The printed book includes the ebook.

More than four decades ago Peter Bürger published his Theory of the Avant-Garde (published in Spanish as Teoría de la vanguardia). Now a book with a cult standing, it addressed the two most important tasks demanded by art at that time: breaking with representation and dissolving the frontier separating art from life. According to Bürger, the failure of that double undertaking certified the defeat of the avant-garde and perhaps something worse: its impossibility.

Forty years on, Teoría de la retaguardia (Theory of the Rearguard) is an ironic manifesto that emerges from that fiasco, although it wastes no time mourning it or trying to disguise it. Above all, because this is where one understands that our age is not marked by the distance between art and life, but by a tension between art and survival, which is the continuation of life by any means.

In the unease which arises from that survival, Teoría de la retaguardia is suspicious of an art that leaves its splinters in politics, iconography or literature, fields from which it returns increasingly battered to its perennial Ithaca: the museum. Resulting from that return trip, this caustic and austere essay – in which Duchamp clashes with La Lupe, the revolution with the museum, Paul Virilio with Joan Fontcuberta or Fukuyama with Michael Jackson – asks if Contemporary Art will ever end. Because if it were mortal, one would have to write an ending for it.

Iván de la Nuez is an essayist, críitic and curator. His books include La balsa perpetua (1998); Paisajes después del Muro (1999), El mapa de sal (2001); Fantasía Roja (2006); Postcapital. Crítica del futuro (2006); Inundaciones (2010) and El comunista manifiesto(2013). These books have been translated into different languages and published by companies like Mondadori, Península, Debate, Periférica, Surkhamp, Galaxia Gutenberg, Castelvecci and Angelus Novo.
He has curated or co-curated shows like La isla posible (1995); Inundaciones (1999); Parque humano (2002); Banquete(2003); Postcapital (2006); De Facto.Retrospectiva de Joan Fontcuberta (2008); Dentro y fuera de nosotros. Retrospectiva de Javier Codesal (2009); La Crisis es Crítica (2009); Atopía. El arte y la ciudad en el siglo XXI(2010); and Iconocracia (2015).
He has written essays for retrospective shows by Stan Douglas, Los Carpinteros, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Vik Muniz, Joan Fontcuberta, Carlos Garaicoa and Javier Codesal.