Welded painted steel, 16.5 x 14.5 x 8.5, 2019.
The title is on the sculpture: the word is stamped into the hook as a manufacturer’s mark, so the name is found like the parts. A vanguard is the body that marches ahead of an army, and in the nineteenth century the French form, avant-garde, was borrowed for artists who go ahead of their public. The forms are martial and heraldic: a hook, a horn, a zigzag that reads as pennant or lightning, and a crescent whose rim is flame-cut.
Found lettering is an early device of the avant-garde the word names. From 1911 Braque and then Picasso stencilled letters into their pictures, and by 1912 they were pasting in printed paper, so that the world’s own writing entered the work. Here the writing is stamped into steel: a brand, a part number, a country of origin. The country is China, and the sculpture is painted in the blue and white of chinese porcelain, the ware that took its name from the country, so the stamp and the colour point to the same place.
