European Avant Garde

This research studies the concept of musical experimentalism in the manifestos of musical avant-garde. It theorises the concept of musical experimentalism, clarifies the confusion between the concepts of avant-garde and modernism in music research, and locates the most important manifestos in reference to the idea of musical experimentalism. The main finding of the study is that musical experimentalism is a radical ethos concerning the making of music: aside from working as a musical technique, it can also serve as a way to be in the world and a way to change society. The research examines, among other things, contemporary classical music, electronic music, sound art, noise and free improvisation. The salient material of the study comprises manifestos written by well-known avant-garde and experimental composers such as Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), John Cage (1912–1992) and Pauline Oliveros (1932–). The material also consists of writings by R. Murray Schafer (1933–) and Hildegard Westerkamp (1946–), both representing the field of acoustic ecology. Few previous studies have explored some of the manifestos underlying the idea of musical experimentalism in this study such as the writings of composers Frederik Rzewski (1938–) and Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981). The material also includes manifestos by artists from different domains of art, such as texts by the Italian futurist painter Luigi Russolo (1883–1947), the Russian futurist auteur Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) and the American beat writer William S. Burroughs (1914–1997). This research is based on avant-garde theory (e.g. Bürger 2006 [1974], Ziarek 2001, Calinescu 1987; Huyssen 1986; Poggioli 1968 [1962]) and experimental music studies (e.g. Demers 2010; Saunders 2009; Hegarty 2007; Attali 2006 [1977]; Nyman 1999 [1974]; Mauceri 1997). The research builds the theory of musical experimentalism from the viewpoint of Martin Heidegger’s (e.g. 2010 [1929]; 2007 [1962/1988]; 2000 [1927]; 1998 [1935/1936]) and Herbert Marcuse’s (2011 [1977]; 1969) philosophies using Heidegger’s concepts of ‘being-in-the-world’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘nothingness’, and Marcuse’s concepts of ‘aesthetic ethos’ and ‘counter-societal experience’. The study also considers the idea of experimentalism from the viewpoint of etymology, phenomenological philosophy, transcendentalism and anarchism. The research presents an interpretation of the ethos of musical experimentalism as a mode of musical and cultural subversion. It argues that musical experimentalism does not operate within conventional musical laws, theories, preconditions or definitions, but is based on the idea that music can happen anywhere at anytime. The ethos of musical experimentalism requires openness to the world and acceptance of the indeterminate essence of reality. Musical experimentalism depends on the instability of being and aims to radicalise experience through seeing, hearing and understanding reality in a new way. Musical experimentalism questions the accepted reality and replaces it with a new, artistically formulated reality. In this way, musical experimentalism is also radically political in that it aims not just to subvert musical experience, but also the experience of reality. In other words, musical experimentalism aims to change the world by changing individuals; not only the laws of music, but also cultural values are to be questioned.

L’évolution de la littérature et des arts est communément envisagée comme une succession de ruptures, dont chacune définit une école ou un mouvement dit d’avant-garde. Mais il serait temps de s’interroger sur la face cachée de ce récit : celle des continuités et des retours, de la tradition et des arrière-gardes qui s’inscrivent dans les marges ou même à contre-courant de la dynamique générale.
Il s’agit de transformer en profondeur notre perception de l’évolution littéraire et artistique et d’inventer une nouvelle manière d’écrire l’histoire. Cet ouvrage montre l’intérêt d’une diversité des approches pour étudier un objet aussi ambigu. Face cachée de la modernité, l’arrière-garde pourrait bien aussi en être la clé, apte à ouvrir des perspectives nouvelles et faire surgir des aspects inattendus. S’il faut penser les arrière-gardes, c’est pour pouvoir penser tout le reste.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Introduction : Penser les arrière-gardes, par William Marx

Première partie : Modèles théoriques, archétypes artistiques

1 - L'arrière-garde vue de l'avant, par Vincent Kaufmann 2 - Rétrospection et prospection, de Mallarmé à Heidegger, par Laurent Mattiussi 3 - L'opéra, combat d'avant ou d'arrière-garde ? le cas Wagner, par Timothée Picard 4 - Arrière-gardes et Nouvelle vague, le cinéma "qualité France", par Jean-Pierre Esquenazi 5 - Le postmodernisme est-il une arrière-garde ? par Henri Garric

Deuxième partie : L'antimodernisme en France

6 - L'arrière-garde, de Péguy à Paulhan et Barthes, par Antoine Compagnon 7 - Avant-garde poétique, arrière-garde politique : autour de "L'Effort libre", par Michel Décaudin 8 - Une revue d'arrière-garde militante, "Les Guêpes" , par Pascal Mercier 9 - Régionalisme et arrière-garde, le cas du "Pigeonnier", par Franck Jouffre 10 - Julien Benda, ou l'éternelle arrière-garde, par Régine Pietra 11 - Roger Nimier, hussard d'arrière-garde, par Jean-François Louette

Troisième partie : Les paradoxes du modernisme européen

12 - A l'arrière-garde du modernisme, Wyndham Lewis, par Martin Puchner 13 - Arrière-garde et modernisme anglais, Leavis et la grande tradition de la rupture, par Niels Buch-Jepsen 14 - Une arrière-garde à l'italienne ? La Ronda, par Anne-Rachel Hermetet 15 - La référence à Dieu, une posture d'arrière-garde ? Bernanos et Unamuno, par Danielle Perrot-Corpet

Index

For a painting of such tiny dimensions, Salvador Dalí’s Apparatus and Hand (Aparell i mà) stirred up a rather large polemic upon its hanging at Barcelona’s Saló de Tardor in October of 1927. The previous summer found the painter on three months’ leave from military service, working on this small oil panel at his habitual holiday perch on the shores of Cadaqués. Having drawn upon nearly every modernist tendency on offer in Europe over the past several years – from Cubism and Futurism, to Purism and Metaphysical painting, whether in succession or combination – Dalí began with this summer’s work to slough off the traces of derivation. At once more “personal”  and increasingly in tune with the burgeoning Surrealist movement in Paris, Dalí’s newest images – Apparatus and Hand and two versions of Honey is Sweeter than Blood – pack their spaces with a seemingly endless store of diminutive imagery, and recede into ever more distant horizons.  At this transitional moment in his personal trajectory, Dalí makes visible the mutual implications of apparently contradictory conceptions of the human body as they percolated in the European avant-garde: rigidity and elasticity, organicism and artificiality, rationalism and oneiricism, scaffolding and flesh.  For a brief moment, Apparatus and Hand managed to conflate seemingly contrary poles of the European avant-garde. Even as he began expressing an active desire to join Breton’s clan – making a first foray to Paris in April of 1926, and entering Surrealist circles fully by the spring of 1929 – he pledged in a letter to Lorca to keep his work “at the edge of Surrealism.”  It is at this temporary edge, and its treatment of the body, that we find some insights into interwar European painting at large.

In: Poslanje filologa, ur. C. Pavlović, T. Bogdan, 2008. Proučavanje filma često se temeljilo na dosezima i metodologijama drugih znanosti – od psihologije (primjerice, psihologije percepcije i kognitivne psihologije), sociologije i teorije književnosti, preko povijesti umjetnosti (odnosno teorije likovnih umjetnosti) do lingvistike, i tako dalje. Kada je o utjecaju teorije književnosti riječ, teorija proze i teorija fikcionalne književnosti ostavili su u filmologiji puno većeg traga od teorije stiha i teorije lirike, premda je još u zlatno doba ruskog formalizma (usp. američku antologiju sovjetskih tekstova Russian Formalist Film Theory; Eagle, 1981) bilo zapaženih pokušaja analize filma kao poezije. Jurij Tinjanov je, primjerice, još 1927. godine tvrdio da je zbog «skakutavosti» filma, zbog isprekidanosti vizualnog slijeda nastale tehnikom montaže, opravdano uspoređivati film s poezijom, umjesto (kao što je uobičajenije) s proznom književnošću (Tinjanov, 1971: 292). Napokon, i u Ejzenštejnovoj ideji montaže kao sudara kadrova (Ejzenštejn, 1964, Wollen, 1978) i naglašavanju znamenite montaže atrakcija (doduše, preuzete iz Ejzenštejnovog kazališnog iskustva) vidi se eminentno lirski potencijal filmske forme i filmskog medija. 1 No, čak i kada se vodeći teoretičari filma, poput utjecajnog Amerikanca Davida Bordwella, pozivaju na radove ruskih formalista, više ih zanima njihova teorija narativne književnosti (Bordwell, 1986), odnosno poznate teze o fabuli, sižeu ili motivaciji (sistematizirane kod Tomaševskog), a ruskoformalističku teoriju filma kao poezije potpuno zanemaruju.

Sarah Lucas is one of the greatest artists I know belonging to the generation that rose during the Clinton Nineties. She has a feeling for her materials that quite simply takes your breath away, a formidable command over sculptural form, a knack for the striking composition, juxtaposition or installation, an abiding interest in charged and often politically-incorrect content, a deliciously wicked sense of humor, and ranks among our better wordsmiths.  “What is there not to like?”, one might ask.  A more extensive version of this article is forthcoming.

“At the lunatics’ night”. The Formists in the distorting mirror of the interwar art criticism

Most Polish critics, especially those educated to respect the 19th-century naturalist aesthetics, could not accept any sort of anti-mimetic treatment of art. In this rejection they eagerly employed their trusted methods and familiar habit to criticise the misunderstood and let their ignorance and incapacity hide behind invectives. It is indeed very difficult to provide a different reading of the reviews of the first exhibitions of Formist artists and the so-called new art since all of them display a sense of superiority and disdain for their subject. Not uncommon were accusations of aesthetic perversion, “morbid hallucinations”, ultra-futurist quackery, and unhealthy propensity for absurdity and eccentricity. According to the critics, “descriptive geometry” and senses-shocking shapes marked a clean break from the fundamental laws of beauty and logic, from the aesthetics that seemed both unquestionable and intransgressible. As late as the second decade of the 20th century, Polish press was filled with terms such as “the lunatics’ night”, “delirious frenzy”, or “artistic ragtag” of the Formists. Curiously, those diagnoses that set to read modernist works as created by mentally unstable individuals, frequently came together with accusations of dilettantism, ignorance, childishness, illogical thinking, or even idiocy and moronism. The aim of such claims was clear – to discredit modern art, to show that it could not be taken seriously as something beyond the established boundaries of any known artistic criteria and norms. As such it did not require critics to provide any additional explanation. On the other hand, however, the common use of mental illness-related metaphors proves that works by young artists were seen as posing a serious threat and substantial problem – a problem that required taking decisive countermeasures.

The first institutional history of European avant-garde cinema in the 1920s. Through the lens of the Stuttgart "Film and Foto" exhibition, the film portion curated by Hans Richter, this essay intertwines the history of European avant-cinema, both as a mode of production and exhibition practice, with contemporary film theory. The result are the beginnings of film culture in Europe before 1930.

Beginning first with a general overview of the term avant-garde, this paper next examines roughly Meiji politics as one of the core reasons behind the perception of the early Japanese avant-garde in the 1920s as a simple imitation of the European model. Radical avant-garde groups such as MAVO and Sanka will be introduced as main examples for the movement, which questioned the foundation of modern art and avant-garde in Japan. Their tools for achieving this goal in the form of tendencies toward transgressions can be located in the diversity of artistic styles and genres, in the blurring of the boundary between the so-called high and low art, and in the passing from the visible to the invisible. The resulting performative act—of demonstrating the new movement in the form of a manifesto as an artistic practice and the elimination of the boundaries between the artwork and the audience—is outstanding.

From "Japan and Asia: representations of selfness and otherness", edited by Marco Pellitteri, (Mutual Images, Vol. 4), 2018, 6–33.

The Situationist International (SI), led by the revolutionary Guy Debord, were active throughout the 1950s and 60s. They published the journal Internationale Situationniste that included many incendiary texts on politics and art, and were a galvanizing force in the revolutions of May 1968. The importance of their work has been felt particularly in their revolutionary analysis of cities. The SI were responsible for utopian imaginings of the city, where its alienating effects from its routine use as a site of consumption and work were banished and it was instead to be turned into a place of play. Tom McDonough collects all the SI’s key work in this area for an essential one-stop collection. Including such essential works as ‘The Theory of the Derive’, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, and many previously untranslated texts, the book will also be strikingly illustrated by the images that were core to the Situationist project.

This article explores the close personal and professional relationships between the Austrian-American designer, artist, and architect, Frederick Kiesler; and designer, theorist, and co-founder of the De Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg. It demonstrates that Kiesler's work and ideas were strongly influenced by Theo van Doesburg's work, his writings, and theories. Personal correspondence between the two men are documented, as well as between van Doesburg and Kiesler's wife, Steffi Kiesler. Over the course of his long career in the arts and design, Kiesler promoted Van Doesburg and De Stijl ideas to an American audience long after van Doesburg's untimely death in the early 1930s. Van Doesburg's theories and his rejection of functionalism were a touchstone to which Kiesler returned again and again in his architectural work and ideas. The article shows that via Kiesler, De Stijl continued to have an influence on US architectural discourse through the 1950s.

Modernist Cultures 12.3 (2017): 331–344. This essay reconsiders Reyner Banham's classic study of early twentieth-century architecture and design, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, originally published in 1960. Banham surveyed the architecture, design, and visual arts of the 'first machine age', characterized by industrial production and motorized transportation, from a self-consciously thematized perspective within the 'second machine age', populated by expendable consumer technologies and images. This revisionist perspective enabled Banham to challenge long-standing myths propagated by the dominant figures of the modern movement. In his polemical emphasis on the contingency and plurality of that which had empirically transpired in first machine age, Banham rejected the reduction of the messy history of the modern movement to the victory of a putative 'international style'. Banham reasserted the intimate connection of architectural modernism with the avant-garde artistic movements of the 1910s and 20s, emphasizing particularly the most radical ones such as expressionism, futurism, and dadaism.

This paper explores Walter Benjamin’s relationship with French Surrealism from sources rarely studied or practically unknown until now. First, I will set out the direct link between the theses on “profane illumination” and the “organization of pessimism” in Der Sürrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz, and various texts by Pierre Naville, one of the most active figures in the Surrealist movement between 1925 and 1929. Second, I will consider Benjamin’s commentaries in Pariser Passagen <I> and convolute “S” of the Passagen-Werk about Surrealist writings and Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, flagging up the implications of this confrontation for Benjamin’s ideas of secularization of mysticism and messianism. Lastly, I will seek to refine the meaning of Benjamin’s “anthropological materialism” and its relevance to those sections of the Passagenarbeit that are dedicated to the evolution of social movements since the French Revolution.

Who exactly was Emil Szittya, this figure of the Hungarian and international avant-garde? Writer, poet, sociologist, art critic, art historian, painter? Anarchist, social democrat, liberal, fascist, antifascist, communist? Fraudster, agent provocateur, informant or French resistance fighter? Was he only Hungarian, Jewish, Swabian, German, Swiss or French? Or simply a wanderer of the world? He was all of these. And some of those qualifiers were mere accusations leveled against him, or a way he had of referring to himself. - in French

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

The contradictions and tensions in Carl Einstein’s last art publication are evident already in its title, Georges Braque. For as he wrote a friend, “The Braque book is of course not a book about Braque.” Yet, with illustrations of 102 works by Braque, a separate luxury edition with two original etchings signed by the artist, Georges Braque certainly looked like a monograph, and a fancy one at that. But its contents validate Einstein’s remark—the book is in truth a patchwork affair that sends mixed messages about the fate of art in modernity. Janus-faced, it comprises both the final statement of Einstein’s utopian vision and intimations of its imminent collapse.

Part of the conference Deep Time and Crisis, c. 1930

Parts of this have since appeared in publications elsewhere. Posting the file because it contains additional detail/ ideas/ correspondence on various topics. Discussion of Lennon, McCartney, Duchamp & Stockhausen is unique to this, though selections from sections on 'Norwegian Wood' appear in the articles 'Where You Once Belonged' & 'The Beatles' Uses of Literacy'. Discussion on Hoggart & Melly appear in my review of Hoggart (1957/2009). The rest is fresh.

Una ola de sueños -"el otro manifiesto del surrealismo", como se lo llama en el estudio preliminar de este libro- es a la vez el texto inaugural del movimiento surrealista y un verdadero inventario de sus actividades hasta 1924. Publicado poco antes del Manifiesto de André Breton y reeditado en Francia después de la muerte de Aragon, además de ofrecer el testimonio directo de uno de los principales protagonistas del movimiento, elabora toda una concepción del arte y la literatura -valorada en su momento por críticos como Ernst Robert Curtius y Walter Benjamin- donde lo "surreal" aparece bajo una luz completamente distinta. Esta primera traducción castellana se presenta aquí acompañada de un ensayo sobre las ideas estéticas de Aragon y un amplio aparato crítico que documenta aspectos casi desconocidos de la historia del surrealismo.

Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a companion volume which puts the late work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, charting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle.

The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer.

At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit from the twenty first.

At the 40th anniversary of its inauguration, the Pompidou Centre represents by no doubts one of the most relevant achievements within the history of construction of the past century. Its realisation is the result of a unique joint venture between a young group of architects led by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and the engineering team Structure 3 of Ove Arup composed, among the others, by Peter Rice, Edmund Happold and Lennart Grut. One of the key parts of the whole structure is the joint supporting the 48-meter span floor, realized in the form of the gerberette and fabricated in the special technique of steel cast.

The first solution employed to solve the joint consisted of a friction collar supporting moving floors made of lattice girders, a powerful translation of the principle of flexibility the competition entry was rooted in. After renouncing to further develop the moving floor solution, architects and engineers undertook new studies in order to solve the connection between floors and the vertical structures. The lattice girders solution left the place to a composite Vierendeel truss joint to the vertical structure by the means of a secondary horizontal beam anchored to the internal and external poles of the façade. The complexity of the solution and the new restrictions imposed by the project’s budget led to another setback and further research were needed. The numerous solutions attempted in 1972 included the reduction of the Vierendeel truss, the transformation of the external poles into pre-tensed cables, the abandonment of the Vierendeel and the adoption of a cantilevered beam anchored to the vertical poles. Once identified as the definitive structural breakthrough, this cantilevered beam was submitted to a process of refinement and improvement that turned a first steel composite element into the monolithic sculptural piece that nowadays so distinctively characterizes the structure of the Centre Pompidou: the gerberette.

In the last decades the value of this breakthrough seems to have overshadowed the complex process laying behind it. The aim of this contribution is both to reposition the gerberette as an arrival point of a complex evolutionary path and therefore to deepen each of the relevant stages which preceded and led to the gerberette’s design and fabrication.  To achieve these objectives this contribution will resort to unpublished material preserved in public archives and private collections and will profit of a series of interviews with the protagonists of Beaubourg’s design and construction.

Nearly as familiar as Surrealism's imagery is the movement’s fixation on
Freudian psychology: used not as a therapeutic tool, but as a thread to plumb the untapped depths of the unconscious, its drives and desires. Far less recognized today are Surrealism’s engagements with Marxist politics—as fraught, and ultimately abortive, as they were impassioned.  As attested in the titles of two of their journals—La Révolution Surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution—insurrection was no ancillary metaphor to this enterprise, but its driving force and ultimate purpose. To that end, the Surrealists came—gradually, fitfully, and often uneasily—to reconcile the movement’s metaphysical ambitions with Marxist materialism.

The Cubist Art Exhibition organised in the Galeries J. Dalmau in Barcelona, in the spring of 1912, was the first display in Spain of this avant-garde movement.
The document shows Juan Gris’s significant support to the cubist event organisation, the task of the press and, especially the help of Josep Maria Junoy. He was a journalist, draughtsman and poet, who helped to spread cubism in Spain, as well as the work of Juan Gris and the exhibition itself.
Some of Juan Gris’s drawings and oils, presented in this exhibition are identified thanks to the press pages. Moreover, it has been identified the presence of a painting not included in the Catalogue Raisonné made by Douglas Cooper, updated and republished in 2014.

If we want to understand how and why classicism could become such a key concept for T. S. Eliot’s criticism, we must absolutely go back to the origins of this concept, that is to French literature and especially to one of the main defenders of classicism in the twentieth century, Charles Maurras. Then we shall see that there was at least as much difference between Eliot’s and Maurras’s classicisms as between Anglo-Catholicism and Roman Catholicism.

This essay focuses on the writings of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, who was at the center of a group of historians and theorists at the University of Venice’s School of Architecture. It considers how his works dealing with the avant-garde, especially Architecture and Utopia and The Sphere and the Labyrinth, develop a historical-critical method to identify and explicate the gap between the evolution of ideologies of the avant-garde and their translation into a repertoire of techniques that have divergent histories and social meanings than those posited by avant-garde ideologies. In doing so, Tafuri is not just offering an “ideology-critique” of modernism, revealing the way that the avant-garde failed to fulfill its postulated social and aesthetic goals; he is also arguing metahistorically, that via a dialectic of the avant-garde, twentieth-century capitalist modernity weaves an ideological fabric of modernism and interleaves it into the effective structure of reality, for instance through the practices of architecture and urbanism. Thus, “modernism” becomes a relevant term of periodization, not because of the historical veracity of any orthodox art historical narrative of the succession or progressive evolution of modernist forms, but insofar as “modernism” designates the symptomatic tension between the progressive history of avant-garde forms and the heterogeneous technical history that represents how the avant-garde’s formal programs were actualized.

Las publicaciones sobre el pintor de la Escuela de Madrid Francisco Arias no facilitan apenas información sobre su situación personal y actividad artística durante la Guerra Civil Española.
Este documento muestra su labor artística durante ese periodo militar, vinculada, como en el caso de otros muchos artistas, con la propaganda bélica republicana durante el conflicto.
ABSTRACT
The publications on the painter of the Escuela de Madrid Francisco Arias hardly provide any information on his personal situation and artistic activity during the Spanish Civil War.
This document shows his artistic work during this military period, linked, as in the case of many other artists, to Republican war propaganda during the conflict.

We must invent and rebuild ex novo the modern city like an immense, tumultuous building yard, agile, mobile, dynamic in all its parts, and the modern house like a gigantic machine. Elevators must not huddle in stairwells like solitary worms, rather staircases -now rendered useless -must be abolished, and elevators must swarm up the facades like serpents of iron and glass. The house of cement, glass, iron, stripped of painting and sculpture, enriched solely with the inherent beauty of its lines and its relief, extraordinarily ugly in its mechanical simplicity, as tall and as wide as it need be rather than as prescribed by municipal law, must rise on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer stretch out like a doormat at ground level but will plunge into earth by means of several stories that will bring together the traffic of the metropolis and be connected by metalcatwalks and swift-moving conveyor belts for necessary displacements.