This volume, Futurism and the Technological Imagination, results from a conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas in Helsinki. It contains a number of re-written conference contributions as well as several specially commissioned essays that address various aspects of the Futurists’ relationship to technology both on an ideological level and with regard to their artistic languages. In the early twentieth century, many art movements vied with each other to overhaul the aesthetic and ideological foundations of arts and literature and to make them suitable vehicles of expression in the new Era of the Machine. Some of the most remarkable examples came from the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. By addressing the full spectrum of Futurist attitudes to science and the machine world, this collection of 14 essays offers a multifaceted account of the complex and often contradictory features of the Futurist technological imagination. The volume will appeal to anybody interested in the history of modern culture, art and literature.
Examines the tensions between the aims of military technology and modernist aesthetics in relation to perception.A basic aim of visual technologies is to collapse perception with the perceived object. Modernist aesthetics shows that an irreducible element of time and space always remains. Military technology tends towards the impossible goal of eliminating this dimension; modernist aesthetics exploits it. Placing military operations alongside modernist aesthetics reveals the civic sphere suspended between two incompatible desires.Reading the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Stephane Mallarme, the Italian Futurists and H. G. Wells against Apache attack helicopters, Network-Centric Warfare, satellites, decoys, sirens and radios, this book addresses issues such as targeting, surveillance, visibility and the invisible, broadcast and media, the military body, diasporas, geopolitics and beauty.Key Features- An important contribution to the increasingly important interdisciplinary field of war studies- Original and 'groundbreaking' readings of modernist art, literature, music, poetics and aesthetics- A valuable and provocative new reading of the avant-garde- Contributes to a new understanding of both military technics and modernist aesthetics
"TECHNOCRATS OF THE IMAGINATION traces the rise of collaborative art and technology labs in the U.S. from WWII to the present. Ryan Bishop and John Beck reveal the intertwined histories of the avant-garde art movement and the military-industrial complex, showing how radical pedagogical practices traveled from Germany's Bauhaus movement to the U.S. art world and interacted with government-funded military research and development in university laboratories. During the 1960s both media labs and studio labs leaned heavily on methods of interdisciplinary collaboration and the power of American modernity to model new modes of social organization. The book's chapters take up MIT's Center for Art, Science, and Technology, Bell Labs's E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) Salon, and Los Angeles Museum of Art's Art + Technology Program. Their interconnected history illuminates how much of contemporary media culture and aesthetics depends on the historical relationship between military, corporate, and university actors. In light of revived interest in Black Mountain College and other 1960s art and technology labs, this book draws important connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s. The authors situate the rise of collaborative art and technology projects in the 1960s within John Dewey's ideology of scientific democracy, showing how leading thinkers from the Bauhaus movement in Germany immigrated to the U.S. and brought with them a Deweyan model for collaborative and interdisciplinary art and technology research. Over the course of the decade, the U.S. government increased funding to scientific research at university and private laboratories. Beck and Bishop investigate how various art and technology projects incorporated the collaborative and innovative interdisciplinarity of the avant-garde art movement with the corporate funding structure driven by the U.S. government's military and technoscientific interests. Finally, the authors consider the legacy of 1960s art and technology projects. During the 1970s and 80s, defense R&D funding was less motivated by a Cold War corporate state, and was instead restructured according to an entrepreneurial and neoliberal model. At the same time, funding in the art world also became increasingly financialized and globalized. Today's art and technology work happens collaboratively not because of an intellectual commitment to interdisciplinarity, but because of the precarity of the contemporary labor market. This book will interest students and scholars in art history and theory, media studies, history of technology, American studies, cultural studies, and critical university studies"--
In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists’ investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold’s theater, Tatlin’s and Khlebnikov’s architectural designs, Mayakovsky’s writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.
Niebisch retraces how the early Avant-Garde movements started out as parasites inhabiting and irritating the emerging mass media circuits of the press, cinema, and wired and wireless communication and how they aimed at creating a media ecology based on and inspired by technologies such as the radio and the photo cell.
In Mexican Modernity, Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. Gallo tells the story of this other revolution by focusing on five artifacts that left a deep mark on the literature and the arts of the 1920s and 1930s: the camera and its novel techniques for seeing the modern world; the typewriter and its mechanization of literary aesthetics; radio and poetic experiments with wireless communication; cement architecture and its celebration of functional internationalism; and the stadium and its deployment as a mass medium for political spectacle. Gallo traces the ways artists and writers, armed with these artifacts, revolutionized representation by breaking with the traditional modes of production that had dominated Mexican cultural practices: Tina Modotti rose against the conventions of "artistic" photography by promoting a radically modern photographic aesthetics; typewriting authors rejected the literary precepts of modernismo to celebrate the stridencies of mechanical writing; and young architects abandoned older building materials for the symbolic strength of reinforced concrete. Gallo uncovers a secret history of Mexican modernity that includes a number of fascinating episodes: the pictorialist backlash against Modotti and Edward Weston; the postcolonial Remingtont typewriter; Mexican radio in the North Po the campaign to aestheticize cement through journals and artistic competitions; and the protofascist political spectacles held at Mexico City's National Stadium in the 1920s.
Breaking the time barrier -- Morse's inventions -- The writing of Van Gogh -- Taking off -- John Cage's early warning system -- Art in real time -- Is it happening? -- Short films about flying -- Bibliography -- Index
Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.
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.
