Between The Avant Garde And The Everyday

The wave of anti-authoritarian political activity associated with the term “1968” can by no means be confined under the rubric of “protest,” understood narrowly in terms of street marches and other reactions to state initiatives. Indeed, the actions generated in response to “1968” frequently involved attempts to elaborate resistance within the realm of culture generally, and in the arts in particular. This blurring of the boundary between art and politics was a characteristic development of the political activism of the postwar period. This volume brings together a group of essays concerned with the multifaceted link between culture and politics, highlighting lesser-known case studies and opening new perspectives on the development of anti-authoritarian politics in Europe from the 1950s to the fall of Communism and beyond.

How did the concept of the avant-garde come into existence? How did it impact on the performing arts? How did the avant-garde challenge the artistic establishment and avoid the pull of commercial theatre, gallery and concert-hall circuits? How did performance artists respond to new technological developments? Placing key figures and performances in their historical, social and aesthetic context, Günter Berghaus offers an accessible introduction to post-war avant-garde performance. Written in a clear, engaging style, and supported by text boxes and illustrations throughout, this volume explains the complex ideas behind avant-garde art and evocatively brings to life the work of some of its most influential performance artists. Covering hot topics such as multi-media and body art performances, this text is essential reading for students of theatre studies and performance.

This collection of critical essays explores new approaches to the study of avant-garde literature and art, film and architecture. It offers a theoretical framework that avoids narrowly defined notions of the avant-garde. It takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various avant-garde movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations. Individual essays concentrate on cubist collage and dadaist photomontage, on abstract painting by members of the Dutch group De Stijl, on verbal chemistry and dadaist poetry and on body art from futurism to surrealism. In addition, the collection wishes to open up the discussion of the avant-garde to a thorough investigation of neo-avant-garde activities in the 1950s and 1960s. For decades the appreciation of neo-avant-garde art and literature, film and architecture suffered from a general and all-inclusive rebuke. This volume is designed to contribute to a breakthrough towards a more competent and more precise investigation of this research field. Contributions include a discussion of Warhol’s multiples as well as Duchamp’s editioned readymades, forms of concrete and digital poetry as well as the architectural “Non-Plan”. The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2002. The research group formed around the Avant-Garde Project at Edinburgh will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.

This collection of critical essays is designed to lay the foundations for a new theory of the European avant-garde. It starts from the assumption that not one all-embracing intention of all avant-garde movements - i.e. the intention of "reintegrating art into the practice of life" (Peter Bürger) - but the challenge of new cultural technologies, in particular photography and cinema, constitutes the main driving force of the formation and further development of the avant-garde. This approach permits to establish a theoretical framework that takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various art movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations. Following the theoretical foundation of the new approach, individual contributions concentrate on a diverse range of avant-gardist concepts, trends and manifestations from cubist painting and the literary work of Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein to the screeching voices of futurism, dadaist photomontage and film, surrealist photographs and sculptures and neo-avant-gardist theories as developed by the French group OuLiPo. The volume closes with new insights gained from placing the avant-garde in the contexts of literary institutions and psychoanalytical and sociological concepts. The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at Yale University, New Haven, in February 2000. The research group formed on this occasion will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and high-speed industrial machinery proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, a fascination with speed influenced artists—from Moscow to Manhattan—working in a variety of media. Russian avant-garde literary, visual, and cinematic artists were among those striving to elevate the ordinary physical concept of speed into a source of inspiration and generate new possibilities for everyday existence. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects. Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first work to consider all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only in aesthetic terms but in its cultural and political context.

Discusses the social aspects of art, popular culture as art, galleries, museums, and the meaning of art.