Embattled Avant-Gardes
Embattled Avant-Gardes

Author: Walter L. Adamson

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2009-08-17

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0520261534

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This sweeping work, at once a panoramic overview and an ambitious critical reinterpretation of European modernism, provides a bold new perspective on a movement that defined the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. Walter L. Adamson embarks on a lucid, wide-ranging exploration of the avant-garde practices through which the modernist generations after 1900 resisted the rise of commodity culture as a threat to authentic cultural expression. Taking biographical approaches to numerous avant-garde leaders, Adamson charts the rise and fall of modernist aspirations in movements and individuals as diverse as Ruskin, Marinetti, Kandinsky, Bauhaus, Purism, and the art critic Herbert Read. In conclusion, Adamson rises to the defense of the modernists, suggesting that their ideas are relevant to current efforts to think through what it might mean to create a vibrant, aesthetically satisfying form of cultural democracy.

Provisional Avant-Gardes
Provisional Avant-Gardes

Author: Sophie Seita

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1503609588

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What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine—from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks—to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.

Greenwich Village 1963
Greenwich Village 1963

Author: Sally Banes

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780822313915

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This book does not aim to document comprehensively the extraordinarily rich activity in New York City in the early 1960's. Instead, the author focuses on one year, 1963. This was the most productive year of the period 1958-64, the transition between the Fifties and Sixties. The author also focuses on one other place---Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan. For it was primarily here, in a place already historically and culturally mythologized as avant-garde terrain, that the emerging generation of vanguard artists lived, worked, socialized, and remade the history of the avant-garde. - from the Introduction.

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde
Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde

Author: David Cottington

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0300265077

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An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the “avant-garde” in Paris and London Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

Hegemony and Revolution
Hegemony and Revolution

Author: Walter L. Adamson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1983-01-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780520050570

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As a result of his inquiry into the nature of class, culture, and the state, Antonio Gramsci became one of the most influential Marxist theorists. Hegemony and Revolution is the first full-fledged study of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks in the light of his pre-prison career as a socialist and communist militant and a highly original Marxist intellectual. Walter Adamson shows how Gramsci's concepts of revolution grew out of his experience with the Turin worker councils of 1919-1920 as well as his experience combatting the Fascist movement.For Gramsci, revolution meant the steady ascension of a mass-based, educated, and organized "collective will," in which the final seizure of power would be the climax of a broader educative process. Success depended on countering not just the coercive power of the existing economic and political order but also the cultural hegemony of the state. A "counter-hegemony" for Gramsci required the leadership of an organized political party, but at its core lay his conviction that the common people were capable of self-enlightenment and could produce an alternative conception of the world that challenged the prevailing hegemonic culture.Adamson shows how these ideas, which Gramsci developed prior to his imprisonment, led him to a highly original concept of "subaltern" class movements that cohere not just on the basis of economic interest but by virtue of religious, ideological, regional, folkloric, and other sorts of cultural ties as well. These ideas of Gramsci have had enormous influence on a wide variety of subsequent cultural theories including postcolonialism and Foucault-style analyses of discursive practices.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-02-04

Total Pages: 992

ISBN-13: 900438829X

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A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

The Avant Garde: A Very Short Introduction
The Avant Garde: A Very Short Introduction

Author: David Cottington

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-01-31

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 019164255X

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'The avant-garde' is perhaps the most important and influential concept in the history of modern culture. For over a hundred years it has governed critical and historical assessment of the quality and significance of an artist or a work of art, in any medium-if these have been judged to be 'avant-garde', then they have been worthy of consideration. If not, then by and large they have not, and neither critics nor historians have paid them much attention. In short, modern art is and has been whatever the 'avant-garde' has made, or has said it is. But very little attempt has been made to explore why 'the avant-garde' carries so much authority, or how it came to do so. What is more, the term remains a difficult one to define, and is often used in a variety of ways. What is the relation between 'the avant-garde' -- that is, the social entity (the 'club') -- and 'avant-garde' qualities in a work of art (or design, or architecture, or any other cultural product)? What does 'avant-gardism mean? Moreover, now that contemporary art seems to have broken all taboos and is at the centre of a billion-pound art market, is there still an 'avant-garde'? If so, what is the point of it and who are the artists concerned? In this Very Short Introduction, David Cottington explores the concept of the 'avant-garde' and examines its wider context through the development of western modernity, capitalist culture, and the global impact of both. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Theory of the Avant-garde
The Theory of the Avant-garde

Author: Renato Poggioli

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1968

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780674882164

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Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Renato Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.

The Minjian Avant-Garde
The Minjian Avant-Garde

Author: Chang Tan

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-02-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1501773208

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The Minjian Avant-Garde studies how experimental artists in China mixed with, brought changes to, and let themselves be transformed by minjian, the volatile and diverse public of the post-Mao era. Departing from the usual emphasis on art institutions, global markets, or artists' communities, Chang Tan proposes a new analytical framework in the theories of socially engaged art that stresses the critical agency of participants, the affective functions of objects, and the versatility of the artists in diverse sociopolitical spheres. Drawing from hitherto untapped archival materials and interviews with the artists, Tan challenges the views of Chinese artists as either dissidents or conformists to the regime and sees them as navigators and negotiators among diverse political discourses and interests. She questions the fetishization of marginalized communities among practitioners of progressive art and politics, arguing that the members of minjian are often more complex, defiant, and savvy than the elites would assume. The Minjian Avant-Garde critically assesses the rise of populism in both art and politics and show that minjian could constitute either a democratizing or a coercive force. This book was published with generous support from the George Dewey and Mary J. Krumrine Endowment.

Remote Avant-Garde
Remote Avant-Garde

Author: Jennifer Loureide Biddle

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-02-04

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0822374609

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In Remote Avant-Garde Jennifer Loureide Biddle models new and emergent desert Aboriginal aesthetics as an art of survival. Since 2007, Australian government policy has targeted "remote" Australian Aboriginal communities as at crisis level of delinquency and dysfunction. Biddle asks how emergent art responds to national emergency, from the creation of locally hunted grass sculptures to biliterary acrylic witness paintings to stop-motion animation. Following directly from the unprecedented success of the Western Desert art movement, contemporary Aboriginal artists harness traditions of experimentation to revivify at-risk vernacular languages, maintain cultural heritage, and ensure place-based practice of community initiative. Biddle shows how these new art forms demand serious and sustained attention to the dense complexities of sentient perception and the radical inseparability of art from life. Taking shape on frontier boundaries and in zones of intercultural imperative, Remote Avant-Garde presents Aboriginal art "under occupation" in Australia today.