Neo Avantgarde And Culture Industry

Eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years, each looking at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. Some critics view the postwar avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most insightful art critics and theoreticians of recent decades, argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.This collection contains eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years. Each looks at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. The art movements covered include Nouveau Realisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villegle) art in postwar Germany (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and pop art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham). Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); or he addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman). One of the book's strengths is its systematic, interconnected account of the key issues of American and European artistic practice during two decades of postwar art. Another is Buchloh's method, which integrates formalist and socio-historical approaches specific to each subject.

Myths are a central part of our reality. But merely debunking them lets us forget why they are created in the first place and why we need them. André Fischer draws on key examples from German postwar culture, from novelists Hans Henny Jahnn and Hubert Fichte, to sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys, and filmmaker Werner Herzog, to show that mythmaking is an indispensable human practice in times of crisis. Against the background of mythologies based in nineteenth-century romanticism and their ideological continuation in Nazism, fresh forms of mythmaking in the narrative, visual, and performative arts emerged as an aesthetic paradigm in postwar modernism. Boldly rewriting the cultural history of an era and setting in transition, The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture counters the predominant narrative of an exclusively rational Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”). Far from being merely reactionary, the turn toward myth offered a dimension of existential orientation that had been neglected by other influential aesthetic paradigms of the postwar period. Fischer’s wide-ranging, transmedia account offers an inclusive perspective on myth beyond storytelling and instead develops mythopoesis as a formal strategy of modernism at large.

Essays spanning three decades by one of the most rigorous art thinkers of our time grapple with formal and historical paradigms in twentieth century art. These influential essays by the noted critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh have had a significant impact on the theory and practice of art history. Written over the course of three decades and now collected in one volume, they trace a history of crucial artistic transitions, iterations, and paradigmatic shifts in the twentieth century, considering both the evolution and emergence of artistic forms and the specific historical moment in which they occurred. Buchloh's subject matter ranges through various moments in the history of twentieth-century American and European art, from the moment of the retour à l'ordre of 1915 to developments in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the beginnings of Conceptual art in the late 1960s to the appropriation artists of the 1980s. He discusses conflicts resulting from historical repetitions (such as the monochrome and collage/montage aesthetics in the 1910s, 1950s, and 1980s), the emergence of crucial neo-avantgarde typologies, and the resuscitation of obsolete genres (including the portrait and landscape, revived by 1980s photography). Although these essays are less monographic than those in Buchloh's earlier collection, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, two essays in this volume are devoted to Marcel Broodthaers, whose work remains central to Buchloh's theoretical concerns. Engaging with both formal and historical paradigms, Buchloh situates himself productively between the force fields of formal theory and historical narrative, embracing the discrepancies and contradictions between them and within individual artistic trajectories. Contents Formalism and Historicity (1977) • Marcel Broodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde (1980) • Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting (1981) • Allegorical Procedures: Appropriations and Montage in Contemporary Art (1982) • The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers (1983) • From Faktura to Factography (1984) • Readymade, Objet Trouvé, Idée Reçue (1985) • The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avantgarde (1986) • Cold War Constructivism (1986) • Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions (1989) • Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture (1994) • Sculpture: Publicity and the Poverty of Experience (1996)

This is the first sourcebook to trace the emergence and evolution of art markets in the Western economy, framing them within the larger narrative of the ascendancy of capitalist markets. Selected writings from across academic disciplines present compelling evidence of art’s inherent commercial dimension and show how artists, dealers, and collectors have interacted over time, from the city-states of Quattrocento Italy to the high-stakes markets of postmillennial New York and Beijing. This approach casts a startling new light on the traditional concerns of art history and aesthetics, revealing much that is provocative, profound, and occasionally even comic. This volume’s unique historical perspective makes it appropriate for use in college courses and postgraduate and professional programs, as well as for professionals working in art-related environments such as museums, galleries, and auction houses.

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.

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real—to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

The neo-avant-garde of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, is due for a thoroughgoing reassessment. This collection of essays represents the first full-scale attempt to deal with the concept from an interdisciplinary standpoint. A number of essays in this book concentrate on fine art, particularly painting and sculpture, thereby adding significantly to the growing art historical literature in the field, but a number of the contributions also focus on poetry, performance, theatre, film, architecture and music. Given that there are also major essays here dealing with geographical blindspots in current neo-avant-garde studies, with thematic issues such as art’s entanglement with gender, mass culture and politics, with key neo-avant-garde publications, and with the purely theoretical problems attaching to the theorisation of the topic, this collection offers a multi-dimensional approach to the subject which is noticeably lacking elsewhere. Taken together these essays represent a consolidated attempt at re-thinking the ‘cultural logic’ of the immediate post-World War II period.