Endings and Continuities: Avant-Garde and Meaning-Making

This article thematizes avant-garde’s meaning-making and temporal disruption, emphasizing their role in reconfiguring cultural narratives. Case studies include UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith’s radical digital archive, democratizing access to avant-garde works, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a cinematic intervention destabilizing meaning through fragmented narratives. The analysis incorporates Mark Rothko’s artistic formula, which underscores the tragic, sensual, and ephemeral dimensions of meaning-making, and Antonin Artaud’s assertion of madness as a legitimate worldview challenging societal norms. By engaging with the materiality of media, from text and images to virtual and AI realities, the paper examines how avant-garde practices end and continue, fostering new modalities of perception and creation. Ultimately, it argues for archives and art as active agents of transformation.