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.


The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

Author: Rosalind E. Krauss

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1986-07-09

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780262610469

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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.


How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art

How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art

Author: Serge Guilbaut

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 022679184X

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"A provocative interpretation of the political and cultural history of the early cold war years. . . . By insisting that art, even art of the avant-garde, is part of the general culture, not autonomous or above it, he forces us to think differently not only about art and art history but about society itself."—New York Times Book Review


Brave New Avant Garde

Brave New Avant Garde

Author: Marc James Léger

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1780990502

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Brave New Avant Garde is a collection of essays that ask the questions: what is an adequate model of contemporary avant garde practice and what are its theoretical premises? With this it asks the related question, echoing Alain Badiou: must the avant garde hypothesis be abandoned? Brave New Avant Garde stands in opposition to postmodern post-politics and the view that radical practice has no other future than its reduction to the workings of the free market in the form of the "simple process of cultural production" or to variations on the cultural politics of representation. Today's avant garde, formed in the wake of the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of the anti-globalization movement, represents a counter-power that rejects the inevitability of capitalist integration. The way out for artists in today's world of creative industries is defined in these pages as a psychoanalytically informed sinthomeopathic practice, a critical identification with prevailing conditions of production that avoids the surplus enjoyment of the ideology of postmodern pluralism.


Theorizing the Avant-Garde

Theorizing the Avant-Garde

Author: Richard John Murphy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-04-22

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780521648691

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In Modernism, Expressionism and Theories of the Avant Garde, Richard Murphy mobilises theories of the postmodern to challenge our understanding of the avant-garde. He assesses the importance of the avant-garde for contemporary culture and for the debates among theorists of postmodernism such as Jameson, Eagleton, Lyotard and Habermas. Murphy reconsiders the classic formulation of the avant-garde in Lukacs and Bloch, especially their discussion of aesthetic autonomy, 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, it draws on a rich array of critical theories, such as those of Bakhtin, Todorov, MacCabe, Belsey and Raymond Williams. This interdisciplinary project will appeal to all those interested in modernist and avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, and provides a critical rethinking of the present-day controversy regarding postmodernity.


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 Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy

Author: Slav N. Gratchev

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-10-05

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1793615756

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The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy presents a range of chapters written by a highly international group of scholars from disciplines such as literary studies, arts, theatre, and philosophy to analyze the ambitions of avant-garde artists. Together, these essays highlight the interdisciplinary scope of the historic avant-garde and the interconnectedness of its artists. Contributors analyze topics such as abstraction and estrangement across the arts, the imaginary dialogue between Lev Yakubinsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, the problem of the “masculine ethos” in the Russian avant-garde, the transformation of barefoot dancing, Kazimir Malevich’s avant-garde poetic experimentations, the ecological imagination of the Polish avant-garde, science-fiction in the Russian avant-garde cinema, and the almost forgotten history of the avant-garde children’s literature in Germany. The chapters in this collection open a new critical discourse about the avant-garde movement in Europe and reshape contemporary understandings of it.


Sfera E Il Labirinto

Sfera E Il Labirinto

Author: Manfredo Tafuri

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 9780262700399

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"Tafuri's work is probably the most innovative and exciting new form of European theory since French poststructuralism and this book is probably the best introduction to it for the newcomer. ..."


Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde

Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde

Author: Julia Vaingurt

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2013-05-31

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0810166526

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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.