The Aesthetic Implications of Avant-Garde Music

1977 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-410
Author(s):  
HERBERT M. SCHUELLER
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Aesthetic

Theoretical Problems of Soviet Underground Culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Tomáš Glanc ◽  
Maria Engström ◽  
Ilja Kukuj ◽  
Klavdia Smola
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Relational Art ◽  
Theoretical Hypothesis ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article presents a spectrum of theoretical problems associated with the Soviet artistic underground as a historical and cultural phenomenon. The central focus is on constellating issues of terminology and definition around the borders of underground culture in the USSR, within scholarship about it. As a theoretical hypothesis of the handbook, the chapter introduces the concept of the lifeworld, which the volume editors and contributors interpret as a synthetic multimedia nexus of a given nonconformist circle’s activities, both artistic and cultural. The underground lifeworld manifests the aesthetic discourse idiosyncratic for each artistic circle and serves as the source of semi-spontaneous “relational art” that absorbs and generates artworks, along with performative and communicative practices. Through the concept of the aestheticized lifeworld, the authors of this article define the historical specificity of the Soviet artistic underground in relation to the Russian historical avant-garde and Western neo-avant-garde.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 522-538
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Experimental Films

The conclusion argues that while expanded cinema might seem radically opposed to conventional, popular, and mainstream cinema, it nonetheless attempts to articulate and specify the aesthetic qualities that define all cinema. This parallels a trait of conventionally made avant-garde/experimental films; the assertion of cinema’s nature and essences, which constitute all forms of cinema regardless of how different one kind of film appears from another. The conclusion also draws upon the notions of the “essentially cinematic” explored across the book to counter theoretical arguments against such specificity positions (e.g. medium specificity) that have been advanced by critics and scholars in the worlds of cinema and art. The conclusion argues that these anti-specificity positions are overly simplistic, and that expanded cinema represents a more nuanced and sophisticated notion of what a medium specific theory—or work of cinema—can be.

Secessionist Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Fine Art ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Secessionist Movement ◽  
Applied Arts ◽  
Modern Movement

The Secessionist Movement is the name applied to a range of artistic splinter groups that began to emerge in the 1890s. Objecting to what they saw as the inherent conservatism of established academies, these groups ‘seceded’ or broke away from their parent institutions and launched their own, avant-garde approach. The first secessionist group appeared in Munich in 1892 under the leadership of Franz von Stuck and Wilhelm Trübner. Among the most influential secessionist groups was that founded in Vienna by a coalition of artists, architects and designers who resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in 1897. United by the urge to elevate the applied arts to the status of fine art, members of the Vienna Secession produced exquisite work across a spectrum of creative disciplines. The aesthetic initially resembled the curvilinear Art Nouveau style, but it increasingly moved towards abstraction and geometric simplicity. The founding of the Vienna Secession thus marked the beginning of a new artistic era in Austria and heralded the birth of the Modern Movement.

Widersprüchliche Optionen: Stationen der Künste 1913

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Asendorf
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Aesthetic

AbstractApart from their rather coincidental origin year, 1913, there is no apparent connection between a monument like the “Völkerschlachtdenkmal” in Leipzig (“Monument to the Battle of the Nations”) and the aesthetic manifestations of the avant-garde. These artistic expressions oscillate between opposite poles: weakness and desire for stability, refinement and primitivism, immanence and transcendence. It might be assumed that precisely these contradictory impulses lie at the heart of the rich and widely influential artistic outcome of this pre-war year.

Choreographies of the Living

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.

Modernism, Functionalism, and Tradition: The Music of Friedrich Goldmann

Tempo ◽  
1995 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Alastair Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Socialist Politics

The current reappraisal of tradition, along with an interest in a music that deals with concrete emotions and which has a direct appeal to audiences, sounds a certain resonance with the aesthetic doctrines that prevailed in the former communist bloc. A sense of history is vital to socialist politics, but the availability of a symphonic tradition to Soviet composers after a break with that heritage suggests a state of posthistoire; a condition normally associated with postmodernism. The postmodernist reappraisal of the past is anticipated by, for example, Shostakovich's complex and sometimes ironic relationship to the symphonic tradition. Conservative traditionalism in the East maintained to be a critique of high modernist principles; in the West, ironically, a turn to tradition is now put forward as an alternative to the same rationalist modernism. At the moment when the achievements of the historical avant-garde and of high modernism have become fully available to the former Eastern Europe, the former Western Europe is engaged with the reappraisal of tradition. Even where a modernist music did develop in Eastern Europe – as, for example, it did in Poland – it was followed by a move back to more traditional techniques. The consequence of this inclination is that composers such as Górecki and Pärt, who employ traditionally-based expressive languages, have shot onto centre stage. The point is that composers from the former communist bloc have already encountered many of the issues that now preoccupy some contemporary composers in the capitalist West.

scholarly journals The Sound of the Unsayable: Jewish Secular Culture in Arnold Schönberg and Aharon Appelfeld

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 334
Author(s):  
Michal Ben-Horin
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Arnold Schoenberg ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Verbal Representation ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed new light on the question of Jewish secular culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian Jewish composer, was born into an assimilated Viennese family and converted to Protestantism before returning to Judaism in the 1930s while escaping to the United States. Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), an Israeli Jewish writer, was born in Czernowitz to assimilated German-speaking parents, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1946. My claim is that in their works both composer and author testify to traumatic experiences that avoid verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to sacred tropes and theological concepts. In exploring Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and Appelfeld’s Journey into Winter among others, this article shows how the transcendent sphere returns within the musical and poetic avant-garde (musical prose, 12-tone composition, prose poem, non-semantic or semiotic fiction) as a “sound” of old traditions that can only be heard through the voices of a new Jewish culture.

scholarly journals The Neo-Enlightenment Aesthetics of Jürgen Habermas

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes ◽  
Paulo Eduardo Arantes
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Action ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jurgen Habermas ◽  
Modern Project ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay was prepared especially for the issue 49 of Cultural Critique (2001) as an extract of the argument presented in Otília and Paulo Arantes’ book Um Ponto Cego no Projeto Moderno de Jürgen Habermas (A blind spot in Jürgen Habermas’ Modern Project, 1992) (which remain untranslated into English). While Habermas has seldom addressed the question of aesthetic directly, here the authors reconstruct why architecture becomes the aesthetic side of predilection for him. What the authors call a “neo-Enlightenment aesthetics” in Habermas involves a reconfiguration of the judgement of taste, as conceived in the Enlightenment, but now projected through the lens of communicative action where the rules of engagement have left the spectacle behind. A Kantian aesthetic with airs of Benjamin and Brecht, they contend, became the ingredients which Habermas tried to get beyond the impasse that Peter Bürger had already pointed out with regard to idealist aesthetics, namely how the process of the autonomization of art is simultaneously a process both of its consolidation and its eventual demise. How then to talk about aesthetics after Avant-Garde? For Habermas, architecture becomes a place of encounter for his own ideas about the public sphere, rational engagement, and aesthetic engagement. The Arantes, however, contest Habermas’ abstract defense of Modern Architecture by showing how, in the word and specially in Brazil, each phase of its development is intimately tied to specific moments in capitalism development. They follow in Adorno’s footsteps in arguing that the site of Modern Architecture in Brazil is a cipher of glass and concrete that evinces the silence of the spellbound rather than the emergence of a public genre with enlightenment functions. (Sílvia Lopes)   Keywords: Habermas, Modernity, Modern Design, Modern Movement, Postmodernism, Ideology, History, Benjamin, Utopia, Communicative Action, Linguistic Turn, Enlightenment, Reason, Critical Theory, Welfare, Brazil.

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