology, and that is why I decided to explore moving images for my own development. It also make me realise that it is possible to have aesthetic without really thinking about it in the first place. Because throughout the whole process all I think about is how to communicate the message, and then the aesthetic will follow by itself. I will continue this exploration using moving images as I can see the potential of this within my creative process.