(Out in The) Real World

It is certainly true that the development of the avant-garde marks a radical break with the form of artistic language which existed until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Traditionally, language was always thought of as describing something outside itself, in the “real” world. The difference between natural language (considered as an instrument rather than a poetics) and artistic language was merely that in the latter the form was an integral part of the message – the “how” was as important as the “what”. At whatever date we put the moment when the epistemological foundations of this “rhetorical” world began to disintegrate, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century, and in the context of avant-garde art, that the content of a work began to become indistinguishable from its form. External reality was no longer seen as a donnée with its own preordained meanings but as a series of fragments, essentially enigmatic, whose meanings depend on the how they were formally related or juxtaposed by the artist.

Alan Colquohoun; Essays in Architectural Criticism, Modern Architecture and Historical Change; From Bricolage to Myth, or How to Put Humpty-Dumpty Together Again

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