In the 1920s, with the end of the revolution, the Soviet government began investing resources and energy into creating a new type of book for the first generation of young Soviet readers. In a sense, ...these early books for children were the ABCs of Soviet modernity; creatively illustrated and intricately designed, they were manuals and primers that helped the young reader enter the field of politics through literature. Children’s books provided the basic vocabulary and grammar for understanding new, post-revolutionary realities, but they also taught young readers how to perceive modern events and communist practices.
Relying on a process of dual-media rendering, illustrated books presented propaganda as a simple, repeatable narrative or verse, while also casting it in easily recognizable graphic images. A vehicle of ideology, object of affection, and product of labour all in one, the illustrated book for the young Soviet reader emerged as an important cultural phenomenon. Communist in its content, it was often avant-gardist in its form.
Spotlighting three thematic threads – communist goals, pedagogy, and propaganda – The Pedagogy of Images traces the formation of a mass-modern readership through the creation of the communist-inflected visual and narrative conventions that these early readers were meant to appropriate.
Experimentations provides a detailed historical and theoretical analysis of the first three decades of experimental composer John Cage's aesthetic production (ca. 1940-1972). Paying particular ...attention to Cage's inter- and cross-disciplinary engagements with the visual arts and architecture during this period, the book sheds new light on some of Cage's most controversial and influential innovations, such as the use of noise, chance techniques, indeterminacy, electronic technologies, and computerization, as well as upon lesser known but important ideas and strategies such as transparency, multiplicity, virtuality, and actualization. Ultimately, it traces the development of Cage's avant-garde aesthetic and political project as it transformed from the emulation of historical avant-garde precedents such as futurism and the Bauhaus, to the development of important precedents for the post-World War II movements of happenings and Fluxus, to its ultimate abandonment in the aftermath of problems encountered in the vast, multimedia composition HPSCHD (1967-69).
Poetry of the revolution Puchner, Martin; Puchner, Martin
2005., 20051121, 2005, c2006., 2006-01-01, Volume:
15
eBook
Poetry of the Revolutiontells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from theCommunist Manifestoto the manifestos of ...the 1960s and beyond, it highlights the varied alliances and rivalries between socialism and repeated waves of avant-garde art. Martin Puchner argues that the manifesto--what Marx called the "poetry" of the revolution--was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires. When it intruded into the sphere of art, the manifesto created an art in its own image: shrill and aggressive, political and polemical. The result was "manifesto art"--combinations of manifesto and art that fundamentally transformed the artistic landscape of the twentieth century.
Central to modern politics and art, the manifesto also measures the geography of modernity. The translations, editions, and adaptations of such texts as theCommunist Manifestoand theFuturist Manifestoregistered and advanced the spread of revolutionary modernity and of avant-garde movements across Europe and to the Americas. The rapid diffusion of these manifestos was made "possible by networks--such as the successive socialist internationals and international avant-garde movements--that connected Santiago and Zurich, Moscow and New York, London and Mexico City.Poetry of the Revolutionthus provides the point of departure for a truly global analysis of modernism and modernity.
Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to ...capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomised the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterising techniques, styles and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging 2004 study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including Joyce, Eliot, Stein and Barnes.
In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "experimental" in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time--New York City, 1964--Piekut examines ...five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic's disastrous performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt's demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman's Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.
Glorify the empire Culver, Annika A
Glorify the empire,
c2013, 2013
eBook
In the 1930s and '40s, Japanese rulers in Manchukuo enlisted writers and artists to promote imperial Japan's modernization program. Ironically, the cultural producers chosen to spread the imperialist ...message were previously left-wing politically. In Glorify the Empire, Annika A. Culver explores how these once anti-imperialist intellectuals produced avant-garde works celebrating the modernity of a fascist state and reflecting a complicated picture of complicity with, and ambivalence toward, Japan's utopian project. A groundbreaking work, this book magnifies the intersection between politics and art in a rarely examined period of Japanese history.
The first book-length critical and historical account of an ultramodern architectural movement of the 1960s that advocated "living equipment" instead of buildings.
From pre-war years in Paris to the end of the 1920s in Kyiv, Ukrainians or artists from Ukraine produced some of the world's greatest avant-garde art and made major contributions to painting, ...sculpture, theatre, and film-making. This book tells their story and explores the roots of their inspiration.
The German-Jewish émigré composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract ...Expressionism and Black Mountain College. This is the first full-length study of this often overlooked composer, launched from the standpoint of the mass migrations that have defined recent times. Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation. A conjurer of unexpected cultural connections, Wolpe serves as an entry-point to the utopian art worlds of Weimar-era Germany, pacifist movements in 1930s Palestine and vibrant art and music scenes in early Cold War America. The book takes advantage of Wolpe's role as a mediator, bringing together perspectives from music scholarship, art history, comparative literature, postcolonial studies and recent theories of cosmopolitanism and diaspora.
Introduces the full range and depth of the early 20th-century European avant- gardes This engaging introduction outlines the cultural and political contexts in which the avant-gardes operated, taking ...readers on a journey throughout the whole of Europe. It discusses the most salient features of the avant-gardes' work in all the arts, succinctly surveys the major avant-garde movements (cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, constructivism and many other –isms) and demonstrates the ways in which they transformed the face of all modern art forms. Clearly written, this book shows readers and students of modernism how and why the avant-gardes were a major force in modern art and culture. Key Features * An up-to-date and thorough guide to the 'classic' European avant-gardes, from 1905 to 1935 * Covers all the arts practiced by the classic European avant-gardes – from painting and film, literature and sculpture, architecture and photography to theatre, dance and music – focusing on the specificity of each art form as well as on what united them * Includes text-boxes, 100 illustrations, many in colour, and a user-friendly index/glossary
