Taking the piss? Or, Whatever happened to the avant garde?

Interestingly, the reaction to Martin Creed winning the Turner Prize has been most positive among the least 'arty' people I've spoken to: 'I may not know much about art, but I recognise a good laugh when I see one.' He cannily declined to explain the meaning of his work, so any interpretation from postmodern high art waffle to piss-take is equally valid. But it does make me want to question: Is that all that's possible? Is there no role for radical modern art? Whatever happened to the avant garde?

The weekend the Turner Prize was announced, the Guardian magazine ran an article on the claim by the heirs of Kasimir Malevich for compensation for the billion dollar collection of his works in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, allegedly looted by the Nazis. MOMA (the American Museum of Modern Art) has already settled out of court for its Malevich collection, and returned one painting, which sold for $15.5m. Malevich was the Martin Creed of his day. In 1915, his minimalist Black Square caused a scandal and the police had to be called. Now his works are selling for incalculable sums. What happened?

Malevich's Black Square and Martin Creed's Light Going On and Off seem to sum up a century of Modern Art. Is there no role, as the Post-Modernists would claim, for an avant garde? Is such an idea necessarily elitist? When did modern art become big money, and how has that affected the artists? Has Charles Saatchi bought and butchered the best and brightest (or just the most noisy)?

At the start of the Twentieth Century, political radicalism and artistic experimentation seemed indissolubly wedded. Modern artists were at war with bourgeois conservatism. They were out to shock, provoke and also have a good laugh. They were in love with the energy of mass production - speed, noise, the angular, mechanical, shiny, discordant, breathless, chaotic newness of everything. For some, like the Italian Futurists, this led them to militarism, misogynism and fascism; most, though, allied with the Left and, after the Russian Revolution, with Communism.

Post-revolutionary Russia saw an explosion of artistic creativity. In the midst of Civil War and invasion by foreign armies! The avant garde flocked to the service of the Revolution. The poet Mayakovsky joined ROSTA, the Russian Telegraph Agency: 'It meant telegraphed news immediately translated into posters and decrees into slogans. It was a new form that spontaneously originated in life itself. It meant the men of the Red Army looking at posters before a battle and going to fight not with a prayer but a slogan on their lips.' With a largely illiterate population, graphics, theatre and film were vital to get the message across. With scarce resources, ingenuity and functionality were a spur to originality and developing new media. For a brief period, the dream of total creative freedom, experimentation, and a mass popular audience, was realised. Perhaps the crowning artistic achievement of this period (and of the century, film being the quintessential medium of the twentieth century) was Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin.

By 1927, when Malevich exhibited in Berlin, the atmosphere had changed sufficiently that he felt it necessary to discuss disposal of his works in the event of his death or long imprisonment. Lenin was dead and a massive struggle was underway for control of the Party and the country. Populism took on a new soul-deadening meaning. Propaganda in the sense we understand it today, turgid, bludgeoning repetition of hollow slogans, replaced spontaneous creativity. Malevich, in common with all the modernists, was denounced for excessive formalism, inaccessibility, elitism. In 1929, a week before the opening of his massive spectacular celebration of the 1905 Revolution, Mayakovsky, who had said of 1917, 'there was no doubt, it was my revolution', killed himself in despair at the direction of events. The love-boat was wrecked on the rocks.

Outside of Russia, especially after the adoption of the Popular Front strategy, when Stalin directed communist Parties to woo liberal, democratic intellectuals, and set himself up as the defender of culture against the threat of fascism, Communism or its fringes seemed the natural home for modernism. Senator George Donderoe from Michigan declared 'Modern art equals communism'. A view echoed by Hitler. The best attended exhibition of avant-garde art of the century was, ironically, the Munich Exhibition of Degenerate Art, 1937, organised by the Nazis to demonstrate how the Weimar Republic had squandered precious national resources on Jewish/Bolshevik/Negro-inspired art, which mocked and vilified the German national spirit. 16,000 works were confiscated from German museums. The exhibition included works by Gaugin, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso. It's mind-boggling to imagine the value of all those works in today's art market. Goebbels felt that all these works should be burned, but the most saleable were auctioned off to swell the coffers of the Third Reich, and some found their way into the personal collections of Nazi leaders, such as Gšring.

The Spanish Civil War underlined the identification of Communism with modernism, democracy and progress. Picasso's Guernica, another defining modernist work of the twentieth century, was painted in response to the atrocity bombing by the Fascists of that small town.

The fact that the Stalinists in their turn were slaughtering Anarchists and Trotskyists, the Moscow Trials were in full spate, and the avant garde inside Russia suffered the same fate as anyone with a critical thought in their heads - exile, imprisonment, death - did not immediately break this link. There was debate in the international art movement. The Surrealists split (and split again and splintered, echoing the splits in the political movement). Breton, one of Surrealism's prime movers, allied with Trotsky, as did Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, who was influential on the young American avant garde. They produced a manifesto 'Towards a Free Revolutionary Art', which held out artistic freedom combined with political engagement, as an alternative to the stifling dogma of Stalinist 'Socialist Realism'.

'Some day it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism which started out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.' (Clement Greenberg)

Clement Greenberg, who 'discovered' Jackson Pollock, became the spokesman for depoliticised art for art's sake. So how did it happen? The focus of modern art shifted to New York, and the internal economic and political conditions of the US did the rest. There was a mass exodus of avant-garde artists from Germany to the United States, after the Degenerate Art Exhibition, to be followed by a second wave from occupied Europe, when War started. Stalin had obliterated the Russian avant garde. Initially the modern art scene focussed on the European exiles, but then young American artists started to organise themselves to take advantage of the 'picture boom'.

Pearl Harbour accomplished what a decade of the New Deal had failed to do, reviving American capitalism and redirecting class struggle into patriotism. During the first six months of 1942 the government placed $100 billion worth of orders with the private sector (as opposed to $12 billion the previous six moths) and 17 million new jobs were created. By 1945, Americans held $140 billion in savings and war bonds, three times the entire national income of 1933. A lot of money just waiting to be spent on luxury goods, including art. Upmarket department stores, like Gimpels and Maceys, started selling art, beginning with Old Masters but moving on to the modern. In this situation, American artists, no longer supported by New Deal funding, needed to address themselves to this new market.

The Federation of American Painters and Sculptors, originally a Trotskyist-influenced split-off from the CP-dominated Congress of American Artists, set itself the task of increasing the public visibility and therefore sales potential of modern American artists. In the process they succeeded in a complete transformation of the concept of an artistic avant garde. The immediate post-war years were a time of intense debate and cultural restructuring, which set in place many of the structures and attitudes which are still with us today.

With Europe devastated and the working class on the verge of, or actually, insurrectionary, the US found itself economically dominant but culturally disoriented. From the political isolationism of the thirties, American capitalism had to become totally interventionist to counter 'Soviet' expansionism and the threat of working class revolt. It had to back up its military and economic with cultural dominance. Art was part of this programme. Economic aid was tied to cultural and political conditions. European markets had to be opened up to American products, including those of 'the cultural industries'. The French film industry was destroyed, for example, as part of the aid package, to make way for the total dominance of Hollywood. As a part of all this, New York had to maintain its new role as the centre of modern art.

The project of the American modern artists therefore dovetailed with the needs of US (and world) capitalism. The newly rich American middle classes were given a crash course in the appreciation of modern art. Avant-gardism became a species of commodity speculation: spot the art that's too advanced for today's taste but will be worth tons in tomorrow's market. The Federation orchestrated the debate in the press about the need for a specifically American, vital (largely abstract) art which reflected the uncertainty of the times but secured American dominance. Both the Nazis and the Stalinists, the two enemies of 'freedom', had denounced abstraction and modernist experimentation and dogmatically insisted on their versions of Realism, therefore the Free World should embrace the new art and repudiate realism. American artists returning from the War were shocked at the complete transformation of the art world in their absence.

It would be wrong to see the Federation and the Abstract Expressionists, Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, e.g., who came to dominate the modern art scene, as simply cynically selling out to American cultural imperialism. They were as affected as anyone else by the Post-war intellectual shell-shock. The impact of the Nazi death camps and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had to be assimilated. 'After Auschwitz there can be no poetry'. There was a pervading sense that, in an age of industrialised slaughter, realism was almost pornographic. They were suspicious of the prostitution of art to politics by the Stalinists. Abstraction, individualism, and the total removal of art from the diktats of politics, seemed the most honest approach. One side effect of the focus on individual genius, permeated by Cold War ideology, was the exclusion of women artists from a leading role. Pre-war European avant-garde art had been as much about New Woman as New Man. The Russian movement, particularly, represented women artists in equal numbers with men, though their role was obscured in later histories. Surrealism too involved many women artists: Meret Oppenheim's Fur Breakfast became almost iconic of Surrealism. Now women were returned to their pre-twentieth century role in art, as models and enablers for men of genius.

There have been many attempts to challenge the commodification of art, and the imperialist and masculinist domination of culture, most recently Post-Modernism, which succeeded only by reducing everything to 'discourse'. You could see Martin Creed's work in this light, teasingly refusing to 'discourse' at the same time as obliquely commenting on the state of modern art.

Some critics, echoing Adorno, have said, 'after September 11th there can be no irony', which pretty much spells the death of Post-Modernism. New York is the centre of the world culturally and it suffered a direct hit. Perhaps the aftershocks are sufficient to shift the cultural centre of gravity, as happened after World War Two. It's certainly true that Grand Narratives, Good and Evil are back in a big way. Will this be the spur for a twenty-first century avant garde?