Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital

Abstract

The term avant-garde continues to generate controversy. “Previous avant-garde theorists,” Seita writes—and I am included on her list—“have tended to consider avant-gardes as monolithic, homogeneous, and historical entities outside their material and social contexts. They have either tended to repeat the self-theorizations of avant-garde writers or have based their interpretations on a very selective range of documents and objects.” In response, Seita's own study promises to “fill [the] gap by offering an extensive diachronic study of avant-garde print communities beyond modernism.” The “communities” in question, based on an examination of American “little” magazines, include “New York Proto-Dada,” “Proto-Conceptualisms,” “Proto-Language and New Narrative,” “Feminist Avant-gardes” and “Communities of Print in the Digital Age.” The repeated “Proto” is meant to signal Seita's view that more attention should be paid to those on the fringes of avant-garde communities, since the central figures have been discussed again and again.It is too bad that doctoral dissertations (Seita's book began as one) have to have a specific—and often polemical—thesis. Seita's individual chapters, detailing the contribution of individual magazines, especially their use of typography and innovative spatial design, are both informative and original: she uncovers a wealth of material not widely known. But her criteria for inclusion—“provisionality, periodicity, multiple authorship, heterogeneity of contents”—are dubious: how “heterogeneous” can texts be and still exemplify the novelty and surprise that characterize avant-garde writing? In her “New York Proto-Dada” chapter, for instance, Seita discusses The Blind Man, which ran for only two issues in 1917 and is remembered today as the vehicle for Marcel Duchamp's revenge against the Salon of Independent Artists for refusing to exhibit his urinal called Fountain. Duchamp wrote an anonymous essay for Blind Man defending Fountain as distinguished by the artist's choice rather than his individual creation—a distinction that was to change art forever. But for Seita, it is the community, not the individual, that counts, and so her account of The Blind Man gives equal time to Beatrice Wood, the legendary Dada muse, who financed some of Duchamp's enterprises and kept company with him and their mutual friend Henri-Pierre Roché. And Mina Loy's collage-poem “O Marcel . . . Otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise's,” assembled from fragments of overheard conversation, is given more space than any text by Gertrude Stein, no doubt because, like Duchamp, Stein was never a member of any avant-garde community: she was herself a one-person avant-garde community, surpassing all her contemporaries.In the same vein, in her “Proto-Language” chapter, Seita deliberately focuses on the now forgotten Barbara Baracks and the feminist poet Kathleen Fraser, whose magazine How(ever)—the title is a rather obvious imitation of the word play devised by Charles Bernstein and his fellow Language poets—is given twelve full pages of discussion. How(ever) and its successor How 2, were designed to counter the male dominance of the Language magazines, but Seita does not mention that a woman, Lyn Hejinian, was one of the founders of the original Language movement or that Rae Armantrout and Susan Howe, both major poets who by now have transcended all labels, were regularly printed in the various Language magazines of the first generation.Seita's book is at its best when it reconsiders and examines small-press journals now little known but genuinely innovative, like Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's 0 – 9 and the offset-printed some/thing edited by David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg. Indeed, if we focus on her subtitle Little Magazine Communities rather than on Seita's claim to rethink the meaning of avant-garde, this is a genuinely valuable book, rediscovering and realigning literary communities so as to give us a better sense of the imagination and energy that characterized offbeat poetry and poetics in the twentieth century.