The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of (...) literary text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism. (shrink)

The Wallflower Avant-Garde highlights a strain of formalism visible in both modernist literature and contemporary queer studies, drawing attention to an aesthetic that is as quiet and quirky as it is queer. In studies of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery, Brian Glavey argues for a recalibrated understanding of the relation between sexuality and the aesthetic, revealing a non-oppositional avant-gardism that opts out of some of the binaristic imperatives that have structured recent (...) debates in queer theory. Refusing to decide between positive and negative affects or to side with either utopian or antisocial ambitions, The Wallflower Avant-Garde explores models of reading and writing about art that remain flexible enough to dig deep even as they gloss the surface.At the heart of this argument is a revaluation of modernist ekphrasis, a mode understood as literature's imitation or description of the visual arts. From the well-wrought urns of the New Critics onward, ekphrasis has figured prominently in the legacy of modernist literary criticism, but a tendency to read its complicated modes of relationality in terms of either autonomy or antagonism has obscured the forms of creative failure and imitation embodied in the desire to confuse poetry for pottery. Attending to mimetic and descriptive strategies without dismissing the aspirations for wholeness and closure that often animate them allows for the recognition that queerness and modernism are intertwined in unexpected and unpredictable ways, revealing new insights into the varieties of abstraction, preterition, and spatial form that stand behind modernism's investment in the aesthetic. (shrink)

The avant-garde has been popular for some time, but its popularity has tended to fly under the radar. This ¿popular avant-garde,¿ conceived as the meeting ground of the avant-garde and popular, avoids the divorce of art and praxis of which the avant-garde has been accused. The Popular Avant-Garde takes stock of the debates about both the ¿historical¿ (¿modernist¿) and posterior avant-gardes, and sets them in relation to popular culture and art forms. With a critical (...) introduction that examines the concepts of ¿the avant-garde,¿ ¿the popular,¿ and ¿the popular avant-garde,¿ the series of essays analyzes the way in which the avant-garde employs popular genres for political purposes, as well as how the popular acquires a critical function with respect to the avant-garde. Each of the volume¿s three sections considers a different aspect of the productive exchange between the avant-garde and popular: the popular avant-garde as a culturally hybrid and cross-border phenomenon; the play between the popular avant-garde and developments in media and technology; and the popular avant-garde¿s upending of conventional ideas about ¿the people¿ and ¿the popular.¿ The Popular Avant-Garde takes a fresh look at the now canonical Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist movements from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, and cultural and critical theory, while at the same time exploring less well-known avant-garde work in literature, film, television, music, photography, dance, sculpture, and the graphic arts. This volume¿s coverage of the American and Afro-American, Luso-Brazilian and Latin-American, East-European, and Scandinavian avant-gardes, in addition to the vanguards of Spain and other parts of Western Europe, will appeal to all those interested in avant-garde and popular art forms. (shrink)

_Five Faces of Modernity_ is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: _modernity_, _avant-garde_, _decadence_, _kitsch_, and _postmodernism_. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if (...) we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. _Five Faces of Modernity_ attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as _classicism_, _baroque_, _romanticism_, _realism_, or _symbolism_ and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage étudie dans sa première partie des formes diverses d'écriture, de la critique d'art au récit en passant par la poésie et le manifeste. Leurs auteurs, de Beckett à Michaux et de Paz à Tzara, ont été liés aux avant-gardes de la première moitié du vingtième siècle (en particulier à dada et au surréalisme) tout en empruntant une voie originale. Il aborde ensuite dans sa seconde partie les rapports de peintres comme Magritte et Léger à l'architecture. En outre, (...) il analyse le problème culturel de la collection d'art et du musée posé par des figures historiques de l'avant-garde comme Duchamp et Broodthaers. (shrink)

This volume proposes an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing in modernism and the avant-garde. The essays explore how the avant-gardes and modernism attempted to establish the material specificity and hybridityof media and art forms. The collection sheds light on the full range and import of the aesthetics of matter in avant-garde and modernist practice across all art forms from the 19th century to the present day.

The early twentieth century saw the rise of various movements and communities in response to a perceived crisis in a western modernity that many contemporaries viewed as decadent and in urgent need of social, cultural, and spiritual renewal. In Britain in particular, several groups of traditional artisans expressed their rejection of modernity by leaving the city to form small artistic communities. Such community experiments often had their roots in the nineteeth-century Arts and Crafts movement, a background shared by the (...) founding members of the community at Ditchling in Sussex — Eric Gill, Douglas (Hilary) Pepler, and Edward Johnston — but augmented by an increasing commitment to Roman Catholicism on the part of Gill and Pepler. The Ditchling group’s commitments to traditional handicrafts and the Church made their relationship to modernism tentative and difficult, but some members at least were familiar with artistic developments in the wider world. In particular, Eric Gill would reject modernism at Ditchling, while David Jones would embrace it to assert his artistic and spiritual independence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of (...) disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of (...) disalienation, that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

In Theorizing the Avant-Garde Richard Murphy mobilizes theories of the postmodern to challenge our understanding of the avant-garde and assesses its importance for the debates among theorists of postmodernism such as Jameson, Eagleton, Lyotard and Habermas. Murphy reconsiders the classic formulations of the avant-garde and investigates the relationship between art and politics via a discussion of Marcuse, Adorno and Benjamin. Combining close textual readings of a wide range of films as well as works of literature, this interdisciplinary (...) project will appeal to all those interested in twentieth-century modernist movements and postmodernity. (shrink)

Biographical note: Sascha Bru, Genth University, Belgium; Peter Nicholls, University of Sussex, UK.

They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the (...) history of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure. The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of toscanità or "being Tuscan." In their journals--Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power. (shrink)

A thorough history of the involvement of Australia's Northern Territory in World War II. Includes photos, extensive notes and bibliography.

Examines art and literature of the Americas through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Demonstrates how modernism and the avant-garde were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation"--Provided by publisher.

Michael O'Pray _Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions_ London and New York: Wallflower, 2003 ISBN 1 903364 56 6 136 pp.

A remarkable volume, the Russian avant-garde and radical modernism brings together the most significant movements and figures in Russian experimental art, cinema and literature of the early twentieth century (both pre-Soviet and Soviet) and presents them in commentary by leading scholars in the field" -- p. [4] of cover.

The most important modes of film practice, in my view, are art-house cinema and the avant-garde, both of which contrast with the classical Hollywood mode of film practice. While the latter is characterized by its commercial imperative, corporate hierarchies, and a high degree of specialization as well as a division of labor, the avant-garde is an “artisanal” or “personal” mode. Avant-garde films tend to be made by individuals or very small groups of collaborators, financed either by the (...) filmmakers alone or in combination with private patronage and grants from arts institutions. Such films are usually distributed through film cooperatives and exhibited by film societies, museums, and universities. (Consequently .. (shrink)

Here is a mystery: in 1939, when the Hollywood Studio System, at the peak of its power, produced such films as Gone with the Wind, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Wuthering Heights, the movies' number-one box-office attraction was not Gable, Garbo, Wayne, Garland, Stewart, or Olivier. In 1939, 1940, and 1941, the most popular performer in the American cinema was Mickey Rooney, who owed his success primarily to a low-budget MGM series that concentrated (...) on his character, Andy Hardy. Here is another mystery: at some point in the past decade, film studies, once the most innovative of the humanities disciplines, began to harden into a catechism of predictable questions and answers. By committing itself exclusively to rational critique, film studies left itself overmatched by the enormously popular, seductive, and enigmatic representations that constitute the movies. And by eschewing experimentation with the forms of criticism, film studies ironically cut itself off from the new methods of research and writing prompted by the twentieth century's revolution in communications technologies. Robert Ray's book about Andy Hardy proposes that alternative ways of thinking and writing about the movies can be derived from the humanities' equivalent of science's pure research--the avant-garde arts. Drawing on the Surrealist tradition, with its use of games, chance, fragments, anecdotes, and collage, Ray invents for film studies new forms of research that imitate the cognitive habits encouraged by photography, computers, and the cinema itself. In doing so, he reveals that even the Andy Hardy movies, a routine product of the Hollywood Studio System, were, after all, rich and mysterious. (shrink)

A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today's cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be "neo-baroque"--characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a "sign of the times" in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the "new science" to television series, video games, and "zapping" with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with (...) a refusal to distinguish between "Donald Duck and Dante." Avoiding hierarchies or ghettos among works, he takes his readers on a fast-paced expedition through contemporary culture that closes with an elegant essay on evaluation and classical form. According to Calabrese, the enormous quantity of narrative now being produced has led to a new situation: everything has already been said, and everything has already been written. The only way of avoiding saturation has been to turn to a poetics of repetition. The author shows that pleasure in texts is now produced by tiny variations, and a certain kind of citation from other works has taken on a central importance that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In describing this development, and others shared by both avant-garde and mass media, he makes us aware of the rapid shrinkage in the once ample space between "highbrow" and "lowbrow." Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Several scholars (Bartoloni 2019, Bukdahl 2017, Vogt 2019) focused on Mario Perniola's perspective on art, post-human sexuality and political theory. Yet little has been written on the philosophical and literary sources - specifically Stoicism, the Baroque and the Avant-Gardes - which influenced his standpoint. The objective of this paper is to develop Perniola's conception of a strategically oriented beauty, which implies a connection between the aesthetic element and the political-effectual one.

The history of twentieth-century visual arts can no longer be written as a succession of avant-garde movements, contends eminent art historian Bernard Smith in this stimulating book. He argues that a return to the concept of period style is inevitable and that modernism--the dominant "style" of art that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and continued through the 1960s--deserves recognition as a period style. Smith renames this period Formalesque since it is no longer modern and since it (...) emphasizes the formal values of art more than any previous period does. In a wide-ranging reformulation of art history in the twentieth century, the author defines the nature and development of Formalesque--an avant-garde style that arose between 1890 and the First World War, was institutionalized between the world wars, and flourished anew between 1945 and 1960. Identifying the Formalesque period, says Smith, makes it possible also to identify dialectical adversaries, such true oppositional avant-garde styles of the twentieth century as Dada, Surrealism, and the Neue Sachlichkeit. These constitute the formative elements of the modernism--now called postmodernism--that became increasingly dominant after 1960. The author locates twentieth-century artistic movements and developments in a broad cultural context and concludes with a thought-provoking examination of the relation between the Formalesque and European and American cultural imperialism. (shrink)

This article is about a period of technology transfer – the late 1910s and 1920s – when wartime aerial reconnaissance techniques and operations were being adapted to a range of civilian uses, including urban planning, land use analysis, traffic control, tax equalization, and even archaeology. At the center of the discussion is the ‘photomosaic’: a patchwork of overlapping aerial photographs that have been rectified and fit together so as to form a continuous survey of a territory. Initially developed during (...) the First World War to provide coverage of fronts, photomosaic mapping was widely practiced and celebrated during the postwar years as an aid to urban development. The article traces both the refinements in photomosaic technology after the Armistice and the rhetorical means by which the form’s avant-garde wartime reputation was domesticated into an ‘applied realism’ that often effaced its site-specific perspective, its elaborately rectified optics, and the oppositionality of both its military and civilian uses. The article has a broader theoretical aim as well. Classic statements of both structuralist and post-structuralist spatial theory have produced an ossified geometry wherein the vertical is the axis of paradigm, top-down strategy, and manipulative distance and the horizontal the axis of syntagm, grassroots tactics, and resistant proximities and differences. In its close study of the technology and rhetoric surrounding interwar photogrammetry, the article provides an example of how one might reverse the long-standing misrecognition of high-altitude optics as effacing time, difference, and materiality – and what it might mean to view such optics as, instead, a resource in turning from abstract toward differential conceptions of both aerial photography and our theoretical habits. This turn I call ‘applied modernism’, a term that accesses both the wartime photomosaic’s affiliation with avant-garde painting and its insistence that portraits of the total are always projections from partial, specific vantages. (shrink)

Modernism remains a complex and complicated term, contested not only with regard to its historical meaning or period boundaries but also with regard to its relevance for aesthetics and, more broadly, for the contemporary understanding of art. Is modernism the culmination of modernity, its crowning moment or perhaps its tipping point toward the purported postmodernity/postmodernism, or is the radical challenge instigated by modernism’s artistic inventiveness—what I call its avant-garde momentum—still extant and current beyond the apparent succession of modernism by (...) postmodernism? This essay approaches these questions through a discussion of various approaches to artworks in modernism and the avant-garde: Adorno, Rancierè, Heidegger, and Lyotard in order to explore the extent to which aesthetics remains both the precondition and the optics for modernism. At the same time, it assesses the implications of the avant-garde’s challenge to the very idea of art. The divergence in the discussions of the split between modernism and avant-garde, as well as the contention between proposals for a new aesthetic and the critique of the notion of art, pivot on the issue of freedom and the role of the human. In its challenge to art, the avant-garde calls into question the centrality of the human and the idea that freedom is a human possession. In doing so, it rethinks the notion of the artwork with regard to the non-human or inhuman. Against the backdrop of this rift between modernism and the avant-garde, the essay discusses the works of Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein. While Stein’s avant-garde writing is intensely engaged in its practice with drafting a new poetic rigor of writing and experience, the modernist Stevens uses aesthetic paradigms and reflection to trigger the liminal state at the end of the imagination or the mind. This brief study of Stevens and Stein illustrates the fact that modernism and the avant-garde inhabit the same historical moment yet part ways with regard to aesthetics. As the avant-garde elaborates its new rigor in order to work in tune with the non-human reach of the event, it moves beyond the metaphysical determination of art and aesthetics. In the avant-garde, what is ‘proper’ to humankind comes to be “inhabited by the inhuman,” to paraphrase Lyotard, and is “celebrated” as such. This fissure means also that the momentum of the avant-garde extends beyond the historical boundaries of, for many already closed, chapter of modernism. (shrink)

Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will explore how these (...) ideas have been used to, on one hand, stage a critique of Afrodiasporic musics, and specifically jazz, and, on the other hand, diminish and obscure the relation between the post-classical and Afrodiasporic avant-gardes. In the second part I will develop another lineage of rhythm, orthogonal to that of the post-classical avant-garde. Drawing from philosophy and Afrocentric, Afromodernist and, finally, Afrofuturist theory, I will map a theoretical move from rhythm understood, in its post-classical guise, as an exclusive and strictly musical category, to rhythm understood as an inclusive and plural category. This likewise charts a passage from an aesthetically autonomous understanding of objects of art to social and collective forms of artistic practice. (shrink)

Fascism, modernism and modernity -- The Jew as anti-artist : Georges Sorel and the aesthetics of the anti- Enlightenment -- La Cité française : Georges Valois, Le Corbusier and fascist theories of urbanism -- Machine primitives : Philippe Lamour and the fascist cult of youth -- Classical violence : Thierry Maulnier and the legacy of the Cercle Proudhon.

This article argues that a sustained, consistent, and ambitious argument underlies Annette Michelson’s writings on art and film across the 1970s and 1980s. Working in relation to modernist discourses of the 1960s, Michelson links an account of time and temporal organization in cinema to a developmental model of film spectatorship. Read in this way, Michelson’s writing represents an alternate and overlooked strand of film theory and criticism, one that provides a new account of cinematic avant-gardes—and an alternative to what (...) I call the infantile tendencies of film theory that is grounded in the terms of cognitive maturity. (shrink)

Makes a case for the power of music and sound in the face of fascistic forces, from modernism to the present.

Using the literary work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the Italian Futurist movement and an early associate of Mussolini, the author explores the point of contact between a "progressive" aesthetic practice and a "reactionary" political ideology.

The present article considers the avant-garde as experience, and primarily as the experience of perceiving avant-garde art in terms of interruption, estrangement, and arrest. The focus is on the “internal”—utopian—time of the avant-garde, or the dimension of the social imagination. This is directly related to Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, and his idea of the interruption of time. The article analyzes the connection between the continuing interest in the avant-garde and the problem of representing utopia. (...) class='Hi'>Avant-garde art is considered as a “sign of history” according to Kant: it takes on the function of an index in that it delineates space for new social relations. Avant-garde art is a form of mapping out a new community, which precedes any institutionalization. Such an intrusion of the “invisible” into avant-garde imagery is explored with the example of Jean-Luc Marion’s reflections on Rothko and Marie-José Mondzain’s conception of the icon as the forerunner of modern abstract art. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the historical imperative for art to create new forms. This imperative has become especially pronounced in the Age of the Avant-Garde. For that reason, I focus on the way in which avant-garde creativity typically proceeds. To that end, I rely on Paul Grice’s theory of communication.

The Challenge of the Avant-Garde is the fourth of six books in the series Art and its Histories, which form the main texts of an Open University course. The course has been designed for students who are new to the discipline but will also appeal to those who have undertaken some study in this area. This volume traces the challenge posed to the academic canon by the emergent avant-garde of the early and mid-nineteenth century.It looks at significant (...) shifts in the development of the concept, both in moves away from the sense of social leadership to a desire for artistic autonomy in the later nineteenth century and then a reverse movement to bridge the gap between art and life in the revolutionary avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. The book closes with an examination of the eventual incorporation of the avant-garde as a form of modern canon by the eve of World War II. Throughout, it seeks to relate the discourse of artistic avant-gardism in all its forms to contemporary social and political histories. (shrink)

Reflections on the relationship of aesthetics to politics tend to circle, almost compulsively, around a relatively stable set of conceptual oppositions, inherited from German philosophies of the late 18th century. This essay proposes an expansion of the theoretical terms of the debate by extending the field of transcendental aesthetics into the domain of historical temporalization. Fundamental art-historical categories may thereby be incorporated, philosophically transformed, into ‘aesthetics’ as forms of historical temporalization: avant-garde, modern, contemporary. The essay expounds two theses, in (...) particular: 1. The historical subsumption of the temporality of the avant-garde by the temporality of the modern: the modern stands to the avant-garde as the negation of its politics by the repetition of the new –‘the new as the ever–same’; 2. the historical subsumption of the temporality of the modern by ‘the contemporary’: the contemporary stands to the modern as the negation of the dialectical logic – and hence specifically developmentalist futurity – of the new by a spatially determined, but imaginary co-presencing. One effect of this latter subsumption, it is argued, is a particular, regressive ‘repetition of the national’, at the level of cultural representation, on the terrain of the global. (shrink)

The contributors to this book rewrite Richter's history to include his pivotal role in the development of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and his political activism.

The first part of this paper explores the kinship in diagnosis of contemporaneity of Hugo Ball and Martin Heidegger. Both thinkers recognize leveling as an important trait of their age. In Ball?s terms, leveling is identified with the apocalyptic abolishment of humanity. That happens by equalizing all of human creation, which becomes possible only after the abolishment of the hierarchy of values, thanks to which it was previously possible to distinguish a work of art from an average work. With Heidegger, (...) leveling is equated with the perverted forms of curiosity. Unlike the former forms of curiosity, coupled by the common desire for deeper insight, modern curiosity is fairly superficial, let loose with no boundaries to all the impressions which supersede the expected and already seen. In the second part of the paper, Husserl?s term of passive synthesis is examined, so we can observe the intervention of phenomenology from the perspective of deconstruction of the effects of leveling. I conclude with a warning that we cannot protect ourselves from the world to which we are exposed by natural subjectivity and conventional forms of knowledge. Which insight leads us to revert to the sources of subjectivity, the idea common to both the avant-garde and the phenomenologists. (shrink)

Many artists who identify as politically committed are suspicious of art due to the Situationist argument that revolutionary art is impossible. If right, the argument also rules out a future artistic avant-garde. I believe that, by concentrating on the truthtelling possibilities of art, we can meet the Situationist argument. To do so, it is necessary to change the relationship art has to everyday life. We can then speculate on the form of a future avant-garde.

"Offering a critical perspective-rather than a traditional survey, this provocative text explores the art of the last twenty years-the latter 1970s, the 1980s, and the first half of the 1990s-in both a thematic and chronological fashion. Using an engaging and approachable style-and an abundance of color illustrations, it takes a long look at dominant tendencies in contemporary art in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Russia-and provides a series of challenging view points on the most advanced art forms, (...) themes, and issues."--Amazon. (shrink)

By demonstrating that many of the concepts and styles associated with Modernism were actually derived directly from cultures such as Japan, China, Korea, India, Egypt, Assyria, West Africa, and the Pacific Islands, this book provides an entirely new way of looking at the evolution of Modernist art and literature in the West.

This paper offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with “modernism,” the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. These perspectives are largely absent in other alternatives in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is placed on Lacan’s affinities with phenomenology, a tradition he criticized and to which he is often seen as opposed. Two general issues are discussed. The first is Lacan’s unparalleled appreciation of (...) the paradoxical nature of human experience, together with his treatment of paradox as almost a criterion of truth. These points are illustrated by considering Lacan’s conceptions of the self and of erotic desire. The second issue is Lacan’s focus on the “ontological dimension,” on overall styles or modalities of what might be termed “transcendental subjectivity”: namely, what he calls the registers of the “Imaginary,” the “Symbolic,” and the “Real.” By emphasizing the incommensurable yet interdependent nature of these modalities, Lacan offers a synthesis of dynamic/conflictual and formal/ontological dimensions of the human condition. This paper offers an encompassing portrait of Lacan’s major ideas that is at odds with the widespread assumption that Lacan is somehow a deeply anti-humanist thinker who derides the subjective dimension. Lacan’s most distinctive contributions are fundamentally concerned with the nature of human experience. They show strong affinities with hermeneutic forms of phenomenology inspired by Heidegger, a philosopher who focused on ontological modes of Being and considered paradox as a mark of truth. (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument (...) has been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)