Avant-Garde Critical Studies

This volume, edited by Éva Forgács, with contributions from art historians from across Europe and the Americas, analyzes the artistic initiatives of the short time span between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In this moment, a new internationalism was anticipated by retrieving pre-war modernism, as well as creating the new era's new artistic lingua franca.

The chapters include in-depth case studies that analyze the complex, often interconnected, projects throughout the world—South America and Eastern and Western Europe—that were soon ended by the Cold War.

This is Volume 2 of 2.
In the history of the twentieth century, Futurism marked the birth of the avant-garde and major artistic and literary changes. Although it first appeared in Italy and Russia, it developed in Poland between 1918 and 1924. The vast documentation and texts, most of them previously unpublished, that we have brought together in this volume constitute the most complete collection ever published on Polish Futurism. A rich critical apparatus and iconography from the 1920s complete the work.

Dans l'histoire du XXe siècle, le futurisme marque la naissance des avant-gardes et des grandes mutations artistiques et littéraires. S'il apparaît d'abord en Italie et en Russie, il se développe en Pologne entre 1918 et 1924. La vaste documentation et les textes, pour la plupart inédits que nous avons réunis dans ce volume constituent l'ensemble le plus complet jamais édité sur le futurisme polonais. Un riche appareil critique et une iconographie des années 1920 complètent l'ouvrage.

This is Volume 1 of 2.
In the history of the twentieth century, Futurism marked the birth of the avant-garde and major artistic and literary changes. Although it first appeared in Italy and Russia, it developed in Poland between 1918 and 1924. The vast documentation and texts, most of them previously unpublished, that we have brought together in this volume constitute the most complete collection ever published on Polish Futurism. A rich critical apparatus and iconography from the 1920s complete the work.

Dans l'histoire du XXe siècle, le futurisme marque la naissance des avant-gardes et des grandes mutations artistiques et littéraires. S'il apparaît d'abord en Italie et en Russie, il se développe en Pologne entre 1918 et 1924. La vaste documentation et les textes, pour la plupart inédits que nous avons réunis dans ce volume constituent l'ensemble le plus complet jamais édité sur le futurisme polonais. Un riche appareil critique et une iconographie des années 1920 complètent l'ouvrage.

This monograph offers the first-ever, full-length analysis of the most irreverent book of Italian Futurism: L’anguria lirica, printed in 1934 on tin metal sheets, with design and poetic text by Tullio d’Albisola and illustrations by Bruno Munari. This study, which features the unabridged reproduction of the pages of the tin book, accompanied by the first English translation of the poem, aims to disentangle the complex relationship between text and image in this total artwork. It shows how the endless series of material transformations at its core – of woman into food, of love into desecrating religion, of man into machine, of poetry into matter – fostered a radical change in poetry-writing, thus breaking away from a stagnant lyrical past.

This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.

The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 is the final volume of the four-volume series of cultural histories of the avant-garde movements in the Nordic countries. This volume carries the avant-garde discussion forward to present-day avant-gardes, challenged by the globalisation of the entertainment industries and new interactive media such as the internet. The avant-garde can now be considered a tradition that has been made more widely available through the opening of archives, electronic documentation and new research, which has spurred both re-enactments, revisions and continuations of historical avant-garde practices, while new cultural contexts, political, technological and ecological conditions have called for new strategies.

The Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang is a Marxist-Surrealist Yugoslav epic poem for children, written by Aleksandar Vučo and accompanied by Dušan Matić’s photocollage illustrations and captions. The poem tracks the adventures of five scrappy, resourceful working-class boys who endeavor to free an equally plucky girl from the evil clutches of a convent school (and its fearsome nuns). While weighing in on various contemporary political issues, the story is unpredictable, action-packed and relayed in richly colloquial language. Matić’s photocollages show “what happened in the meantime” between the “songs” (episodes) of the poem, providing clever twists to the linear plot as well as an illustration of the surrealist concepts of time, space and the transformative capabilities of art.

What has been the significance of sport for the European avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century? From an international and interdisciplinary perspective we show the extent to which avant-garde art and culture was shaped by the dynamic encounter with modern sports.
Our focus lies on avant-garde artists, groups, movements and institutions across Europe (including Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Purism, Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Constructivism in Central and Eastern Europe), thereby unfolding the diversity of avant-garde responses to modern sports. The book in front of you includes fascinating readings in the fields of aesthetics, visual cultures, cultural history and politics and highlights why specific kinds of sport such as cycling, boxing and football became important for avant-garde movements and artists.

Anarchism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Arts and Politics in Perspective contributes to the continuing debate on the encounter of the classical anarchisms (1860s−1940s) and the artistic and literary avant-gardes of the same period, probing its dimensions and limits. Case studies on Dadaism, decadence, fauvism, neo-impressionism, symbolism, and various anarchisms explore the influence anarchism had on the avant-gardes and reflect on avant-garde tendencies within anarchism. This volume also explores the divergence of anarchism and the avant-gardes. It offers a rich examination of politics and arts, and it complements an ongoing discourse with theoretical tools to better assess the aesthetic, social, and political cross-pollination that took place between the avant-gardes and the anarchists in Europe.

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafés, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on Spatiality, Palomares-Salas convincingly argues that an unsolvable tension between place and space is at the core of the Hispanic avant-garde cultural production. A refreshing, transatlantic perspective on Ultraism and Stridentism, the book moves the Hispanic vanguards forward into broader, international discussions on space and modernism, and offers innovative readings of well-known, as well as rarely studied works.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

Beat Literature in Europe offers twelve in-depth analyses of how European authors and intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain read, translated and appropriated American Beat literature. The chapters combine textual analysis with discussions on the role Beat had in popular music, art, and different subcultures.
The book participates in the transnational turn that has gained in importance during the past years in literary studies, looking at transatlantic connections through the eyes of European authors, artists and intellectuals, and showing how Beat became a cluster of texts, images, and discussions with global scope. At the same time, it provides vivid examples of how national literary fields in Europe evolved during the cold war era.

Contributors are: Thomas Antonic, Franca Bellarsi, Frida Forsgren, Santiago Rodriguez Guerrero-Strachan, József Havasréti, Tiit Hennoste, Benedikt Hjartarson, Petra James, Nuno Neves, Maria Nikopoulou, Harri Veivo, Dorota Walczak-Delanois, Gregory Watson.

Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle traces the relationships between the modernist artists in Werefkin’s circle, including Erma Bossi, Elisabeth Epstein, Natalia Goncharova, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Else Lasker-Schüler, Marta Liepiņa-Skulme, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Maria Marc. The book demonstrates that their interactions were dominated not primarily by national ties, but rather by their artistic ideas, intellectual convictions, and gender roles; it offers an analysis of the various artistic scenes, the places of exchange, and the artists’ sources of inspiration. Specifically focusing on issues of cosmopolitan culture, transcultural dialogue, gender roles, and the building of new artistic networks, the collection of essays re-evaluates the contributions of these artists to the development of modern art.

Contributors: Shulamith Behr, Marina Dmitrieva, Simone Ewald, Bernd Fäthke, Olga Furman, Petra Lanfermann, Tanja Malycheva, Galina Mardilovich, Antonia Napp, Carla Pellegrini Rocca, Dorothy Price, Hildegard Reinhardt, Kornelia Röder, Kimberly A. Smith, Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, Baiba Vanaga, and Isabel Wünsche

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975 is the first publication to deal with the postwar avant-garde in the Nordic countries. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, architecture and design, film, radio, television and the performative arts.
It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: The cultural politics, institutions and new cultural geographies after World War II, new technologies and media, performative strategies, interventions into everyday life and tensions between market and counterculture.

This book offers a critical reinterpretation of the Spanish avant-garde, focusing on narrative, transculturality, and intermediality. Narrative, because it prioritizes the analysis of prose over poetry, against the traditional use of critical literature on the subject up to this point. Transculturality, because the Spanish avant-garde simply cannot be understood without the acknowledgement of its multi-linguistic reality and the transnational scope of the experience of Modernism in Europe – of which Spain was an integral yet underexposed component. And intermediality, because the interrelations of painting, photography, film, and literature articulate a correlation and mutual affect among different media, creating a rich cultural tapestry that needs to be addressed.

Contributors: Rosa Berland, Jennifer Duprey, Marcos Eymar, Regina Galasso, Eduardo Gregori, Juan Herrero-Senés, John McCulloch, Andrés Pérez-Simón, Lynn Purkey, Domingo Ródenas de Moya, Evelyn Scaramella and Antonio Sáez Delgado.

Decentring the Avant-Garde presents a collection of articles dealing with the topography of the avant-garde. The focus is on different responses to avant-garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries. Avant-garde activities in the periphery have to date mostly been described in terms of a passive reception of new artistic trends and currents originating in cultural centres such as Paris or Berlin. Contesting this traditional view, Decentring the Avant-Garde highlights the importance of analysing the avant-garde in the periphery in terms of an active appropriation of avant-garde aesthetics within different cultural, ideological and historical settings. A broad collection of case studies discusses the activities of movements and artists in various regions in Europe and beyond. The result is a new topographical model of the international avant-garde and its cultural practices.

One of the aims of the book is to shed more light on the notion Neue Sachlichkeit in its appearance in a variety of fields as painting, architecture, music, photography and literature, in order to get a clearer idea of its scope. Several contributions will do so by analysing the heterogeneity in the use of the term concerning its function in the fight for recognition in the art-fields around 1930 - in other words, Neue Sachlichkeit will be analysed as a positioning strategy. Especially its participation in the broader discourse on modernity, as well as its international and intermedial dimension will be highlighted, often using the historical avant-garde as point of reference. From this perspective, the present volume wants to be read as a plea for a differentiated description of the many shared aspects and some differences between the avant-garde and Neue Sachlichkeit.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900-1925 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries at the start of the twentieth century. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, painting as well as photography, architecture and design, film, radio, and performing arts like music, theatre and dance.
It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective which includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field, but in a broader cultural context. It examines the social and cultural context of the avant-garde: its media, its locations, its reception and audiences, the transmissions between Scandinavia and Europe, and its cultural consequences.
The essays trace the connections between the avant-garde and the cultural discourses of contemporary currents such as revolutionary socialism, radical nationalism and occultism, and discuss questions of gender, ideology and politics, geographical location and technological innovation. The cultural history thus focuses on the role of the avant-garde in shaping the ideas of cultural modernity in the Nordic countries.

International, iconoclastic, inventive, born out of the institutionalised madness of the First World War, Dada erupted in cities throughout Europe and the USA, creating shock waves that offended polite society and destabilised the cultural and political status quo. In spite of its sporadic and ephemeral character, its rich and diverse legacy is still powerfully felt nearly a century later. Following on from Dada and Beyond Volume 1: Dada Discourses, the sixteen essays in this collection provide critical examinations of Dada, placing particular emphasis on the ongoing impact of its creative output. The chapters examine its pivotal figures as well as its more peripheral protagonists, their different geographic locations, and the extraordinary diversity of their practices that included poetry, painting, printmaking, dance, performance, theatre, textiles, readymades, photomontage and cinema.
As the book’s authors reveal, Dada not only anticipates Surrealism but also foreshadows an extraordinary array of more recent tendencies including action painting, conceptual art, outsider art, performance art, environmental and land art. In its privileging of chance and automatism, its rejection of formal artistic institutions, its subversive exploitation of mass media and its constant self-reconstitution and self-redefinition, Dada deserves to be seen as a cultural phenomenon that is still powerfully relevant in the twenty-first century.

This collection of critical essays celebrates the subversive and challenging creativity of the Dada movement, born in pacifist Zurich in 1916 in violent reaction to the First World War. It examines the collective and individual activities that took place under the name of Dada in Zurich, Cologne, Berlin, Paris, New York and Barcelona, and explores the various creative forms employed, including text, collage, photomontage, objects, dance, performance and film. The authors suggest new ways of understanding the work of the most famous Dadaists, while also casting light on the contribution of hitherto neglected figures.
“Dada was a bomb”, declared Max Ernst in an interview in 1958. “Can you imagine anyone, almost half a century after the explosion of a bomb, trying to collect its fragments and stick them together in order to display them?” The aim of this volume is not to reconstitute the bomb, but to analyse some of its explosive effects and after-effects that continue to resonate nearly a century later. Far from attempting to reduce Dada to a homogeneous movement, or to define a unifying principle beneath and beyond the multiple directions taken by Dadaists, this collection aims to respect the diversity and heterogeneity of the movement’s collective activities as well as the specificity of its individual actors.

The avant-garde has been popular for some time, but its popularity has tended to fly under the radar. This “popular avant-garde,” conceived as the meeting ground of the avant-garde and popular, avoids the divorce of art and praxis of which the avant-garde has been accused. The Popular Avant-Garde takes stock of the debates about both the “historical” (“modernist”) and posterior avant-gardes, and sets them in relation to popular culture and art forms. With a critical introduction that examines the concepts of “the avant-garde,” “the popular,” and “the popular avant-garde,” the series of essays analyzes the way in which the avant-garde employs popular genres for political purposes, as well as how the popular acquires a critical function with respect to the avant-garde. Each of the volume’s three sections considers a different aspect of the productive exchange between the avant-garde and popular: the popular avant-garde as a culturally hybrid and cross-border phenomenon; the play between the popular avant-garde and developments in media and technology; and the popular avant-garde’s upending of conventional ideas about “the people” and “the popular.” The Popular Avant-Garde takes a fresh look at the now canonical Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist movements from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, and cultural and critical theory, while at the same time exploring less well-known avant-garde work in literature, film, television, music, photography, dance, sculpture, and the graphic arts. This volume’s coverage of the American and Afro-American, Luso-Brazilian and Latin-American, East-European, and Scandinavian avant-gardes, in addition to the vanguards of Spain and other parts of Western Europe, will appeal to all those interested in avant-garde and popular art forms.

This volume, Futurism and the Technological Imagination, results from a conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas in Helsinki. It contains a number of re-written conference contributions as well as several specially commissioned essays that address various aspects of the Futurists’ relationship to technology both on an ideological level and with regard to their artistic languages.
In the early twentieth century, many art movements vied with each other to overhaul the aesthetic and ideological foundations of arts and literature and to make them suitable vehicles of expression in the new Era of the Machine. Some of the most remarkable examples came from the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
By addressing the full spectrum of Futurist attitudes to science and the machine world, this collection of 14 essays offers a multifaceted account of the complex and often contradictory features of the Futurist technological imagination. The volume will appeal to anybody interested in the history of modern culture, art and literature.

This volume on avant-garde film has emerged as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century avant-garde art, literature and film carried out in the framework of a research project at the University of Edinburgh. It paves the way for a fresh assessment of avant-garde film and develops its theory as an integral part of a newly defined conception of the avant-garde as a whole, by closing the gap between theoretical approaches towards the avant-garde as defined on the basis of art and literature on the one hand and avant-garde cinema on the other. It gathers contributions by the most esteemed scholars in the field of avant-garde studies relating to the “classical” avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, to new trends emerging in the 1950s and 1960s and to the impact that innovative technologies have recently had on the further development of avant-garde and experimental film. The contributions reflect the broad range of different moving-image media that make up what we refer to today simply as “film”, at the same time as reconsidering the applicability of the label “avant-garde”, to offer a comprehensive and updated framework that will prove invaluable to scholars of both Moving Image Studies and Art History disciplines.

Les avant-gardes inventent dès leur début au XXe siècle des politiques et une forme spécifique du politique, et le surréalisme va le plus loin dans l'interpénétration des domaines politiques et artistiques. A la différence des autres mouvements d'avant-garde historiques, le modèle du surréalisme est encore un défi pour nombre d'écrivains et d'artistes d'aujourd'hui, et ne serait-ce qu'en tant que mort-vivant. Voulant reconduire l'art dans la vie, donc aussi dans la politique et le politique, le surréalisme envisage une transformation de la société mais se révèle finalement résistant contre tous les totalitarismes.
Les contributions de ce volume analysent selon quelle politique artistique le surréalisme peut établir et pratiquer cette position politique, unique dans l'art et la littérature du XXe siècle. Ils abordent ce sujet de perspectives théoriques et médiatiques et des points de vue de la littérature, de l’art, de l’histoire et de la communication. Les essais s'occupent aussi bien de sujets, d'oeuvres et d'auteurs représentatifs du surréalisme historique que du surréalisme d'après-guerre et de sa réception d'aujourd'hui. Ils posent ainsi la question de la nécessité et des possibilités d'un nouvel engagement politique de l'art et de la littérature contemporains.

Avant-Garde and Criticism sheds new light on the complex aims, functions, practices and contexts of art-criticism in relation to the European avant-garde. Although many avant-garde works and the avant-gardes of various countries have been analyzed, considerably less attention has been given to the reviews in newspapers and journals on avant-garde literature, art, architecture and film. This volume of Avant-Garde Critical Studies will look at how art critics operated in a strategic way.
The strategies of avant-garde criticism are diverse. Art critics, especially when they are artists themselves, attempt to manipulate the cultural climate in their favour. They use their position to legitimize avant-garde concepts and to conquer a place in the cultural field. But they are also markedly influenced by the context in which they operate. The position of fellow-critics and the ideological bias of the papers in which they publish can be as important as the political climate in which their criticism flourishes. The analysis of avant-garde art criticism can also make clear how strategies sometimes fail and involuntarily display non-avant-garde characteristics. On the other hand traditionalist criticism on the avant-garde offers new insights into its status and reception in a given time and place.
This volume is of interest for scholars, teachers and students who are interested in the avant-garde of the interbellum-period and work in the field of literature, art, film and architecture.

The neo-avant-garde of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, is due for a thoroughgoing reassessment. This collection of essays represents the first full-scale attempt to deal with the concept from an interdisciplinary standpoint. A number of essays in this book concentrate on fine art, particularly painting and sculpture, thereby adding significantly to the growing art historical literature in the field, but a number of the contributions also focus on poetry, performance, theatre, film, architecture and music. Given that there are also major essays here dealing with geographical blindspots in current neo-avant-garde studies, with thematic issues such as art’s entanglement with gender, mass culture and politics, with key neo-avant-garde publications, and with the purely theoretical problems attaching to the theorisation of the topic, this collection offers a multi-dimensional approach to the subject which is noticeably lacking elsewhere. Taken together these essays represent a consolidated attempt at re-thinking the ‘cultural logic’ of the immediate post-World War II period.

In 1906, for the first time in his life, F.T. Marinetti connected the term ‘avant-garde’ with the idea of the future, thus paving the way for what is now commonly called the ‘modernist’ or ‘historical avant-garde’. Since 1906 the ties between the early twentieth-century European aesthetic vanguard and politics have been a matter of debate. With a century gone by, The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde takes stock of this debate. Opening with a critical introduction to the vast research archive on the subject, this book proposes to view the avant-garde as a political force in its own right that may have produced solutions to problems irresolvable within its democratic political constellation. In a series of essays that combine close readings of texts and plastic works with a thorough knowledge of their political context, the book looks at avant-garde works as media producing political thought and experience. Covering the canonised avant-garde movements of Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism, but also focussing on the avant-garde in Europe’s geographical outskirts, this book will appeal to all those interested in the modernist avant-garde.

How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada’s infamous anti-stance.
The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture.
Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.

This collection of critical essays explores new approaches to the study of avant-garde literature and art, film and architecture. It offers a theoretical framework that avoids narrowly defined notions of the avant-garde. It takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various avant-garde movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations. Individual essays concentrate on cubist collage and dadaist photomontage, on abstract painting by members of the Dutch group De Stijl, on verbal chemistry and dadaist poetry and on body art from futurism to surrealism.
In addition, the collection wishes to open up the discussion of the avant-garde to a thorough investigation of neo-avant-garde activities in the 1950s and 1960s. For decades the appreciation of neo-avant-garde art and literature, film and architecture suffered from a general and all-inclusive rebuke. This volume is designed to contribute to a breakthrough towards a more competent and more precise investigation of this research field. Contributions include a discussion of Warhol’s multiples as well as Duchamp’s editioned readymades, forms of concrete and digital poetry as well as the architectural “Non-Plan”.
The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2002. The research group formed around the Avant-Garde Project at Edinburgh will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.

Zwischen dem Komischen und dem Avantgardistischen gibt es Parallelen, die bislang kaum von der Forschung gewürdigt wurden, in diesem Band aber erstmals im Mittelpunkt stehen. In 19 Beiträgen werden strukturelle, konzeptionelle und personelle Beziehungen zwischen den beiden scheinbar gegensätzlichen Phänomenen an repräsentativen Beispielen aus der französischen, italienischen, spanischen, deutschen und niederländischen Literatur vom Ende des 19. bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts untersucht. Die Beiträge reichen von der italienischen Scapigliatura über Futurismus, Dadaismus, Expressionismus und Surrealismus bis hin zu Pataphysik, Oulipo und neoavantgardistischen Texten. Auf diese Weise kommen Autoren, Bewegungen und Aspekte, die bisher zu wenig beachtet wurden, in den Blick, bekannte erscheinen in neuem Licht, und auch die beiden Begriffe Avantgarde und Komik gewinnen an Schärfe. Denn weder ist der avantgardistische Impuls auf die sogenannten historischen Avantgarden zu beschränken noch verbleiben komische Verfahren im Harmlosen: Beide überschreiten Grenzen, die es ständig neu zu reflektieren gilt.

This collection of critical essays is designed to lay the foundations for a new theory of the European avant-garde. It starts from the assumption that not one all-embracing intention of all avant-garde movements - i.e. the intention of “reintegrating art into the practice of life” (Peter Bürger) - but the challenge of new cultural technologies, in particular photography and cinema, constitutes the main driving force of the formation and further development of the avant-garde. This approach permits to establish a theoretical framework that takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various art movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations.
Following the theoretical foundation of the new approach, individual contributions concentrate on a diverse range of avant-gardist concepts, trends and manifestations from cubist painting and the literary work of Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein to the screeching voices of futurism, dadaist photomontage and film, surrealist photographs and sculptures and neo-avant-gardist theories as developed by the French group OuLiPo. The volume closes with new insights gained from placing the avant-garde in the contexts of literary institutions and psychoanalytical and sociological concepts.
The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at Yale University, New Haven, in February 2000. The research group formed on this occasion will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.

Die Entwicklung des künstlerischen Feldes war im 20.Jahrhundert radikalen Veränderungen unterworfen und hat sowohl für Künstler wie für Kritiker ein breites Spektrum an Strategien und Kunstgriffen zur Profilierung verfügbar gemacht. Eine zentrale Rolle dabei spielt das Zitat, wie der vorliegende Band belegt. Instrument Zitat soll das Spezifische im Umgang mit Zitaten und Zitieren bei Kritikern und avantgardistischen, modernistischen und postmodernistischen Künstlern zeigen, als Vorarbeit zu einer Geschichte des Zitats und des Zitierens.

Subjectivity is one of the central issues of twentieth-century philosophy, literature and art. Modernism, which “discovered” the subconscious, put an end to the belief in the Cartesian Subject as the autonomous centre of knowledge and self-consciousness. Instead, the subject became something uncontrollable, unreliable, incomplete and fragmentary. The attempts to recapture the unity of the subject led to the existential quest and the flight into ideology (nazism, communism).
Postmodernism, the cultural movement of the second half of the twentieth century, did not consider the subject any longer as an important category. Attention was focused on the “I” and the “Other”, on dialogism and polyphonism (Bakhtin). Ideology lost its appeal and so did the “great” stories (Lyotard).
In this issue of Avant-Garde Critical Studies the problem of subjectivity in twentieth-century culture is discussed from various angles by specialists in the field of philosophy, literature, film, music and dance.

Dem hier präsentierten Band liegt die These zugrunde, daß die Anfänge der Praxis, kunstprogrammatische Texte als Manifest zu bezeichnen, und die anschließende Hoch-konjunktur in der avantgardistischen Nomenklatur vor dem Hintergrund der problematisch gewordenen Intentionalität im Dreieck Künstler, Kunstwerk und Publikum gesehen werden muß. Den Beleg dafür tritt der vorliegende Band von drei Ansätzen aus an: Interpretation, Funktionalität und Strategie.
Dabei wird ein Korpus aus verschiedenen Kunstsparten behandelt, das von literarischen Deklarationen der russischen Moderne ab 1893 bis zu postmodernen Manifesten reicht, mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf den Manifesten der historischen Avantgarde. Damit ist das vorliegende Buch auch als ein Beitrag zur Historiographie der Bezeichnung von Texten der Avantgarde als Manifeste, der Rolle von Manifesten in der Avantgarde und letztlich auch der Textproduktion der Avantgarde insgesamt zu verstehen.

This book addresses the major critical and interpretive issues of contemporary experimental poetic texts.
Critical approaches, historical contexts, and basic concepts are surveyed in two introductory essays, while the study of poetic movements in historical context and the chronological trajectory of production of experimental texts are discussed in the first major segment of the volume, Experimentation in Its Historical Moment. The principal topic addressed here is the nature of experimental poetry in revolutionary social contexts.
The second major theme, focused upon in the section Experimentation in the Language Arts, is that of language as a vehicle for experiments and cognitive quests, aimed not at the production of truth or social emancipation but at experiential aspects of language and language use. Haroldo de Campos's fragmented poetic prose work Galàxias is a highlighted topic of attention, as are poetic and language experiments in Lettrism, Fluxus, sound poetry, and new technological poetries.
The development of the basic tenets of Concrete poetry and current critical perspectives on its status in poetical experimentation constitute the basis of the third section of the book, Concrete and Neo-Concrete Poetry. The relationship of historical Concrete poetry to artistic genres is presented, with special emphasis on Brazil and on contemporary visual writing. The section Memoirs of Concrete, in the context of oral history, includes retrospective accounts by two of Concrete poetry's most renowned editors.
The closing section of this book presents statements on the theory and practice of avant-garde poetry by 22 participants in the Yale Symphosymposium on Contemporary Poetics and Concretism.

This study of six early twentieth-century periodicals serves to refine the traditional image of the inter-war journal as the pre-eminent vehicle of artistic and intellectual renewal. Every periodical has its own history but general themes are clearly identified. Traces emerge of a common commitment to the internationalisation of the arts and we find early and unexpected discussion of Freud, Chaplin and Joyce in Brussels and Berlin, jazz in Vienna and Brussels, Ezra Pound in the Netherlands and Belgium. In contrast to this internationalisation are the ambitions of the various editors to play a significant role in their national cultures. This tension between national and international influences was in the first instance stimulating and innovative. Later, as a result of political and socio-economic developments, the newly achieved openness and exchange were gradually diminished and finally disappeared as did the periodicals themselves.

Usually the term 'innovation' is used in connection with artists' and authors' themes and techniques. What we see in most studies about innovation is that its problematic aspects are related to problems in literary or artistic history and that scholars try to solve those problems in work-oriented research. Some scholars, however, especially emperical sociologists, claim that problems with respect to innovation cannot be solved without analyzing the cultural area where those problems arise.
The major question that this book discusses concerns the role of art committees, literary, art and film critics, art collectors, museum directors, academic writers and other 'gatekeepers' with regard to different forms of art in the interbellum period as well as after World War II.

Why did modern painting flourish in Paris, Vienna, or Brussels but stall in London or Madrid? What propelled some avant-gardes to global fame while others vanished? This book takes you inside modern art’s explosive rise between 1848 and 1918, revealing how artists navigated nationalism, markets, elite networks, and public demands to invent new ways of making—and living—art. Forget the myth of isolated geniuses. Here, avant-gardes cross borders via dealers, journals, exhibitions, and exiles. Follow their journey from Paris to Moscow, Barcelona, and New York through alliances, rivalries, and migrations. Richly illustrated with artworks, maps, and charts, this is art history reimagined—transnational, social, and vividly alive.

This book chronicles the history of the visual languages developed in Argentina during Peronism, exploring how art and propaganda interacted with and responded to their historical context. At the heart of this study is the term “intentional citations”, a framework that advocates for the socio-cultural specificity of Latin American modernist art, in contrast to models that overly rely on European concepts of modernism and the avant-garde. Readers will discover how Argentinian artists cited European artworks to express particular ideas and goals, how Peronist propaganda employed various artistic traditions—including abstraction—for political purposes, and how ideologues rebranded Perón and Eva as a formidable ruling couple. This book also examines how the Peronist regime and artists competed for control of the cultural field. Despite their stark political differences, however, both factions pursued similar goals.