Nostalgia for the Avant-garde

What makes us go back again and again to the time of the avant-garde, to this experimental practice? The article analyzes how a steady interest in the avant-garde is connected with the Utopian impulse. Avant-garde art may be treated as a "sign of history": it can be regarded as denotation in the sense that it marks the space for a new type of social relations. It is the experience of mapping of a new community which is anterior to any of its institutional forms. The author explores this intrusion of the "invisible" into avant-garde imagery by turning to Jean-Luc Marion's reading of Rothko and to Marie-Jose Mondzain's interpretation of the icon as a precursor of contemporary abstract art.