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.
In the history of the European avant-garde, zone compositions have appeared along the seams between entities. Likewise Czech avant-gardists saw Apollinaire’s Zone as a poem of transition, and it is ...essential to identify whence and whither, and to subsequently correct the established explanation of the Czech historical avantgarde’s attitude towards memory and the past. The early Czech avant-garde saw itself as a movement without a history, emerging from point zero, but zone compositions are substantially oriented towards the past. Memory, past and myth form an integral part of zone compositions — the forms of the modern-age epic. Within the context of the long compositions of European modernism, this study analyses Czech zone compositions as a special form of the epic, as an alternative pole of the Czech historical avant-garde.
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