20th century Avant-Garde

Arseny Zhilyaev in conversation with Boris Groys: "Contemporary art is the theology of the museum". This recent conversation is part of the Center for Experimental Museology, a collaborative project between COLTA.RU and the V-A-C Foundation. The material was published on e-flux conversations for the first time in english.

In this essay I seek to explore the icon of the Fighting Cock movement (Khorus Jangi) and of its Manifesto, " The Slaughterer of the Nightingale, " in order to consider its implications and imagistic allusions. In outlining the background of the Khorus Jangi and associated movements, I discuss the imagery of the khorus both in ancient Iran and globally, and in the context of the ideology of the Khorus Jangi. The Manifesto is discussed and analyzed and it is seen that the khorus prefigured the Manifesto, and heralded the appearance of a new movement in painting, as distinct from what had already happened in surrealist and modernist circles in writing. The manifestation of surrealist and modernist ideology in imagery seems to have been a response to this wake-up call of the Khorus Jangi.

Aida Foroutan, “Why the Fighting Cock? The Significance of the Imagery of the Khorus Jangi and its Manifesto ‘The Slaughterer of the Nightingale,’” Iran Namag, Volume 1, Number 1 (Spring 2016), XXVIII-XLIX.

https://www.irannamag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/1.1-English-Foroutan-Iran-Namag.pdf

La collection Arts & esthétique propose de remettre en circulation des textes courts - recueils d’articles, essais, entretiens, aphorismes ou fragments - qui éclairent des productions artistiques passées et présentes sans distinction de genre. Chacun des titres permet au lecteur de se situer au coeur d’un débat théorique dont l’enjeu est toujours une meilleure compréhension de l’art.

The Review article discusses four new scholarly volumes focused on various problematic issues related to Russian Modernism. The essay debates major points of methodology and research topicality with respect to Russian Symbolism and the Avant-Garde.
- Martha M.F. Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty. Russian Modernism and Its New
Religious Aesthetic. Evanston, 2016.
- Jonathan Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism. Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism. Evanston, 2017.
- Katherine Lahti, The Russian Revival of the Dithyramb. A Modernist Use of Antiquity. Evanston, 2018.
- Reframing Russian Modernism. Edited by Irina Shevelenko. Madison, 2018.

The Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts (Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz, in Persian), took place from 1967 through 1977 in and around the city of Shiraz, in Iran. It was a pioneering festival incorporating music, theatre, dance, dance-drama and cinema, with a democratizing mission, creating a transformative inter-cultural and multidisciplinary experience. Emphasis, from a Global South perspective, was on the traditional performing arts and Iranian and international contemporary and the avant-garde-all while commissioning and encouraging new creations. Below is a detailed list of all that took place during the eleven years of the life of the Festival. The author was a member of the organising committee and director of music and dance. The research involved access to Festival catalogues and daily News Bulletins, Iranian and international newspapers and magazines reporting directly from the Festival, printed programmes from various events, personal communications with participating artists, their agents, related institutions and various research libraries. This catalogue was initially made available to the public in January 2018, updated in Dec. 2020 and has since been improved with corrections and additional details.

Deutung und Bewertung des Rilkeschen Lebenswerkes, insbesondere seiner »Duineser Elegien«, sind nach wie vor durch eine erstaunliche Unsicherheit gekennzeichnet. Dies erklärt sich wohl vor allem aus der weitgehenden Vernachlässigung bewußtseins- wie literaturgeschichtlicher Zusammenhänge in der bisherigen Forschung. Die Arbeit stellt daher die »Duineser Elegien« in den Kontext von Rilkes Gesamtwerk und versucht, ihre Eigenart und ihren Rang vor dem Hintergrund der deutschen Lyrik zwischen Jahrhundertwende und dem Beginn der zwanziger Jahre zu bestimmen. Da sie dabei die wesentlichen Züge der europäischen Modeme einbezieht, enthält die Studie auch den Entwurf einer Geschichte der modernen Lyrik und leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Formulierung eines Epochenbegriffs der »Modeme«. Mit Hilfe ausgewählter philosophischer wie literarischer Texte der Zeit skizziert sie ein Entwicklungsmodell, das den französischen Symbolismus, die deutsche Jahrhundertwende, die »klassische Modeme« und die Avantgarde (Futurismus, Expressionismus, Wortkunst und Dada) in ein überzeugendes Verhältnis zueinander bringt, und zeigt Grundstrukturen der modernen Lyrik auf.
In ständigem Wechsel mit diesen Kontexten werden die »Duineser Elegien« eingehend analysiert. Nach rezeptionsgeschichtlichen und rezeptionsästhetischen Vorüberlegungen untersucht die Arbeit im Detail das Motivgeflecht des Werkes, Rilkes Verwendung von Mythos, Metapher, Vergleich und Symbol sowie die Bauformen des Zyklus und die intendierte Leserhaltung. Sie weist nach, wie Rilkes Deutung der condition humaine, sein neuer Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Subjektivitätsentwurf, und der poetische Diskurs der »Elegien« zusammenhängen und grenzt sie von den radikaleren Experimenten der Avantgarde ab.

This BA thesis defines and differentiates the concepts “feminist artist” and “woman artist” and in this, offers a more comprehensive examination of Francesca Woodman and her oeuvre by resolving whether she was a feminist artist or an artist who happened to be a woman.

Polish-Moroccan artistic relations during the Cold War are part of
a broader historical phenomenon of the political and cultural rapprochement
between the countries of the Eastern Bloc and those
of the Global South. Ahmed Cherkaoui in Warsaw is a chronological
overview of these relations, initiated by the arrival of Farid Belkahia
in Warsaw in 1955. The book focuses on Moroccan artists who studied
at art schools in Warsaw and Kraków, as well as the Film School in
Łódź. Ahmed Cherkaoui was the first student from the independent
Kingdom of Morocco at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw to receive
scholarship. The book reconstructs his ‘Warsaw period’, offers insight
into the milieu of other Moroccan art students in Poland, as well as
Roman Artymowski’s collaboration with Moroccan artists and students
in Asilah. The publication focuses on socialist art of the 1950s,
matter painting and abstract art of the 1960s, as well as academic
art, experimental film, conceptual practices and the graphic art of
the late 1970s against the background of the artistic and political
transformations of the global Cold War.

*Winner of the Peter C. Rollins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the Northeast Popular Culture Association*
An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.

The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is one of the twentieth century's most influential art schools, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.

The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers―notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities in design; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the school's communist period (1928–1932), when Bauhäusler put their skills into the service of the revolution―even as Nazism emerged and entered the Bauhaus itself.

With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

La première pièce de Joanna Laurens, The Three Birds, (2000) propose une révision dramatique du mythe grec de Philomèle qui s’inscrit en contrepoint de la fable telle qu’elle est relatée dans les Métamorphoses d’Ovide. Le rapport à la langue et à la figure du barbare, paradigme de l’Autre, engage une réflexion sur la question des minorités, la voix de l’étranger et l’idée d’une réversibilité des postures. Barbarismes, irrégularités syntaxiques, « babélisation » font ici violence au langage ainsi qu’aux différentes langues parlées dans la pièce qui s’altèrent et se barbarisent à l’image des personnages, incarnant ainsi dans la chair du verbe la mutilation de la langue qui fait la matière cruelle du mythe. Au cœur de la pièce, elle-même réécriture d’une autre pièce – celle, perdue, du Térée de Sophocle – on retrouve en effet l’écriture d’une autre scène – celle, tabou, du viol et de l’amputation de la langue de Philomèle – qui, à défaut de pouvoir se dire, vient s’écrire sur la tapisserie que brode la jeune fille à l’attention de sa sœur pour révéler le crime étouffé par les mensonges en cascades de Térée en même temps qu’elle se reflète dans la trituration du langage. Cet article s’intéressera donc aux enjeux de la réécriture en tant que mise en place d’une alternative fondamentale à partir d’une perspective neuve – celle du barbare amoureux, ou plutôt de la barbarie de l’amour impossible – qui se reflète dans le motif intradiégétique de l’activité de tissage en tant qu’écriture de « l’Autre » (réécriture par l’Autre, la femme, de l’autre scène ou de l’autre pièce, qui ne peut être dite). Avec la duplicité intrinsèque du langage et l’exploration de son potentiel de transformation, nous verrons dès lors comment l’altérité se donne plutôt à voir comme altération, voire aliénation, jusqu’au creux de la langue où elle prend naissance pour la faire délirer (Deleuze). Le langage de la pièce reflète ainsi la façon dont l’humain vient faire trace dans la langue du barbare et montre comment, par-delà l’humanisation du Thrace, la barbarie vient à son tour réinvestir l’humain et marquer de son empreinte l’acte et le langage d’amour devenus viols. En déroulant à l’extrême le fil ténu qui sépare humanité et barbarie, les expérimentations poétiques de Laurens, où le langage et « l’autre » du langage se rencontrent dans leurs contradictions-mêmes, permettent ainsi de renouveler le sens du mythe grec autant que le langage dramatique sur la scène théâtrale à l’aube du vingt-et-unième siècle.

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Joanna Laurens’ first play The Three Birds (2000) is a retelling of the Greek myth of Philomela in which language undergoes a poetic treatment unprecedented on the contemporary British stage. Mirroring and enacting the characters’ evolution from innocence to barbarism, language is distorted and altered to an extreme through a creative process involving word coinage (i.e. barbarisms), syntactic irregularities, and ‘babelisation,’ thus bringing out and performing the violence of the myth. Departing from Ovid’s poem which is itself a reworking of the original fable, as well as from the feminist takes on the story during the second half of the twentieth century, Laurens’ dramatic writing offers a new approach to the language and figure of the Barbarian, a traditional paradigm of the Other. She addresses such issues as the oppression of minorities, the voice of the stranger, and the reversibility of ethical positions by providing a reflection on the intrinsic duplicity of language itself and by exploring its potential for ‘metamorphosis’ and manipulation, thus presenting otherness as alienation. At the core of the play, which is a rewriting of another (lost) tragedy – that of Sophocles’ Tereus –, are Tereus’ lies, which are a rewriting of another (taboo) story – that of Philomela’s rape and amputated tongue. Although it can’t be verbally expressed by the young woman, this traumatic episode is nonetheless revealed through a tapestry she weaves for her sister Procné to denounce the crime of the lying husband, the needlework compensating her lost voice. This article thus looks at the issues at stake in Laurens’ rewriting, which can be read as the Other of the Greek myth and its famous feminist interpretations. Not only does her play propose an alternative which stems from an unusual, profoundly humane perspective – the suffering of a man whose love is thwarted – but this reversal is also mirrored in the intradiegetic motif of the tapestry as a writing of the Other (the scene behind the scenes, unheard of) by the Other (the abused, silenced woman). I propose to study how the Other comes to be inscribed at the core of language where it takes shape, rendering it delirious (Deleuze), as humanity can be traced in the Barbarian and barbarism can in turn affect humanity beyond the figure of the Thracian. As the act and language of love are turned into linguistic abuse and physical rape, Laurens’ formal experimentations, where language and the Other of language meet at the crossroad of their own contradictions, allow for a renewal in the meaning of the Greek myth as well as in the dramatic language on the British stage at the start of the twenty-first century.

Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous dress of 1913 incorporates a heterogenous variety of materials in its patchwork structure, which includes both fur and fabrics of different weights and colours. By focusing on the relationship between art, fashion, and the tango, this article studies the dynamic between the tangibility and intangibility of Delaunay’s dress and proposes an interpretation related to the collage. The dress materialises the collage within the lexicon of fashion, while its texture incorporates fragments of movements, tango poses, and everything one could find drooped over the patronesses and patrons of the ballrooms of the age. This article transposes the concept of the collage from the surface of the dress to the space of the ballroom, and reflects on the new idea of intimacy and physical proximity encouraged by the fashion of the tango.

[in French]
L’étude du fragment et de l’écriture fragmentaire s’est développée depuis quelques années, sans que pour autant des réponses consensuelles ne surgissent. Si cette pratique est devenue courante après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, elle a pourtant des pionniers. Dans l’univers francophone littéraire européen non français, Charles-Albert Cingria (Genève, 1883-1954) et Paul Nougé (Bruxelles, 1895-1967) sont deux auteurs représentatifs de cette modalité d’écriture, ayant introduit de nombreuses stratégies qui seraient explorées postérieurement. Se concentrant sur l’œuvre publiée et inédite des deux auteurs, la présente étude cherche à dégager les axes d’une pensée littéraire qui s’actualise en pratiques d’écriture fragmentaire, dans des espaces génologiques et thématiques de frontière. Dans ce cadre, le lecteur, expérimentant constamment la violence métamorphique textuelle, joue un rôle primordial.

[in English]
The study of the fragment and of fragmentary writing has increased in recent years. However, consensual answers have been difficult to find. If this practice has become regular since the Second World War, it certainly had precursors. In the francophone non French literary European world, Charles-Albert Cingria (Geneva, 1883-1954) and Paul Nougé (Brussels, 1895-1967) are two outstanding authors of this writing modality, who introduced several strategies that were subsequently to be developed. The present study, based in the published and unpublished work of both authors, aims to identify the guidelines of a literary conception materialised in practices of fragmentary writing, in generic and thematic spaces of frontier. Within this context, the reader, permanently experiencing metamorphic textual violence, plays a major role.

[in Portuguese]
O estudo do fragmento e da escrita fragmentária tem vindo a desenvolver-se nos últimos anos, sem que no entanto respostas consensuais apareçam. Se esta prática se tornou muito comum depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, ela tem pioneiros. No universo literário francófono europeu não francês, Charles-Albert Cingria (Genebra, 1883-1954) e Paul Nougé (Bruxelas, 1895-1967) são autores marcantes desta prática de escrita, tendo introduzido várias estratégias que viriam a ser desenvolvidas posteriormente. Centrando-se na obra publicada e inédita dos dois autores, este estudo procura identificar as linhas mestras de um pensamento literário que se actualiza em práticas de escrita fragmentária, em espaços genológicos e temáticos de fronteira. Neste contexto, o leitor, experimentando permanentemente a violência metamórfica textual, assume um papel determinante.

Discussions of “silent cinema” have generally focused on films made during the silent era (1894–1929). Even after the spread of synchronized sound, however, several experimental filmmakers created films without soundtracks, purely visual experiences that challenged cinema’s status as a multisensory medium. This article gives close attention to Stan Brakhage’s 1959 film "Window Water Baby Moving" as a way of outlining
some of the effects of cinematic silence, such as aesthetic ambiguity and a heightened awareness of cinema’s visual rhythms.

This dissertation presents a mathematically informed, cultural-materialist interpretation of a classically romantic literary-theoretic thesis: that a work of literature can aesthetically communicate an ineffably complex holistic understanding of the real world, which we might call the work's `aesthetic meaning.' Drawing on a generalization of `deep learning' ("artificial intuition") systems and on elementary algorithmic information theory, we describe a kind or aspect of aesthetic meaning—`ambient meaning'—that may have a special resonance with Modernist and avant-garde approaches to aesthetic meaning, as well as with the concepts of aesthetically sophisticated cultural-materialist literary theory of the kind that critics like Sianne Ngai or Raymond Williams practice, sometimes understood as 'affect studies.'

This document critically reviews the theories of the avant-garde of both the Left and the Right put forward between the 1920s – the time of the vigorous assertion of the avant-garde – and the late 1970s – the beginning of the conservative turn led by Regan and Thatcher and reflected in cultural, change. The focus is on modern autonomous art and the historical avant-garde art movements. Art is first of all put in its place by locating it in the context of the institutional framework of modern society. This includes historical references to the emergence of the modern concept of art and of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics. The review of the theories opens with analyses of Ortega y Gassett and Poggioli’s proposals dating from 1925 and 1968 respectively. Important among the theories of the Left are those of the representatives of Critical Theory such as Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Bürger. Among the Right, both the German and American Neo-conservatives are considered, Gehlen, Ritter and Marquard representing the former and Bell that latter. The analysis closes with final reflections on the concepts of the autonomy of art and of the avant-garde which become comprehensible only within the context of rationalised and disenchanted (i.e. disillusioned and enlightened) modern society.

Esta investigación analiza el período compren-dido entre finales de los años 20 y principios de los 30 en la literatura de Francisco Ayala. La cuestión principal gira en torno a la deno-minación como vanguardista de los escritos del granadino, poniéndolos en relación con otras corrientes de vanguardia españolas y europeas del momento. Ayala fue un escritor fuertemente marcado por la vivencia del cine y de la metrópolis en un momento clave de la historia contemporánea europea, un autor pre-ocupado por el posicionamiento del artista en su contexto político y social.
Abstract: This research analyzes the period between the late 20's and early 30's in the literature of Francisco Ayala. The main issue is to solve the question about the denomination as vanguard of the writings of the Spanish writer, and after that, if possible, put them in relation to other avant-garde art currents, Spanish or European. Ayala was a writer strongly marked by the experience of cinema and the metropolis on a key moment in contemporary European history. An author concerned about the role of the artist in a particular political and social context.

Vera Kotelevskaya’s Review of Susanne Strätling’s Book "Die Hand am Werk: Poetik der Poiesis in der russischen Avantgarde". München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2017, 531 S., ISBN: 978-3-7705-6092-9

Ключевые слова: Велимир Хлебников; Всеволод Мейерхольд; Сергей Третьяков; русский авангард; русский формализм; русский конструктивизм; биомеханика; показ/рассказ; гаптическая поэтика; поэтология; карпалистика; жест; рука; интермедиальность

Keywords: Russian avant-garde; Russian formalism; haptic poetic; poetology; gesture; hand; Daniil Kharms; Alexey Gastev; Velimir Khlebnikov; Petr Miturich; Vsevolod Meyerhold; Sergey Tret’iyakov

Schlagwörter: Russische Avantgarde; Russischer Formalismus; haptische Poetik; Poetologie; Geste; Hand; Daniil Charms; Alexey Gastev; Welimir Chlebnikow; Petr Mituritsch; Wsewolod Meyerhold; Sergey Tret’ijakov

On October 1, 1920, the city of Santiago, Chile, came to a halt as tens of thousands stopped work and their daily activities to join the funeral procession of José Domingo Gómez Rojas, a 24 year old university student and acclaimed poet. Nicknamed "the firecracker poet" for his incendiary poems, such as "The Cry of the Renegade" Gómez Rojas was a member of the University of Chile's student federation (the FECh) which had come under repeated attack for its critiques of Chile's political system and ruling parties. Government officials accused the FECh's leaders of being advocates for the destruction of the social order, subversives who had the temerity to question national policy making, and insolent youths who did not know their place. Arrested for alleged sedition as part of a five-month-long "prosecution of subversives," Gómez Rojas joined other students and workers in Santiago's prison system. He never left. After two months in police custody, he died in Santiago's asylum, quickly to be reborn as a political martyr for students and workers alike.

This microhistory recovers the context within which Gómez Rojas's arrest, imprisonment, and death unfolded and the experiences of men he counted as friends, comrades, colleagues, mentors, and pupils. Fifty years before the much-heralded student movements of 1968, Raymond Craib shows, university students and workers were active political collaborators and radicalized political subjects. In interwar Chile, members of Chile's sizeable working class marched side-by-side with students from the FECh. At the same time, increasingly radicalized university students, as well as former students, workers, and worker-intellectuals, gathered together to talk, read, and find common cause. Members of what Craib calls a "capacious Left" they shared a wide-ranging interest in works of sociology and political theory, a penchant for poetry, and an eclectic embrace of anarchist, socialist, and communist principles and practices. They also shared the experience of repression, an experience that ultimately cost Gómez Rojas his life and marked an entire generation of political organizers and agitators, including future president Salvador Allende and poet Pablo Neruda.

The Department of Jewish Art at Bar-Ilan University, Department of Art History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies at Tel Aviv University, and Maria and Michael Zetlin Museum of Russian Art in Ramat Gan.

August 29, 1952, in Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock: a historic event takes place. The pianist David Tudor closes and opens the piano lid three times, without touching the keyboard itself, during the premiere performance of John Cage’s new composition. This piece, called 4′33′′ has been written for a “silent piano.” It is a composition that is NOT to be played! Critics and the audience find the joke poor. Today, depending on the individual point of view, 4′33′′ might be interpreted in hundreds of different ways.
Keywords: John Cage, 2oth Century Avant-Garde, experimental music.

Sycorax shapes a powerful figure and narrative thread through colonial and postcolonial thinking. This essay, written in the 1990s, lays out some of the influential ways in which the figure of Sycorax influenced postcolonial feminist methodologies.