Avant-garde Movements Research Articles

Collective ethos. Phenomenology, early avant-garde and new anthropology

In the first part of the article, the author discusses the basic outlines of romantic and avant-garde anthropology. The crucial concept is related to the motives that drove the romantics in their journey toward individuation, whereas the members of avant-garde movement brought new visions of community into being. Unlike the romantics, early avant-garde movements advocated for ideals of general, globalized man mediated by technology and media. In the second part of the paper, the author analyses Husserl?s concept of all-community (Allgemeinschaft) bearing in mind the attempts of his phenomenology to extend our idea of community as much as it is possible by means of including everything that discloses the very foundations of our lifeworld into the concept of community. By doing so, Husserl encompassed not only the real and the past, but the possible intersubjectivity as well.

The Village

photo : f . català roca .© photographic archive f . català roca . courtesy of the arxiu històric del collegi d ’ arquitectes de catalunya 62 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 cover section belief in an age of intolerance My village sits on a circular platform. The gate of every house faces toward the square and stands perpendicular to ten streets, all culde -sacs. In the center of the square, one hundred meters high, rises an ancient tower without any opening. At the top flies a black flag woven with stars cut from silver paper. No one has gone beyond the square, and no one knows what lies beyond the walls that close off the streets. Needless to say, the legends that represent life outside as more frightening increase from century to century. Night and day the sky of my town, like the gonfalons of the Via Crucis, holds sun, moon, and stars motionless and palely luminous. When we young people awake, we ride bicycles and wake the neighborhood with loud trumpet blares. The girls bring chairs to the gates of their homes and sit there. They watch tenderly as we ride our races round and round the square, and they cover their chests with medals so their friends might win. We all wear jerseys embroidered with the names of our loves in colored thread. When the races are finished, we prop our bicycles against the tower and go sit at their sides. We hold hands and spend hours on end like this. Mothers open their balconies and lay out their damasks. As the hour of rest draws near, a trapdoor opens in a corner of the square, and in the midst of a cloud of incense appears Father Felix. He carries a stack of books under his arm and runs his other hand through his long beard. One day he says: “God always gives himself whole to us. Never does he give one arm or one cheek or one leg. Nor does he ever give one arm to another arm, or one cheek to another cheek, or one leg to another leg.” Another day he says: “Our village is an act of God’s love, and all things are the offspring of love.” At that moment, we look at length into each other’s eyes, and we again grasp amorous hands. Fra Felix, amidst another cloud of incense, reenters the hatch, laden with bicycles. The sky, with the sun, moon, and stars, moves gently like scenery. Translation from the Catalan By Lawrence Venuti The Village by J. V. Foix Editorial note: Copyright © to the Catalan text by the Heirs of J. V. Foix. Translation copyright© 2017 by Lawrence Venuti. J. V. Foix (1893–1987) was a Catalan poet and essayist; this photo was taken in Cadaqués, Girona, in 1969. At the start of the twentieth century, he was instrumental in introducing the European avant-garde movements into Catalonia. “The Village”is an extract from his collection of prose poems, Daybook 1918. To learn more about Lawrence Venuti, turn to his interview on page 23. left Giorgio de Chirico (1888– 1978), Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914, oil on canvas, 69 x 85 cm, private collection ...

The Alchemy of Photography: “Grotesque Realism” and Hybrid Nature in Jerry Uelsmann's Photomontages

The Alchemy of Photography: “Grotesque Realism” and Hybrid Nature in Jerry Uelsmann’s Photomontages Shun-liang Chao (bio) [B]elieve me, photography is alchemy, it is magic. —Jerry Uelsmann, “Some Humanistic Considerations of Photography” (1971)1 [L]et him alter, change, transform, and metamorphose himself into a hundred various shapes and figures. —François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 3, chapter 12 (1994; in French, 1546)2 When Joseph Niépce, William Talbot, and Louis Daguerr invented photography in the first half of the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe was amongst those who were quick to glorify the technology as the “most extraordinary triumph of modern science”3 not least because it outperformed language in reproducing the world as perceived by the corporeal eye. Nevertheless, some like Charles Baudelaire were not so enthusiastic about the mechanical reproduction of nature. In his Salon de 1859, Baudelaire, albeit extolling Poe as one of his literary beacons, stigmatizes the recent invention of photography exactly because its documentary power to literally reproduce nature contributes to the public taste for the true (le vrai) in such a way as to make beauty banal, monotonous, and cold.4 The taste for le vrai allows the artist to copy nature slavishly rather than to exert the imagination, “la reine des faultés” (the queen of faculties), and to paint what he sees rather than to plunge into the deepest recess of the soul to find “la sensation du neuf” (the sensation of novelty).5 In other words, photography is for Baudelaire anathema to the creative imagination. To be sure, Baudelaire could not foresee that his call for le neuf sowed the seed of the European avant-garde movement,6 which questioned the means of representation with terms of reference to “relativity and the [End Page 301] subconscious rather than the recording of a surface literal reality”7 and which was to give birth to various experimental art forms, including Dadaist and surrealist photomontages in the first half of the twentieth century. Experimental photography, as a radical practice of manipulating the photograph, traveled across the Atlantic and during the 1960s in the United States became a legitimate school of photography, of which Jerry Uelsmann (1934–) was a leading light. In the history of photography, Dada manipulations of the image, followed by surrealist manipulations, pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century in the use of photomontage to violate the documentary nature of the photograph. Robbing photography of its innate power to record visible reality, photomontage is a technique of assembling elements from individual photographs and makes itself “a handmaid of the grotesque,” a boundary creature of hybridization, owing to its tendency to shatter “boundaries more naturally than any other medium.”8 Both Dada and surrealist photomonteurs employ (grotesque) photomontage—in which separate parts are fused visibly and/or invisibly—to refashion the world, but with different purposes. Battling against “art as illusionistic, conjuring imaginary worlds” and against the enforcement of “a collective moral code,”9 Dada “denies itself the solace of good forms” (to use Jean-François Lyotard’s terms)10 through the practice of cutting, gluing, and patching together disparate verbal and visual fragments. For instance, in the best-known photomontages made in 1919–23 by Berlin Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, who initiated experiments in photomontage in 1918,11 the sense of rupture and fragmentation figures pronouncedly as a historical response to the traumatic loss of totality in Europe after World War I and as an ideological attempt to vandalize political power like the Weimar Republic.12 Deviating from the suggestively nihilistic propensity of Dada, surrealist photomontage, primarily born of combination printing or doubling, allows the (con)fusion of materials without fissures to dominate and declare “the seamless integrity of real.”13 Surrealist photomontage strives to reorganize the way the real is perceived or indeed redefine real values in terms of internal models; it presents a dreamlike world that is veri-similar, “a liquid state of disintegration” in which things ebb and flow without regard for the “form that things are generally required to have.”14 Surrealist photomontage is amongst other uses of photomontage in the early twentieth century that, Graham Clarke...

The Beat "Pad"

In her article "The Beat 'Pad'" Heike Mlakar analyzes the importance of Joan Vollmer's and Hettie Jones's Manhattan apartments as centers for the upcoming avant-garde movement of the time in order to understand the meaning of "home" in postwar bohemianism in general and specifically for female Beats. In sensationalized late 1950s films and in print media, the Beats were associated with low-rent Beat "pads" in poor urban areas, in which wild all-night parties were held—sites of drug use, destitution, and sexual promiscuity. Both Vollmer and Jones contributed greatly to the formation of the Beat Generation by providing the perfect setting for the flourishing of the artistic scene that would change the postwar literary scene forever: it was here, in Vollmer's Apartment 51, that the cornerstone for a new era in literature was laid, as Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac lived there simultaneously from 1945 to 1946. Similarly, the "pads" Hettie Jones shared with then-husband Amiri Baraka served a similar function, namely to build up a homogeneous Beat identity.

Art, Politicisation and Public Action

Cultural public action has progressively embraced two very different concepts of Art and culture: one universalist and linking innovation to democratisation; the other, differentialist and relativist, advocating a non–hierarchisable plurality of artistic forms. What happens to these differences within cultural public action and politicisation of the artistic sphere? One of the main aporias of cultural policy is the gap between the artist as an innovator and the general public, which can be seen from both demand (a function of democratisation), and supply (a function of support for creation) sides. This gap has been defended in a pessimistic, aristocratic fashion (‘Baudelarian Modernity’), and through politico-aesthetical rationalisation (avant–garde in nature). Yet in both cases, it raises the question of the gap between the dynamics of creation and of consumption — a gap that highlights the constant paradoxes that arise from supposing a direct relationship between artistic innovation on the one hand, and socio-political emancipation and progress on the other. Ironically, it is the upper classes that lend the greatest support for artistic daring. For both ideological and political reasons, most of the avant-garde movement was ranged against the bourgeoisie. The duality of the value of originality in Art (the aristocratic heroism of the innovator versus the democratic individualism of the expressive artist) point to two differing standpoints in the politicisation of art. This duality offers two answers, which are now superimposed on this paradox

The Object or the Fact? The Political Aesthetics of Interwar Reportage

This essay examines the ways divergent theories of materiality influenced the practices and critical assessments of literary reportage in primarily two interwar avant-garde movements—German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) and Soviet Factography. The essay turns first to the reportage writing of Joseph Roth and Ilya Ehrenburg as representative examples of the conceptualizations of the “object” and the “fact” put forward by these movements, and the second half of the essay shows how and to what political effect works of reportage by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin blur these philosophical and aesthetic distinctions. In doing so it demonstrates how interwar Marxist debates about the representation of object-ness in avant-garde literature might help assess the theoretical viability of the new materialist thought for literary studies today.

The Postmodern Nineteenth Century: “Sonnet—To Science” and the Case for Poe's Avant-Garde Poetics

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's poetry has often suffered at the hands of critics. This is due in large part to the complicated relationship between the poems and Poe's theoretical writings. The indeterminate quality of these latter texts—do they map a legitimate poetics, or are they instead further instances of hoaxing?—has led to a body of criticism in the United States that tends to mistake innovation for infelicity and to dismiss the poems merely as scaffolding for Poe's prose writings. In this paper, I argue that Poe's poetry, far from being the dabbling of an exemplary short story writer and magazinist, is as important to the American poetic tradition as that of his near contemporaries, founding figures Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. His poems, like theirs, not only entice and perplex us with what they have to say but also, as Jerome McGann has pointed out in The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel, with how they say it. Looking at “Sonnet—To Science” as one example, I show how Poe's poetry is able to remain out front of the very literary conventions—and accompanying evaluative criteria—it invokes by routinely teasing at the preferred reading those conventions are meant to authorize. The resulting disarray, calculated if at times vexing, is the hallmark of what I refer to as Poe's avant-gardism, that serious play that anticipates both the European and American avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and those wide-ranging poetries that continue to emerge in the twenty-first in response to the postmodern turn.

The Postmodern Nineteenth Century: “Sonnet—To Science” and the Case for Poe's Avant-Garde Poetics

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's poetry has often suffered at the hands of critics. This is due in large part to the complicated relationship between the poems and Poe's theoretical writings. The indeterminate quality of these latter texts—do they map a legitimate poetics, or are they instead further instances of hoaxing?—has led to a body of criticism in the United States that tends to mistake innovation for infelicity and to dismiss the poems merely as scaffolding for Poe's prose writings. In this paper, I argue that Poe's poetry, far from being the dabbling of an exemplary short story writer and magazinist, is as important to the American poetic tradition as that of his near contemporaries, founding figures Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. His poems, like theirs, not only entice and perplex us with what they have to say but also, as Jerome McGann has pointed out in The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel, with how they say it. Looking at “Sonnet—To Science” as one example, I show how Poe's poetry is able to remain out front of the very literary conventions—and accompanying evaluative criteria—it invokes by routinely teasing at the preferred reading those conventions are meant to authorize. The resulting disarray, calculated if at times vexing, is the hallmark of what I refer to as Poe's avant-gardism, that serious play that anticipates both the European and American avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and those wide-ranging poetries that continue to emerge in the twenty-first in response to the postmodern turn.

Picasso: esculturas en papel para un nuevo pensamiento estético.

Aunque desde sus orígenes el papel estuvo ligado fundamentalmente a su finalidad como soporte para la escritura, pronto encontrará en el arte un medio en el que desplegar sus más audaces posibilidades creativas. Así los artistas lo han empleado como soporte en diferentes procedimientos artísticos como el dibujo, el grabado, la acuarela, etc. Técnicas que desde la bidimensionalidad del papel han contribuido a ensanchar los horizontes expresivos del arte. Sin embargo, resulta menos conocida la importancia que adquiere en el arte desde su conformación tridimensional. La irrupción del papel como material escultórico en el arte se produce a principios del siglo XX, en los inicios de la modernidad, teniendo a Picasso como principal referente. La proyección de sus trabajos realizados en papel, resultará determinante para entender buena parte de los postulados escultóricos de los primeros movimientos de vanguardia, influyendo de manera decisiva en el posterior desarrollo de la modernidadi.

The Making of a Manifesto: Historiography, Transcription, and the Beginnings of Dada

Hugo Ball's famous “Dadaist Manifesto,” from July 14, 1916, has often been regarded as one of the founding documents of the Dada movement. This essay considers the text from the perspective of its complex publication and reception history, in order to reconstruct the way in which it became the early Dadaist centerpiece it is commonly seen as today. The case of Ball's manifesto, I argue, affords insight into a broader logic of historiographical narrativization that has shaped the scholarly understanding of Dada and its initial development in Zurich 1916: the privileged role ascribed to this particular text testifies, on my analysis, to a more general project of retroactive anchoring, which seeks to locate the official beginning of the movement in an “opening” gesture that can be dated, located, and named. Such a critical reassessment of the manifesto's editorial and historiographical treatment, from the 1960s onward, helps to focus attention, in turn, on a crucial, yet heretofore largely unexplored, dimension within the text itself. Ball's manifesto demands to be read, I suggest, less as the proclamation of a new avant-garde movement than as the performative staging of a programmatic linguistic practice, in which “Dada” appears as a process of dynamic (dis)articulation.

Swampwalls: dark matter and the lumpen army of art

Dominant notions of contemporary art are being overturned not by some radical avant-garde theory or movement, but instead by an “uprising” from within the confines of the “art factory,” as well as by newly embodied instances of informal everyday creativity that high culture has long overlooked. Theorists Negt and Kluge might have described this insurrection as the partial unblocking of a counter-public or proletarian sphere: a realm of fragmented identities and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. A more specific cultural interpretation suggests this mutiny from within and assault from below is the irrepressible brightening of “creative dark matter:” that marginalized and systematically underdeveloped aggregate of creative productivity, which nonetheless reproduces the material and symbolic economy of high culture. The results are explosive, or at least potentially so as this long, pent-up shadow archive spills out into the once forbidden dwelling place of mainstream law and order and high cultural privilege. Meanwhile, a new wave of socially engaged art is thriving on the margins of the art world. Like an enormous production warehouse this “post-public” creativity is developing sustainable farming, reenacting historical labor demonstrations, providing public services lost to decades of deregulatory economic policy, and initiating local bartering systems and environmental cleanups. Its vitality is something Joseph Beuys could have only dream about. And not surprisingly even this “autonomous” and “Interventionist” art is selectively becoming part of the mainstream culture industry through what Gilles Deleuze describes as an “apparatus of capture.” Nevertheless, one result of this new confrontation reveals this vibrant imaginary “from below” is pushing artistic production, pushing also discourse, pedagogy and cultural institutions into radically re-thinking definitions and possibilities not only involving the possibilities of contemporary avant-garde art practices, but also about the very nature of creativity, democracy, and political agency more broadly.

Evocations of Byzantium in Zenitist Avant-Garde Architecture

Evocations of Byzantium in Zenitist Avant-Garde Architecture considers references to Byzantium in the architecture and philosophy of Zenitism, an Eastern European avant-garde movement founded by Ljubomir Micić in 1921. In this article, Jelena Bogdanović analyzes the visionary projects for the Zeniteum, designed by the only architect member of the Zenitist group, Jo Klek (Josip Seissel), as a singular example of Byzantine-modernist architecture, which incorporated aspects of Byzantine total design, spirituality, and aesthetics of dematerialization. She outlines the ways Zenitist theories and visionary drawings privileged the “Byzantine” dichotomy of a dome and a wall over Western European trabeated architecture while also deviating from the historicist, neo-Byzantine architectural style popular in Eastern Europe. Zenitism used indirect evocations of the Byzantine to create a dynamic Byzantine-modernist architecture, the study of which enriches discourse on tradition and the avant-garde in architecture.

"Nicaraguan Words": José Coronel, the Vanguardia, and Whitman's "Language Experiment"

IN A 1953 memoir, Jose Coronel Urtecho, the founder of the Nicaraguan avant-garde, recalls the shock of a US visitor who noticed a portrait of Walt in Coronel's isolated estate along the San Juan River, near the border of Costa Rica. Coronel wrote that for his Yankee guest to find in rural Nicaragua surprised him as much as finding a caiman on Beacon Street or a tapir tranquilly in Boston Common.1 Coronel's surreal language frames a strange, exotic-animal Walt who can somehow nonetheless (notice that he is grazing tranquilly) be calmly and easily translated into any new context (Rapido 27). Indeed, the relations between the US and Latin America, of which this portrait-encounter represents an intriguing instance, have often been shaped by both this mutual exotic fascination and by countless literary and cultural translations, intersections, and crosscurrents.2What was doing in Nicaragua? In fact, US and Nicaraguan histories have been inextricably linked since the mid-nineteenth century, when traffic from the California Gold Rush (1848- 1855) across Nicaragua's short inter-oceanic route brought a sudden influx of US capital and culture.3 Later in the 1850s, Tennessee filibuster William Walker took advantage of civil war in Nicaragua to seize power and become-in one of the stranger moments in US history-president of Nicaragua until he was expelled by a Central American coalition. By the early twentieth century, a painful contradiction lay at the heart of Nicaraguan culture: Michele Gobat persuasively argues that while Nicaragua sought to imitate the prosperity and power of the US, many Nicaraguans fiercely resented the United States' frequent military, cultural, and financial interventions into their national affairs.4 And in fact, Jose Coronel himself evinced a conflicted attitude, writing: My personal attitude towards the United States was for many years ambivalent: found myself attracted, would almost say fascinated, and at the same time repelled by them.5But if US involvement in Nicaragua repelled Coronel, US literature had attracted him from a very early age. Having as a child first encountered in Spanish translation and then in Whitman's native tongue, Coronel once claimed, I can almost say that learned to read English reading Poe and Whitman (Rapido 51).6 From 1924 to 1927, while many of his peers went to Europe, the young Coronel chose to live and study in San Francisco, California, where he immersed himself in US literature. When he returned, however, he founded an avant-garde movement that vocally denounced the continued US intervention in Nicaragua, and called for the creation of an authentic, autochthonous Nicaraguan literature and culture. Yet despite this agenda, Coronel's Vanguardia, as it came to be called, remained strongly (and paradoxically) permeated by US literary culture, for Coronel had begun what would be a lifetime of serious engagement with US writers, with Walt occupying a prominent place.Indeed, among Latin American avant-garde writers, Jose Coronel stands out for his depth of reading in Whitman's work. As a poet and a translator, Coronel knew Leaves of Grass, and anthologized poems from it in three different collections.7 Yet few scholars have studied this long trans-continental literary relationship.8 So what did Coronel find compelling in Whitman's work? At stake here is not only an accurate vision of hemispheric literary history, but also an understanding of the real overlap between aesthetics and politics in twentieth-century US-Nicaraguan relations, because the texts of Coronel's group, and the politics of its members, would seriously impact the course of Nicaraguan literature and history. A reading of Coronel's later writings on Whitman, alongside the texts of his Vanguardia, reveals Whitman's presence, as the Nicaraguan avant-garde forged a nationalist, autochthonous literature that sought at the same time to be aesthetically new. …

Laughter and the Manifesto: Aldo Palazzeschi’s Counter-Futurist Futurist <i>Il controdolore</i>

Literary history made a Futurist out of Palazzeschi, and he himself said about his manifesto, Il controdolore (published in Lacerba in 1914) that it represented his “modest and direct” contribution to Marinetti’s movement. This article situates Il controdolore among other mainly contemporary texts devoted to laughter. Referring to theories of manifestos, it looks at Palazzeschi’s text as a theatrical space, underlining its literary and non-pragmatic nature. I intend to show that, in this iconic work, we start to recognize certain recurring features and ideas that position Palazzeschi’s very anomalous avant-garde experience among the ranks of the Futurists, in a space of autonomous opposition to both poles of the binary Futurism/non-Futurism. As a matter of fact, his position, liminal, and somewhat anarchic, makes his work a convincing antecedent of avant-garde movements to come, especially Dadaism.

Sullo sfondo del Futurismo: tempo e “malattia storica” di Friedrich Nietzsche e relativi esiti in Giovanni Papini

IN THE CONTEXT OF FUTURISM: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’S TIME AND “HISTORICAL SICKNESS” AND THEIR OUTCOME IN GIOVANNI PAPINI Within Futurism, a critical concept is formed of the past, of history in general, and of the way in which history is lived in the present, along with its harmful consequences, as it becomes an excuse to avoid progress by constantly looking back at the past. this is an idea that is exemplified well by Giovanni Papini in his Discorso di Roma. Contro Roma e contro Benedetto Croce. However, the past and history as “sickness” had already been analysed by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. In the early years of the 20th century, the German philosopher established his presence within Italian culture thanks to the authors of the literary journal Leonardo, and Papini in particular. these intellectuals not only wrote about Nietzsche in their magazine, but they also tried to make use of Nietzche’s thought. From a Futurist perspective, the connection between the two authors has to do primarily with the criticism of history and the past. However, the Röcken-born philosopher focuses on both the abuse and use of the historical past, while Papini carries this idea to extremes by stressing only the abuse that comes from it, therefore condemning it tout court. By doing this, the tuscan intellectual, shortly after adhering to Futurism, follows the guidelines imposed by the avant-garde movement and expresses the fiery magnitude of his thought, aimed at the destruction of the past in all its forms to make way for the long-denied future.

Mychajl’ Semenkos ukrainischer Futurismus zwischen west- und osteuropäischer Avantgarde

The article deals with the Ukrainian futurist Mykhail' Semenko (1892-1937) in order to remember this figure of the European avant-garde movement. Firstly, his poetological and ideological positions are contextualised by looking at his activities within the literature scene in Kiev and Charkov. Secondly, his poetry's characteristics are analysed, which are intertextuality, intermediality, synaesthetic efforts to amalgamate different arts and ways of perception, especially visual poetry, accompanied by a parodistic tendency. Besides, he was striving for a new language, fascinated by distant and exotic destinations and the idea of communism. Semenko's poetry has successfully combined contradictions between Western and Eastern European futurists, internationalism and Ukrainian traditions, urban and rural life.

A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts

AbstractThis article aims to reassemble a feminist genealogy of the posthuman in the arts, with a specific focus on the visual works conceived by female artists after the rise of what has been retrospectively defined as first-wave Feminism. Starting with the main avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century—specifically, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism—this genealogy analyses the second-wave Feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, with its integral exploration of the body highlighted by performance art. Following this, it takes into account the third-wave Feminism of the 1990s and its radical re-elaboration of the self: from Cyberfeminism and its revisitation of technology, to the artistic insights offered, on the one side, by critical techno-orientalist readings of the futures, and on the other, by the political and social articulations of Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism. Lastly, this genealogy accesses the ways contemporary female artists are dealing with gender, social media and the notion of embodiment, touching upon elements that will become of key importance in fourth-wave Feminism. This article is published as part of a collection dedicated to multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives on gender studies.

A divorce of avant-gardes: Surrealism and socialism in post-Reza Shah Iran

ABSTRACTRenato Poggioli’s “divorce of the avant-gardes” was one of the more colorful descriptions of the rift between aesthetic and social radicalism evident in the evolution of the historical avant-garde movements. Outside the geographic domain of studies of the Euro-American avant-garde, however, and even when those studies approach later movements such as Tel Quel, the existence of a natural allegiance between revolutionaries of art and revolutionaries of politics is more often than not taken for granted. This article examines an Iranian manifestation of such an avant-garde domestic dispute that occurred during a famously contested and vibrant period in Iran’s history: the period between the fall of Reza Shah in 1941 and the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mosaddeq in 1953. A debate was initiated—in the pages of literary journals and in the meeting rooms of literary societies and political parties—that, while not as cataclysmic as the political events of the era, had profound ramifications on Persian literature and what it meant to be a writer in Iran.

Der destruktive Charakter der Avantgarden. Walter Benjamins formale und kulturkritische Wende am Beispiel von Einbahnstraße

Walter Benjamin's oeuvre is usually divided into different phases or into different thematic foci. The present paper takes both approaches into account. Starting off from the metaphor of Destruktion, which can already be found in his very early works, I will show that Benjamin's turn toward cultural critique during the 1920s and his departure from academic writing are not only due to the fact that his Habilitation was rejected or that he adopted materialism, but are also a consequence of his intense interest in contemporaneous avant-garde movements. Only if we consider the context of the avant-garde can we appreciate Benjamin as an innovator not only of concepts but also of form-conscious styles of writing. These are esthetically productive responses to the dissolution of boundaries between media, art, and non-art which proceeded from Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. By looking at Einbahnstraβe and its specific formal means, I present Benjamin's new way of writing as a constructive-destructive act relying on contemporaneous avant-garde models.

Photo Noise

Like past avant-garde movements, glitch and noise in the twenty-first century are used to reveal the materiality of the medium. But instead of providing insight or clarity into the politics or social conditions of a technology, they demarcate broader conditions of opacity and blockage, contributing to what Jodi Dean has called ‘communicative capitalism’. The work of German photographer Thomas Ruff alongside the Düsseldorf School, New Photography and JPEG technology are used in this article to illustrate this tendency as a move away from meaning and toward visual noise and communicative breakdown. I use three core analytic registers: the deliberate failure to adhere to visual norms, communicative failure and machine failure and breakdown. Ruff’s work uses visual noise as art to at once reaffirm pervasive conditions of breakdown, failure and decline in high-tech global capitalism, while simultaneously providing a temporary reprieve from these conditions through an emergent form of visual beauty.