Against The Avant Garde

"This book casts the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in a fresh light: his life and work in relation to the visual and performance arts of his time in both Europe and the US. Lavishly illustrated with both documentary and fine art images, it shows how essentially conservative Pasolini was politically and aesthetically despite his reputation as an avant-garde writer and filmmaker. But it also shows how truly advanced Pasolini was when it comes to interdisciplinary art, making him enormously relevant today"--

Avant-Garde and Criticism sheds new light on the complex aims, functions, practices and contexts of art-criticism in relation to the European avant-garde. Although many avant-garde works and the avant-gardes of various countries have been analyzed, considerably less attention has been given to the reviews in newspapers and journals on avant-garde literature, art, architecture and film. This volume of Avant-Garde Critical Studies will look at how art critics operated in a strategic way. The strategies of avant-garde criticism are diverse. Art critics, especially when they are artists themselves, attempt to manipulate the cultural climate in their favour. They use their position to legitimize avant-garde concepts and to conquer a place in the cultural field. But they are also markedly influenced by the context in which they operate. The position of fellow-critics and the ideological bias of the papers in which they publish can be as important as the political climate in which their criticism flourishes. The analysis of avant-garde art criticism can also make clear how strategies sometimes fail and involuntarily display non-avant-garde characteristics. On the other hand traditionalist criticism on the avant-garde offers new insights into its status and reception in a given time and place. This volume is of interest for scholars, teachers and students who are interested in the avant-garde of the interbellum-period and work in the field of literature, art, film and architecture.

Brave New Avant Garde is a collection of essays that ask the questions: what is an adequate model of contemporary avant garde practice and what are its theoretical premises? With this it asks the related question, echoing Alain Badiou: must the avant garde hypothesis be abandoned? Brave New Avant Garde stands in opposition to postmodern post-politics and the view that radical practice has no other future than its reduction to the workings of the free market in the form of the "simple process of cultural production" or to variations on the cultural politics of representation. Today's avant garde, formed in the wake of the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of the anti-globalization movement, represents a counter-power that rejects the inevitability of capitalist integration. The way out for artists in today's world of creative industries is defined in these pages as a psychoanalytically informed sinthomeopathic practice, a critical identification with prevailing conditions of production that avoids the surplus enjoyment of the ideology of postmodern pluralism. ,

The debate on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian neoavant-garde (neoavanguardia) is undoubtedly one of the most animated and controversial the country has witnessed from World War II to the present. Comprising the period between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, the phenomenon of the neoavanguardia involved key writers, critics, and artists, both as insiders - Sanguineti, Balestrini, Guglielmi, Eco, and others - and adversaries such as Pasolini, Calvino, and Moravia. In The New Avant-Garde in Italy - the first book in English to document the movement - John Picchione's objective is twofold: to provide a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical tenets that inform the works of the neoavanguardia and to show how they are applied to the poetic practices of its authors. The neoavanguardia cannot, Picchione argues, be defined as a movement with a unified program expressed in the form of manifestos or shared theoretical principles. It experiences irreconcilable internal conflicts that are explored as a split between two main blocs - one that is tied to the project of modernity, the other to post-modern aesthetic postures. This study suggests that some of the contentious views proposed by the neoavanguardia anticipated a wide range of issues that continue to be significant and pressing to this day.

The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

The Poetic Avant-Garde compares three avant-garde groups active in the era between the world wars: those surrounding Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, and Andre Breton. These groups were composed of poets and writers who made use of the avant-garde's characteristic modes of self-expression: the publication of small journals, unorthodox attention-getting tactics, and interaction with the mainstream press. However, their differing aesthetic, social, and political agendas illustrate the surprisingly broad range of avant-gardism in the interwar era. Strong looks at the choices these three groups made when their radical goals collided with the forces of social and political change in the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting the disparity between their rhetoric and their actual achievements. The book focuses on the avant-garde's struggle to reconcile contradictory imperatives: a desire to be radically new while also finding an audience.

"The groundbreaking new study on the early Soviet Union's Higher Art and Technical Studios, known as Vkhutemas, and their pioneering curriculum that has been a source of inspiration for generations of architects, designers, and artists until the present day."--Provided by publisher.

Jill Carrick's Nouveau R?isme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde provides the first in-depth historical analysis of the "New Realism" movement and the critical and theoretical debates it engaged. This text makes available a new corpus of material - the rich historical and theoretical analysis as well as the fascinating photographic documentation of artists and works - from one of the most significant French art movements of the post-World War II period, whose literature has up to now been dominated by the terms of its founder, Pierre Restany. The illustrations and surprising contextual material - many of which have been unearthed by the author's archival research - document artwork, artists' collaborations, and ephemeral events.