Avant-garde Practice Research Articles

Against the Wall: Ideology and Form in Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht

This essay looks at Mies van der Rohe’s 1926 Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht from the perspective of contemporaneous theories of Marxism, and particularly those of Luxemburg herself. The essay sets out to explore the political backdrop against which the monument was made, Mies’s own political allegiances at the time, and the symbolic and spatial implications of this influential architectural monument. The essay reflects on the relationship between avant-garde practices and Marxism, and the role of ideology in framing certain practices within architectural modernism.

La reflexión visual en Roberto Bolaño. Narración, dictadura y vanguardias en Estrella distante

Este artículo construye sus argumentos a partir de una lectura de la novela Estrella distante del escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño. Se trata de desarrollos que se detienen en los componentes visuales del relato, en las divergencias temporales con que se estructura la narración y en los vínculos que estos tienden con la historia política evocada en la ficción (el personaje principal tiene como proyecto demostrarle al mundo la afinidad entre el arte de vanguardia y la dictadura de Pinochet recién instalada en el país). Las variadas presencias de lo fotográfico son comprendidas como el núcleo de una reflexión visual que recorre la literatura de Roberto Bolaño. Este artículo toma en consideración una polémica que enfrentó a dos intelectuales chilenos en torno a la relación entre las prácticas artísticas de vanguardia que tuvieron lugar en Chile en tiempos de la dictadura y el Golpe de Estado de 1973. Esto es leído en relación con el diálogo soterrado que la novela de Bolaño establece con dichas prácticas de vanguardia.

Kriza modernosti – nekoliko odgovora od Liotara do Vitgenštajna i Balarda /The Crisis of Modernity – a Few Answers from Lyotard to Wittgenstein and Ballard

Once again the crises of modernity becomes actual because of the transitive nature of current situation in contemporary art (the postmodern is still a valid regulatory principle). Comparing classical texts of Lyotard and Habermas, with Rancière’s contemporary perspectives on aesthetics and politics – I will try to recontextualise Lyotard’s thesis on the necessity of rewriting modernity (and the modern) through return to original modernity (ie. avant-garde practices) which brought Lyotard closer to Rancière’s interpretation of the avant-garde. With reference on The Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I will also examine connection between Rancière’s aesthetics and analytic philosophy and – in the case of literature of James Graham Ballard – try to show how critique of the modern works in practice (i.e. how Ballard brought concept into neo-avantgarde literature).

What does translation know?

ABSTRACTThis essay introduces Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl (2010) into the tradition of ‘experimental translation’ – translations that deliberately and severely depart from their source texts, opening up the question of what counts as a translation in the first place. I argue that Ventrakl, which stages a long encounter and ‘collaboration’ with the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl, enriches our understanding of the relationship between translation and contemporary experimental poetic practice through a method that I term ‘radical contextualization’. By strenuously foregrounding the processes of learning and composition that go into its vanguardist attempt at an encounter with history, Ventrakl also foregrounds the question of the ethics of learning, particularly as it affects the relationship between artistic originality and historical reliance on pre-codified modes of communication and authority. I read Ventrakl in light of both translation theory (especially the possibilities opened up by Benjamin’s famous formulations in ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’) and theories of vanguardism and political efficacy in order to point out how important a poetics of translation, particularly one combined with the demystifying properties of contextualisation, can be for a more generalised theory of avant-garde poetic practice.

Paper, Photography, and a Reflection on Urban Landscape in 1960s Japan

This article investigates how avant-garde photographers have explored the material dimensions of the photographic medium in postwar Japan. In particular, it examines the work of Provoke, a radical artistic group that collectively publicized a specific visualization of the urban landscape during the course of the late 1960s. Rejecting the complacent perspectives of conventional reportage and naïve realism, the Provoke artists attempted to construct a direct synthesis of experimental avant-garde and documentary practice as a useful method of social critique. At the center of Provoke's experimentalism there was an original discourse of document and documentation that brought about a new style of photographs characterized by their rough, blurry, and grainy imagery. Provoke's innovative conceptual approach and method of document creation was mediated through paper as a significant material support of the photographic image. Their experiments with paper brought to the fore the affective dynamics of urban forms, signs, and textuality, through which the artists were able to reflect a new ontology of the city in relation to the specific physical materiality of their documentation.

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.

Exploring the hinterlands: avant-garde temporality, socialist realism, and Pogodin’s Aristocrats

Soviet socialist realism is frequently constructed as the death knell of the Russian avant-garde. The combination of vague instructions (mainly concerning the required effect of the work, rather than its formal construction) with severe consequences for non-compliance restricted the appetite for experimentation amongst Soviet writers of the socialist realist era. This article considers the relationship between avant-garde technique and the socialist realist project through a case study of one of the earliest socialist realist plays, Nikolai Pogodin’s Aristocrats (1934–5). Through analysis of the temporal aesthetic underwriting Pogodin’s play, the article explores how avant-garde approaches to temporality continue to influence post-avant-garde play-texts, suggesting a model for the theatrical transitions that occur at the avant-garde hinterlands. Finally, it turns to the production of Pogodin’s play under Nikolai Okhlopkov at the Realistic Theatre and his use of the vortex form as a scenographic idiom. The article concludes by arguing that these hinterland texts, where avant-garde technique serves socialist realist intentions, form a vital moment in understanding how a legacy for Russian avant-garde practice can be defined.

Fostering a Post-Digital Avant-Garde: Research-led teaching of music technology

In this article we discuss how contemporary computational and electronic music-making practices might be characterised as a post-digital avant-garde. We also discuss how practitioners within the higher education sector can play a role in leading the development of these practices through their research and teaching. A brief overview of twentieth-century avant-garde practices is provided to set the scene before a case for defining a post-digital avant-garde is made. By way of illustration, the authors describe their own post-digital creative practices and then discuss how these integrate into their academic duties. We reflect on themes that run through avant-garde practices and continue into the post-digital. Finally, we describe how these themes inform an undergraduate music technology programme such that it might be shaped to reflect these developments and prepare students for a post-digital future.

F.T. Marinetti's Vocalizations

Author(s): Mather, David | Abstract: In portraits of Italian futurist founder and poet Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti, the staging of the revelation of modern character meant factoring in many different, sometimes competing qualities, including his individual traits as well as broader visual principles that fit with avant-garde practices. In particular, an emphasis on his vocal ability would become a prominent feature of many of the most successful depictions.Portraits of Marinetti offer a valuable glimpse of some of the underlying tensions or outright contradictions related to this futurist aim, such as how this dominant, domineering, figure came to signify the movement at large and to overshadow the artistic achievements of others, as well as how early futurism’s popular success in Italy played a role in hastening an authoritarian return to political and ideological traditions.

“Singing the Silent Songs, Enchanting Songs”: Bob Kaufman's Aesthetics of Silence

In the early 1960s, African American poet Bob Kaufman began what would turn into a decade-long period of silence, withdrawing from poetry and the world at large. While much has been written about Kaufman’s relationship to the Beats, jazz, and the Black Arts Movement, very little theorizing has been done on Kaufman’s period of silence, with many critics simply viewing it as a biographical aberration. This article suggests that such misreadings of Kaufman’s silence fail to acknowledge the agency and radical aesthetics behind it. When viewed in the context of avant-garde practices, Kaufman’s silence makes sense as a performative gesture that collapses the divide between life, art, and politics. Furthermore, silence becomes an ethical act, in part because it declares the autonomy of the poem in opposition to the reactionary politics that govern the world. This article ends by suggesting that being cognizant and sensitive to such a poetics of silence can allow us to reconsider the meaning of the lyric poem.

Vernacular traditions in Norwegian jewelry design - Past, present, future

Living in an era of globalization, the capability of communicating identity has become of greater importance than ever. This has increased our estimation of the vernacular, which represents an expression of a national or local identity. In Norway the vernacular tradition in silver jewelry is particularly strong. It has played an important role not only locally, but also in the constantly changing relation with the outside world, in accordance with the societal situation. It should therefore constitute a reliable indicator of how our country relates to the present process of globalization. The aim of the paper is to throw light on the relation between Norway’s role on the global scene and the use of the vernacular tradition in the development of jewelry design in general. It consists of a historical exploration that leads up to a discussion the present and future situation. Today there is a cleft between consumer behavior and avant-garde practice. In accordance with the global situation and Norway’s geopolitical situation of existing in the outskirts of political and economic decisions, the situation is characterized by a variety of practices, and by a slow acceptance of the vernacular values in the world of avant-garde practitioners.

Macaronics as What Eludes Translation

‘Translation’ is one of our all-purpose metaphors for almost any kind of mediation or connection: we ask of a principle how it ‘translates’ into practice, we announce initiatives to ‘translate’ the genome into predictions, and so forth. But the metaphor of translation — of the discovery of equivalents and their mutual substitution — so attracts our attention that we forget the other kinds of inter-linguistic contact, such as transcription, mimicry, borrowing or calque. In a curious echo of the macaronic writings of the era of the dawn of print, the twentieth century's avant-garde, already foreseeing the end of print culture, experimented with hybrid languages. Their untranslatability under the usual definitions of ‘translation’ suggests a revival of this avant-garde practice, as the mainstream aesthetic of the moment invests in ‘convergence’ and the subsumption of all media into digital code.

Reading Collage Drama as Documentary Drama: Trash Archives and Dissensus in Charles L. Mee’s Lives of the Artists

ABSTRACT: Theatre scholarship tends to link the term “documentary theatre” (positively or pejoratively) with the methods and professional ethics of journalists, social scientists, or historians. However, documentary theatre, from the 1920s to the present, has had more in common than is often assumed with avant-garde practices such as collage, assemblage, and bricolage. This article uses the biographical plays of Charles L. Mee, whose cut-and-paste dramaturgy combines textual fragments from factual and fictional sources, to argue for a more expansive definition of the term documentary theatre – one encompassing works that dissent from conventional thinking about how evidence is identified, collected, organized, and explained. This argument focuses upon Mee’s play about disabled “outsider” artist James Castle, soot and spit, and draws upon Jacques Rancière’s writing about panechastic teaching and dissensual art.

Konjunkcija umetnosti i života - ontologija mesta

Art becoming life and its relative convergence to the ideality of autarky (aὐtάrceia), implies a maxim which coincides with the emancipatory promise of Art. NEO-Marxist authors have prescribed this maxim to Marx's early works, particularly to the thesis from his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and elaborated it further on these grounds. This maxim has been applied by many avant-garde movements up to the contemporary moment: Bertold Brecht's political theatre, Guy Debord's situationism, site-specific art, fluxus, Joseph Beuys's social sculpture, etc. The common denominator of all these avant-garde practices is the imperative of an affirmation of their use-value - their realisation at the site of their own production, as opposed to the abstractness of their placement in the world. The site of this production is the site of the very production of sociability. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to examine the maxim art becoming life in the wake of Badiou's ontology of the site by using the example of the modality of site-specific works in the conditions of contemporaneity.

Critical Fontana

Critical Fontana Howard Singerman (bio) Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch by Anthony White. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 336 pp. $29.95 cloth. The subtitle of Anthony White’s monograph on the Italian artist Lucio Fontana, Between Utopia and Kitsch, lays out the terms of the book’s central—and oft-repeated—argument: that Fontana’s art, a “collision of avant-garde techniques and a kitsch past redolent with outmoded, even infantile desires possesses a critical force” (14). Both Fontana’s avant-garde techniques—the perforations and slashes of his Buchi (Holes, 1949–68) and Tagli (Cuts, 1958–68), for example—and his embrace of kitsch’s shiny surfaces and ersatz construction worked to desubli-mate and degrade painting, and “only in its decrepitude did Fontana believe painting could have a utopian potential” (18). White’s book may well be, as he claims, the first to “systematically account” for the “puzzling paradoxes of the artist’s work” (6), but it is not the first English-language monograph on Fontana. There is a good deal of critical and historical writing on Fontana, most of it, particularly in English, has been, as White notes, in exhibition catalogs. The first English-language catalog, with a short, smart essay by Lawrence Alloway, accompanied Fontana’s first one-person show, at Martha Jackson Gallery, in New York City in 1961. And while White’s book covers the entirety of Fontana’s career from the 1920s forward, it is here—with the Jackson show and the reception of the artist’s Venice [End Page 697] paintings in New York—that the book begins. A series of ten five-foot-square Spatial Concepts bearing subtitles like At Dawn Venice Was All Golden or Sun in Piazza San Marco (both 1961)—”phrases likely to be appended to mass-produced postcards for the Italian tourist market” (9)—the Venice paintings enact the collision of avant-garde and kitsch that White’s system turns on. They are, as befits avant-garde practice, monochromes, or nearly so, and punctured or slashed as Fontana’s paintings had been since the first Buchi of 1949, but the paint is silver and gold acrylic laid on like frosting, and Fontana crusted his surfaces with Murano glass. The paintings are at once at least ironically aspirational and, as White’s chapter title has it, “damaged goods.” While they evoke the breakthroughs of the avant-garde and even, in their “lavishly ornament[ed]” surfaces, “the antiquated luxuries of the medieval past” (6), their kitsch titles and elaborate surfaces—and their empty, seemingly mechanical repetitions of a decade-old avant-garde strategy—insist on painting’s failure, its “decrepitude.” In White’s accounting, Fontana’s system is far more complex than the simple, “Manichean” (11) opposition that Clement Greenberg offered in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).1 Rather, Fontana’s is doubly articulated, each pole internally divided against itself, “thereby disallowing any false reconciliation or mastery. In Fontana’s work, both avant-garde and kitsch are riven by a radical incompleteness: a modernity rigorously opposed to that which exists in the present, and grounded in a hopeful, forward-looking appreciation for what has seemingly passed into historical oblivion” (14). White borrows the phrase “damaged goods” from Walter Benjamin, and he links Fontana’s attraction to the outmoded (whether to the antiquated dreams of a past art, the unfulfilled dreams of an earlier avant-garde, or the pleasure promised by objects de luxe or their commodity knockoffs) to Benjamin’s idea of the “dialectical image”: “Benjamin’s argument that certain cultural products offer a critical image of modernity’s contradictions has immense significance for Fontana’s work” (13). And over and over again, across four decades of work, White points to Fontana’s “use of outmoded forms to draw pointed comparisons between modernity’s utopian dreams of fulfillment and their fatal obsolescence as kitsch within commodity culture” (271). While Benjamin’s concept is a fruitful one for White, he acknowledges that they are strange bedfellows; Fontana was, after all, a member of Italian fascist movement and “clearly had no ideological opposition to the theme of Italian military victory” (96) when, in May [End Page 698] 1936, authorities...

What’s Happening? Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg Argue about Art and Life

In 1961 Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) and Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) exchanged a number of letters in which they argued about the definition of their avant-garde practices as Happenings. Kaprow, who first introduced this “root‐metaphor,” as he would later call it, describes with it the necessity of the respective activity to be as far removed as possible from all motives, materials, and formats conventionally connected to art. Oldenburg, who at the time of this exchange was just as active in the New York performance scene as Kaprow, disagrees with his colleague's removal of their practice from the artistic sphere. Oldenburg is also dissatisfied with the fact that Kaprow, through his writings, launches a critical discourse that follows his own definition of the Happening. The two artists thus argue just as much about the positioning of their practices with respect to art as over the authority to establish such a position. This essay traces their argument through their written conversation and in doing so exposes the immense influence Kaprow's rhetoric had on the subsequent art-historical canonization of their respective practices: Oldenburg's more ambivalent position is today amalgamated with Kaprow's theoretical stance.

The art of researching with art: Towards an ecological epistemology

Abstract The applied theatre researcher faces an abundance of research methodologies. In terms of research training, an inventory of approaches is called for, one that follows the nature and needs of the practice. This article outlines one basic epistemological approach in the field of artistic research and practice-led research, as well as in drama education. Following the influences of avant-garde practice and thinking, an extended epistemology is identified, which builds on the relation or reconnection of sensuous experience and propositional knowing that historically have been marginalized by the dominance of a perceived split: just propositional thinking or just aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, this extended – or what researchers term ‘ecological’ – epistemology is embedded in or protected by many theatre practices. It needs to be recognized as a significant epistemology, serving as base also for research and methodology, and is rooted in the arts movement itself.

Inventing abstraction, 1910-1925: how a radical idea changed modern art

Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925 explores the development of abstraction from the moment of its declaration around 1912 to its establishment as the foundation of avant-garde practice in the mid-1920s. The book brings together many of the most influential works in abstractions early history to draw a cross-media portrait of this watershed moment in which traditional art was reinvented in a wholesale way. Works are presented in groups that serve as case studies, each engaging a key topic in abstractions first years: an artist, a movement, an exhibition or thematic concern. Key focal points include Vasily Kandinskys ambitious Compositions V, VI and VII; a selection of Piet Mondrians work that offers a distilled narrative of his trajectory to Neo-plasticism; and all the extant Suprematist pictures that Kazimir Malevich showed in the landmark 0.10 exhibition in 1915.

D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form and the Concept of Dynamic Form in Postwar Avant-Garde Art Theory

The impact is considered of D’Arcy Thompson’s notion of biological form as set out in On Growth and Form on postwar avant-garde experimental art practices associated with the Independent Group, Nigel Henderson’s photography, and László Moholy-Nagy’s post-Bauhaus art theory. How Thompson’s insistence on the importance of physical forces in shaping biological form, and of distortion as a component of symmetrical systems, influenced the writings and practices of these artists, is explored, linking abstraction to legacies concerned with materiality and technique encountered earlier in Constructivism. Henderson’s photograms and ‘stressed photography’ are shown to be directly inspired by Thompson’s conception of form as a diagram of forces, and attest to a novel understanding of rules of symmetry in abstract form that may be seen in the dynamic processes at play in complex natural phenomena. How Moholy-Nagy explored these notions theoretically is examined, for example in his definition of drawing in Vision in Motion, which cites Thompson directly as a source of inspiration.

‘Beauty of Chance’: Film ist

A lesser-known aspect of André Bazin’s film criticism is his love of science films. Bazin’s key reflection in this regard, ‘Le film scientifique: beauté du hasard’, argues that the science film is not just another kind of filmmaking; rather, placed under the scrutiny of Bazin’s cinephilic, Surrealist gaze, the science film is revealed as the repository of true cinematic beauty. A similar approach to the science film is evident in contemporary avant-garde practice. Gustav Deutsch’s Film ist. 1–6 (1998), the first part of an ongoing compilation project, reveals an affinity with Bazin’s appreciation of the science film. Taken together, these approaches suggest an alternative strand of documentary history that is located at the intersection of scientific and avant-garde filmmaking practices.