Bourgeois Art Research Articles

Literary Condemnation of the Slave Trade and Wealth as the Cause of Corruption Represented in the Light of English Literature

This article has illustrated how, within the framework of English literature, the slave trade and money are both literarily condemned as the root causes of corruption. When the slave trade was prohibited in the British Empire in 1807, the idea of equating labourers with slaves was highly controversial. That had happened very swiftly after a campaign that had only really begun 20 years before. Both slavery and the trade in Africans have already been condemned on occasion and in literature. The social objective of imitating the great landed nobility was examined and criticised by Adam Smith. The literature of the eighteenth century was also afflicted by the contradiction between the social and moral hierarchy. It is significantly more focused on the landed classes than the corporate sector, even though it is sometimes considered a bourgeois art form. Contrary to popular belief, writers of the late eighteenth century did not promote bourgeois principles in opposition to those of the aristocracy. Conversely, in the last decades of the century, they favoured a rural way of life and resisted urbanisation. They tended to side with the underclass against their new rulers, the industrial bourgeoisie, in the class struggle that industrialization sparked.

Laboratories for Organizing People: Selected Essays on Art and Byt

Laboratories for Organizing People: Selected Essays on Art and <i>Byt</i>

Ресайклинг Игоря Стравинского в журнале «Советская музыка» периода 1933–1966 годов

Stravinsky’s reputation in the Stalin era was tenuous, but in the early 1960s there was a strong surge of interest connected with his visit to Moscow. This metamorphosis of opinions was prepared and formed, among other things, through the press, in particular – in the chief Soviet music journal “Sovetskaya muzyka” (“Muzykal'naya Akademiya” since 1992). This research work is based on receptive methodology; the content analysis of materials during the period of 1933- 1966 demonstrates how in the conditions of almost complete failure to examine his music the critics created the reputation for him of a “formalist” and a “traitor,” and also demonstrated the attempt to “Sovietize” his emergence during the “Khrushchev thaw”. During the Stalin period, Stravinsky’s name appears in the journal only episodically, when he is arguably viewed as a representative of “bourgeois art.” In the early 1960s he was again labelled a Russian composer, and the attempt is even made of appraisal of his music, which is so remote from the Soviet musical style. Although it was not possible to “Sovietize” Stravinsky, such extreme changes of the Soviet authorities’ attitude of him emphasize the uniqueness of his artistic personality.

Chronopolitics in a minor key: Afrofuturism and social death

In this article, I map some of the philosophical implications of that collection of aesthetic practices grouped under the moniker of since Mark Dery's first deployment of the term in 1993. In so doing, I advance several (inter)related theses. First, that aesthetic philosophy should look to Afrofuturism for a model of emancipatory political art, such as it supposes lost with the high modernism of the 20th century. Second, that an engagement with the culturally and commerically immanent modes of Afrofuturist production will help to realise Benjamin's dream, of an aesthetic philosophy no longer dedicated to the aura of bourgeois art objects. And finally, following Deleuze and Guattari, I claim that Afrofuturism opens up the space for reflection on a minoritarian politics, such as might replace traditional Marxist accounts of class antagonism and help us to reconceive the resistance so sorely needed today.

Fear and Loathing in São Paulo: Slum Metaphysics in the “Coffin Joe” Triptych (1964–2008)

During the 1960s, theorist-filmmakers of the “New Latin American Cinema” (NLAC) renounced screen mythologies of modernity. The most sustained critiques came from Cinema Novo, a Rio de Janeiro–based “New Cinema” movement set upon hijacking the film industry to expose (and reverse) the underdevelopment of Brazilian society. By 1970, the foreign press, festival circuit, and intelligentsia alike had enthroned Cinema Novo as Brazil’s answer to the European New Wave. Soon thereafter, movies by the likes of Brazil’s Glauber Rocha became Latin American cinema for serious cinephiles, a “Third Cinema” of conscience, separate from Hollywood-led commerce (“First Cinema”) and bourgeois art house fare (“Second Cinema”).1

Trotsky e a questão da arte: a fidelidade inabalável do artista a seu eu interior / Trotsky and the question of art: the artist’s unwavering fidelity to his inner self

Este artigo tem como objetivo resgatar um importante debate levantado por Leon Trotsky em seu livro Literatura e Revolução (1924), que trata sobre a relação entre arte e política. O artigo pretende, portanto, utilizar a polêmica que havia no contexto em que a obra fora escrita (após a revolução russa de 1917) para pensar a relevância desse debate nos tempos atuais. Um dos temas centrais que interessa é discutir se é possível, ou não, a construção de uma arte proletária, em contraposição a uma arte burguesa, tal como era proposto por intelectuais e grupos culturais; posição esta que fora sendo adotada pelos dirigentes do Estado soviético, no sentido de definir uma suposta forma de fazer arte legitimamente proletária. A posição de Trotsky é a de que isto não é possível, inclusive o revolucionário se posiciona firmemente contra esta linha, que a seu ver expressa um conjunto de premissas equivocadas, contrárias aos princípios do marxismo, e que tinham como resultado um processo de castração da liberdade humana, que se intensificaria com o stalinismo, e também no fascismo, utilizando a expressão artística como mero instrumento de propagação de ideias políticas, de forma panfletária, impositiva e engessada, mutilando a liberdade de criação e, portanto, ferindo a fidelidade do artista ao seu eu interior, que era fundamental para a expressão artística. Este artigo pretende, portanto, tomar as bases teóricas apresentadas por Trotsky e pensar a influência nos dias de hoje das posições combatidas pelo autor naquele contexto.

The International Festival and Congress “Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis” evaluated by the Soviet musical press

Relevance of the study. The revival of early music has become one of the leading cultural trends of the 20th century. The musicians from the Soviet Union, including Ukraine have joined to this music branch after the Second World War. One of the artistic events that brought them together was the International Early Music Festival and Congress of the Central and Eastern Europe “Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis” (MAEO), which had been taking place every three years since 1966 in the Polish city Bydgoszcz.The main objective of our study is to collect and analyze the materials of the Soviet press devoted to the forum in Bydgoszcz. There are the articles written by Yu. Keldysh, E. Alekseeva, N. Gerasymova-Persydska in the musical journals “Soviet music”, “Musical life”, “Music”. The discussion on the topics proposed by the forum participants has been continued.The methods of analysis and synthesis are applied.Results and their significance. The Polish International Early Music Festival and Congress MAEO did not find the systematic critical coverage in the Soviet press, with the exception of the first forum in 1966. Based on the official position of the Soviet authorities, expressed in the Keldysh’s article, it was shown that the joining the European processes in the domain of early music was not welcomed in the USSR. The achievements of Western European musicians in this field were condemned as a manifestation of bourgeois art. Soviet musicians thanks to their own initiative have mastered the European achievements; they have not achieved the institutional consolidation in the republics of the Soviet Union. The Soviet performers who mastered the early repertoire were mostly amateur and acted informally. The Soviet delegation at the festivals and congresses in Bydgoszcz showed the early musical culture of the peoples of the USSR in its perfect examples in the interpretation of the best musicians who did not specialize in the pre-classical music performing. As a rule, there were choral ensembles of high artistic level, mobile in the working with different repertoire.

Comparative analysis of socialist and bourgeois art in the social philosophical aspect

At the beginning of the XX century, bourgeois theorists of artistic culture declared dehumanization as one of the main features of the modernism art, one of the main tasks of the contemporary artists’ artwork. Getting to the scientific understanding of the complex and complicated phenomena of modern art culture, it is necessary to reveal not only the socio-economic reasons for their appearance; the philosophical prerequisites for the development of modern bourgeois art, the ideological orientation of its movements should be identified. In the article, the authors argue that modern bourgeois aesthetics objectively performs the opposite tasks: a) bourgeois art distracts artists and spectators from pressing issues of life, b) imposes ideals and tastes that are advantageous to the bourgeoisie, c) sow pessimism and disbelief in human forces. According to authors, as opposing the personality of society, bourgeois art contributes to the isolation of human from social problems, from issues and tasks of the struggle for a better future. The authors believe that the disclosure of the reactionary ideological essence for the many directions of modern bourgeois art enables a consistent Marxist aesthetic analysis of the content and form of artwork and the principles of bourgeois artists’ creativity. Naturally, the philosophical idealist teachings and aesthetic systems that make up the theoretical foundation of modern bourgeois art, embodied in its various directions not directly but indirectly. Only a Marxist analysis of artistic phenomena and techniques of artistic creation in their correlation with the creative method makes it possible to reveal the true interconnections of these phenomena and the essence of artistic techniques, makes it possible to detect and criticize scientifically based falsification ideas of bourgeois theoreticians of art.

Antirealism of new reality or art against personality: with the eyes of the philosophy

In the article, the authors provide an assessment of the modernism art, cultivated for decades, in terms of the possibilities of its social and ideological influence. It is argued that the ideologists of the bourgeoisie had to admit that Western art culture was at an impasse. The article analyzes the works of philosophers and artists, such as: Lenin, Schwartz, Nietzsche, Brooke, Leist, Meyer, Reed, Bergson, Lauterbach, Huxley, Weir, etc. Among the many concepts - the theory of "cultural circles", "cultural lag" and "cultural traditions"; Theory of Art Evolution - Professor Munroe; theory of social and cultural dynamics P. Sorokin and others. However, none of these theories could put forward any significant, practically effective ideas that could breathe life into bourgeois art. Summing up the results of more than half a century of the modernism art, we can say that it did not enrich the artistic culture. Starting with contrasting itself with traditional art in a philosophical, theoretical and aesthetic sense, modernism fell outside the scope of art itself due to the absurdity of its practice. The authors believe that in search of a way out of the impasse, bourgeois scholars could not escape from "anti-realism" and art was against the individual. The path traveled by modernist art proves the futility of bourgeois art culture in the first half of the twentieth century, but does not deny its revival in the XXI century.

Analysis of philosophy and humanization art relationship in the first decade of the XX century

When writing the article, the authors pursued one goal: to understand why extreme subjectivity in art, the abandonment for centuries of setting traditions, laws and techniques in art led to the loss of aesthetic criteria by the modernism art, and what philosophical trends influenced this process. The methodological basis of the article is the principles of integrity, objectivity and historicism. The following methods were applied: historical and philosophical analysis, focused on the objective completeness of the study; cultural and comparative approaches aimed at establishing spiritual ties between artists of different historical eras. The article analyzes the works of philosophers and artists, such as: Bergson, Schopenhauer Nietzsche, Chirico, Apollinaire, Lenin, Bru, Kandinsky. Various directions of bourgeois art are considered. The authors believe that abstract art, fully antisocial and dehumanized, fully meets the aesthetic ideals of the modernism art, which opposed itself to human from its very birth. The authors argue that if you take the artists’ position of that time, you can make an unambiguous conclusion, the dehumanization of art could not be avoided. According to the authors, abstract art, fully antisocial and extremely dehumanized, is fully consistent with the goals of bourgeois ideologists and fully meets the aesthetic ideals of the art of modernism, which has opposed itself to man since its inception.

Performing Waste, Wasting Performance: The Ecology of Fluxus

Performing Waste, Wasting PerformanceThe Ecology of Fluxus Aurelie Matheron (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Photograph courtesy of Liz Ligon. Copyright 2012 Liz Ligon. Never had a salad provoked so many reactions as on April 22, 2012, when Fluxus artist Alison Knowles reenacted her iconic 1962 Make a Salad score event on the High Line, near Chelsea Market in New York. The performance was straightforward; after chopping up, tossing, and throwing the ingredients—such as iceberg and romaine lettuce, frisée, onions—onto a tarpaulin, the artist served the salad to the audience. According to New Yorker reporter Betty Morais, the performance lasted three hours, as the salad making was accompanied by the musical notes of the knives and forks that clashed. The somewhat impatient [End Page 102] and disconcerted audience was immersed in an aesthetic experience that confronted the senses with more than visual or even gastronomic impressions alone. Make a Salad is not only one of Knowles's most famous pieces; it is also one of the most emblematic works of the avant-garde Fluxus movement. In the early 1960s, Fluxus offered a radical alternative to the bourgeois commodification of art by replacing the emphasis on artistic products with a focus on process. Insisting on the moment of production, such as the chopping of lettuce, rather than the final product, Fluxus performances foreground what the spectator does not see—the process of making and also of discarding. Using waste (shredded paper, fabric, feces, etc.) to draw attention to the side effects of mass consumption, these performances open up an artistic alternative to capitalism in which what has been discarded matters again. This article argues that Knowles's Fluxus performance Make a Salad mobilizes waste to propose an ecological network as an alternative to the capitalist economy. Foregrounding supposedly insignificant matter—lettuce—as part of an aesthetic experience, it contributes to current discussions on materiality that seek to understand how the nonhuman and nonorganic also participate in the arrangement of social relationships between people and their environment. Art is part of this environment, and Knowles's performance helps to think about how art unsettles established hierarchies between human and matter to form a balanced ecological network. Informed by the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour and by the political ecology of things of Jane Bennett, I understand ecology as a network of human and nonhuman actants who create and sustain their shared house (eco- meaning "house" in Greek) through constant interaction. Exploring how Knowles uses waste, this article seeks to demonstrate that instead of using waste per se, Make a Salad performs waste and retools residual excess in an ephemeral art that will not leave any trace. Make a Salad challenges the artist to give visibility, if not agency, to what has been devalued as impure or unworthy of aesthetic consideration. Starting with how Make a Salad fits into the aesthetics of waste proposed by the 1963 Fluxus Manifesto, I nevertheless want to depart from the commonsensical idea that Knowles's performance is just an illustration of Fluxus. Knowles's understanding of waste challenges Fluxus's politics and aesthetics of waste, thereby creating another model of sociality that is rooted in her own ecology. [End Page 103] Fluxus's Aesthetics and Politics of Waste Fluxus's understanding of waste stands in contrast to our commonsensical view on leftovers and remnants as excessive and unaesthetic. As Stephanie Foote recalls, modern Western society's conception of waste has been defined by negative terms such as "surplus, pollution, contagion, disgust, damage, toxicity, circulation, destruction, contamination."1 According to that view, waste symbolizes a dirty excess marginalized by capitalistic economy for the well-being of society, an excess that has been devalued as impure. Fluxus, by contrast, performs waste to reverse this devaluation of waste. "Purge the world of bourgeois sickness!" begs George Maciunas in the 1963 Fluxus Manifesto, comparing bourgeois art to a kind of "dysentery" that should be evacuated through new aesthetic practices to insure the well-being of the social order. Whereas the bourgeois art economy viewed artworks as marketable commodities, Maciunas promotes an antiart that fully involves spectators in experiences with food, animals, and...

Embodied discourse in the bourgeois museum: performative spaces at the Ordrupgaard collection

In a suburb just north of Copenhagen is Ordrupgaard. At the inauguration in 1918, it was arguably the best collection of impressionism open to the public outside France and the USA. This paper has two goals: First, to reconstruct and analyze the important yet little known original exhibition ensemble at Ordrupgaard, and second, to develop a view of the bourgeois art exhibition as a performative ritual. Building on ideas of exhibition narratives and visitor involvement derived from diverse work done within museology and museum studies, the paper proposes a close examination of how collective memory and performative embodiment drive exhibition experience. From this, Ordrupgaard emerges as an early example of a museum that offers its audience the possibility of a pleasurable enactment of middle class identity within a setting encompassing nature, art and architecture. The case of a small collection museum therefore reveals important mechanics at work within a potentially much larger field of institutions.

J. Bernlef and American Poetry: Poetic-Strategic Mentions of Marianne Moore. A Case Study

At the end of the 1950s, Dutch writers made an appeal — with a Dadaist gesture — to close down museums and destroy works of art. The statement by Armando, Hans Sleutelaar and Cor Vaandrager was aimed at bourgeois art which they renounced as elitist and pedantic. Following in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters from the Dada movement, the neo-Dadaists wanted to eliminate the dividing line between Art and non-Art in the 1950s and 60s. Art was thus assigned a critical role and formed part of everyday life. Since contemporary avant-garde artists in Western Europe focused on reality and shied away from anything that was aesthetically pleasing, they are referred to in history of art compendiums as new-Realists. In the visual arts, the terms ‘New Vision’, ‘zeroists’, and ‘nouveaux réalistes’ were also used. During the period of neo-Dadaism and Neorealism in the literary systems of the Netherlands and Flanders, emphatic reference was made to contemporary trends on the American artistic scene. Accordingly, Andy Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art can be seen as an offshoot of Dada. In the 50s and 60s, Dutch new-Realists made references in their paintings and poetry to the collages of Pop Art and the concomitant critical attitude towards consumer society. The Flemish artist Pol Mara, for example, joined forces with new-Realist poets in Flanders and was unquestionably indebted to Pop Art for his painting technique. The links are not just in the visual arts. In poetry and poetic texts, too, there are many references to contemporary American literature. In their explicit-poetic collection Een cheque voor de tandarts (1967) J. Bernlef and K. Schippers mention Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters (Zurich Dadaism) as spiritual fathers of their modernist art conceptions. The poems of, inter alia, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, too, were seen as exponents at the time and were translated by J. Bernlef into Dutch in that period. In this paper, I want to consider the Newrealist trends in Dutch literature and more particularly in the collected poems and poetry translations by J. Bernlef from the perspective of the explicit links with American modernist poetry. Mentions of Marianne Moore in Bernlef’s poems and essays is the aim of my research.

‘The Monument to a Crisis’

Friedrich Nietzsche describes Human, All Too Human, his third book to be published within his own lifetime, as a work of liberation: one that seeks to strip away the increasingly malignant influences – of Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer particularly – that he perceives as infecting his work. In this article, the author argues that it is more than just a rejection of these individual thinkers however, but instead represents a broad critique of the relationship between bourgeois art, Romantic conceptions of creativity and the modernizing demand for productivity. Realizing that the role of the artist increasingly mimics the oppressive, dispiriting temporality of industrialized labour, the author contends that Nietzsche attempts to develop a more moderate conception of artistic culture built in large part upon the philosophy of Epicurus, seeking to identify a mode of creative practice that is not degraded by the exigencies of the industrial tempo of work, and displaying a surprising sympathy toward the working masses incongruous with his output as a whole.

Outside the White Cube (With Occasional Political Overtones)

Borrowing the title of an autobiographic essay by Lucy Lippard, one can generally understand the history of modern art as a series of ‘escape attempts’. In fact it could be argued that the entire history of modernism, beginning in 1855 with Courbet's Pavilion of Realism, has been driven by the desire of artists to short-circuit and outwit the established modes of institutional display hat sustained the bourgeois art system (while paradoxically still maintaining that their various creative endeavours remained essentially recognisable as art). Typically these escape attempts were employed in the name of recapturing what seemed to be a lost immediacy of experience or some idealistic form that transcended materialisation, which modern life with its various forms of distraction and deception had made increasingly inaccessible. By eschewing the salon, museum, gallery or market, the work of art it was believed might free itself of the corrupting influences of commodified reification and various ideological preconceptions and provide viewers with an unadulterated vision of the world otherwise unavailable in everyday life.

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”: The avant-garde in the works of Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Ruiz

THIS essay seeks to explore meaning of in work of two Chilean artists, novelist Roberto Bolano and filmmaker Raul Ruiz. Political exiles working in different mediums, their works share in reflexive exploration of relationship between art and praxis of life. I seek to illustrate avant-garde ethic at heart of their works by showing that both artists problematize concept of individual creation through disruptions and repetitions. Related to this, line between producer (artist) and recipient (reader or spectator) blurred when recipient invited to actively contribute to production of meaning. I argue that artists' performance of avant-garde gestures and their direct references to avant-garde histories open a space for reflexivity, an instance of recuperation. In this space artwork not a product but a process. Art becomes a life-process. In this way their work seeks to recuperate and continue avant-garde's project: to question autonomous status of art in society. My understanding of avant-garde draws from Peter Burger's theorization of term and from Paul Mann's arguments about importance of discursive intervention on avant-garde. Burger draws attention to historical basis of avant-garde and to its relationship with institutions of art. He discusses how historical avant-gardes--the French and German literary and visual avant-garde of 1920s--launched an attack on status of art in bourgeois society (49). According to Burger, bourgeois art is objectification of self-understanding of bourgeois class. Production and reception of self-understanding as articulated in art are no longer tied to praxis of (47). This means that bourgeois art mirrors a bourgeois view of self as split from praxis of life. The effect of this dissociation gives false perception that work of art totally independent of society. The avant-gardists undertook an assault against such art precisely because they saw it as an institution set off from praxis of life (86, 83). Burger identifies three areas that generally characterize autonomous art--purpose, production, and reception--and explains how avant-garde sought to challenge them (50). Instead of disjoining work from praxis of life, avant-gardist purpose sublation of art into praxis of life. (1) In terms of production, whereas individual artist (the creative genius) produces bourgeois art, avant-garde act radical negation of category of individual creation (51). For example, ready-made: Duchamp's signature on a mass-produced object mocks all claims to individual creativity (52). In terms of reception, avant-garde seeks to erase antithesis between producer and recipient (53). Burger contends that, ultimately, historical avant-garde failed in its attempt to do away with distance between art and life while culture industry has successfully promoted a false fusion between art and life (50). Nevertheless, I want to recuperate Burger's categories to talk about what I see as a current avant-garde ethic. I do not mean to undermine established historical basis of avant-garde, but instead argue for a historically informed continuation of avant-garde gestures that aim to engage relationship between art and praxis of life. Shortly, I will look at categories of production and reception in works of Bolano and Ruiz to show specific manifestations of avant-gardist gestures. While Mann would agree with Burger that historical avant-gardes ultimately became institutionalized through movement's commodification, he also argues that importance of avant-garde not so much its oppositional stance but its potential for discursive intervention: the death of avant-garde one means by which this economy [of discourse] endures. …

Introduction to Hélio Oiticica’s “Héliotape with Mario Montez (1971)”

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica lived in New York City in 1971-78. As did many political exiles and other fellow artists abroad during the years of military dictatorship in Brazil, Oiticica would help himself through difficult times with a bit of cocaine dealing here and there. This enterprise provided him with a remarkable social mobility. Oiticica soon had friends on Street and in rock-star circles, highbrow bohemia, and the queer underground. At the same time, he became a sort of chronicler of life in Lower Manhattan-MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) artist and occasional St. Marks Place pusher at once-and provided his friends and various clandestine countercultural magazines back in Brazil with a ceaseless stream of letters, articles, photos, films, and tape recordings. In these, he would mix such heterogeneous elements as anecdotes of his life in the queer underground, detailed drug and cruising experiences, metropolitan gossip, philosophical reading advice, and comments on film, music, and art scenes. (I don't know what is going on here, there is such a bourgeois art scene, conformity and reactionarism going on, unbelievable!1)The name Heliotapes describes a series of tape recordings that Oiticica made in this fashion between 1971 and 1975. The following is a transcription of one particular Heliotape that Oiticica recorded in conversation with Montez in 1971. By then, Oiticica had reached the conclusion that the sellout of New York's queer underground had long begun, a fact that was confirmed by the success of Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey film Trash (1970) in what he regarded as neoconservative circles that voyeuristically feed on marginal activity. Against this logic of spectacle and consumption, Oiticica maintained a particularly strong affinity to Montez and Jack Smith, whom he considered to be different. Thus, one year after their recorded conversation, Montez would appear in the most famous of Oiticica's Super 8 films, Agripina e Roma Manhattan {Agrippina Is Rome-Manhattan, 1972), in which he and Brazilian artist Antonio Dias throw dice, evoking what Oiticica called a Wall Street Oracle or OraCULO.Already in 1971 Oiticica had used the Heliotape conversation as the basis for his article Mario Montez, Tropicamp that he published in Rio de Janeiro's Presenca magazine.2 In this text, Oiticica envisioned a sort of internationalist underground solidarity between what once had been the notorious Tropicalia movement in Brazil-but now was scattered and fragmented over South America, Europe, and the United States-and Smith and Montez, representing the element resistant to both commercialization and the distinctive chic of New York's post-1968 bohemia. …

Review: Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 . Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 24 September 2011–15 January 2012. In his 1994 essay “The Generic City,” Rem Koolhaas wrote: > Postmodernism is the only movement that has succeeded in connecting the practice of architecture with the practice of panic. Postmodernism is not a doctrine based on a highly civilized reading of architectural history but a method, a mutation in architectural practice that produces results fast enough to keep pace with the Generic City’s development. Instead of consciousness, as its original inventors may have hoped, it creates a new unconscious. It is modernization’s little helper.1 This remains perhaps the only really insightful thing ever written on the subject of architectural postmodernism—unless, that is, one also includes the statement from around the same date by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck—an arch critic—when he described postmodernism generally as a meaningless concept “used by blind people who don’t know what’s going on.”2 There was certainly a sense of both of these tendencies—panic and blindness—in the 2011 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the subject of postmodernism. If, as Manfredo Tafuri declared, the deeper function of bourgeois art is “to ward off anguish,” then the visitor could see that anguish bleeding from its very heart in this show.3 Rooms were stuffed full of furniture, clothes, film clips, pop videos, and everything else in an effort to convey the notion of a populist, exuberant, diverse, ironically low-art approach rooted in a feeling of super-abundance. The problem, of course, is that the period being covered by the V&A show, from 1970 to 1990, felt nothing like that back then. Indeed, it now appears in retrospect to have been a relatively homogenous era in terms of urban culture in Western capitalist countries, certainly when compared to globalized conditions today. It was also notable that the architectural exhibits in the V&A exhibition—including the classic …

Metaphysical remains: Anti-materialism and cultural temporality

Three critiques against cultural timelessness, the notion of late style, recycled ready-mades, and minimalist preservation, are examined to show how they are all compromised by a latent idealism. Such idealism, based on the decoupling of time from materiality through removal, displacement or wilful ignorance of material markers of age, forecloses the kinds of radical change and innovation espoused by the above critiques. While they all embrace timeliness and decay in the materiality of artists’ bodies and cultural artefacts, the ideology of timeless bourgeois art persists in their maintenance of a separate immaterial, eternal cultural essence.

Meddling in Middle Europe: Britain and the 'Lands between' 1919-1925 by Miklós Lojkó (review)

REVIEWS 563 Soviets were excluded, and that ofGenoa which they attended, and seeks to test the theory that 'all the parties involved made their contribution to the maintenance of peace or the outbreak of war' (p. 166). In particular, Dukes argues, only the examination of domestic and foreign policies together can be relied upon to support viable theories of international relations. He closes with a quotation fromViacheslav Nikonov who argues fora global system inwhich post-Soviet Russia will replay the role itonce had in the nineteenth century. The irony is that itsauthor is the grandson ofViacheslav Molotov. Mary Hannah Byers describes the rise of Socialist Realist art as a project of theTretiakov Gallery in Moscow in 1928-32, when theGallery rearranged its collections 'to reflect a revised history ofRussian art based on Marxism Leninism'; from the embodiment of bourgeois values to a 'bastion ofMarxist Leninist ideals' (p. 184).No proletarian aesthetic emerged, however. On the contrary, Socialist Realism, or the depiction of reality as it should be, and not as it is, continued the aesthetic values of the pre-revolutionary bourgeois art, and the experiment was abandoned. In the mid-1930s, Stalin set about demolishing theMarxist school of history, established byMikhail Pokrovskii, and replacing itsabstract formulae of class struggle with narrative that was accessible to the masses, as well as stressing the positive contributions made by such figures as Ivan the Ter rible and Peter theGreat, Suvorov and Kutuzov. Had Pokrovskii not died of cancer in 1932, he would surely have been a prominent victim of the purges, and not merely the convenient scapegoat depicted inDavid Brandenberger's article. StAntony'sCollege,Oxford Harold Shukman Lojko, Miklos. Meddling inMiddle Europe: Britain and the 'Lands Between' igig-ig2j. Central European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2006. x + 377 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95: 41.95: ?28.95. Can British involvement in the financial reconstruction of post-war Central Europe trulybe described as 'meddling'? Judging fromMontagu Norman's far-fetched scheme 'to establish one by one the newparts of oldAustria' with a view to achieving the 'ultimate [federal] solution forEastern Europe' (p. 71), the author's hint of ironymay well be justified. And yet, the reader of this volume may feel a little uneasy about accepting such an uncharitable inter pretation of Britain's diplomatic and economic role inWarsaw, Prague and Budapest in the first half of the 1920s.After all, British professions of support for the resurrection of the Danubian Monarchy rarely amounted to more than a blatant recognition of the evident flaws in the territorial settlement. It is far from clear how far federalist political ideas, or the financial diplomacy of the governor of the Bank of England, reflected British government policy. More importantly, British plans for Central European reconstruction were no flakier, or any less realistic, than those of the other Great Powers in the aftermath of theFirstWorld War. After all,which victor power played a more constructive role inCentral Europe than thatplayed by Britain? 564 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 In this well-researched and scholarly monograph, Miklos Lojko duly acknowledges the British contribution to the recovery of the defeated states. At the same time, he maintains, 'Itwas France that took the initiative in engaging Central Europe in schemes forwider security and maintained the momentum in the early twenties' (p. 6). He contrasts the modest British achievements inAustria and Hungary with the rapidly fading British influ ence in interwarCzechoslovakia and Poland. To underline the point, Lojko devotes nearly a third of his book to Poland, despite the fact thatAnglo-Pol ish relations were treated separately from the affairs ofCentral Europe by the Northern Department of theForeign Office. In his view, this special treatment was the result of the political controversies surrounding the territorial settle ment; a reflection of the strains inAnglo-Polish relations, not of geopoliti cal realities. Be that as itmay, the examples of Poland and Czechoslovakia demonstrate in equal measure the Foreign Office's propensity to dissociate itself from the successor states by the mid-i920s. Conversely, the case ofHungary shows a fluctuating,but significantlyhigh er, level of British commitment to the region. Consequently, the author joins the recent chorus of area specialists in questioning...