Murayama, Tomoyoshi (1901–1977)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Wei Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
Active Member ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Theatre Production ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Preservation Law ◽  
Proletarian Art

Tomoyoshi Murayama was a multi-disciplinary Japanese artist associated with the interwar avant-garde and leftwing theater movements. After briefly attending Tokyo Imperial University, Murayama moved to Berlin in 1922, where he met Herwarth Walden and participated in The Great Futurist Exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm. Upon returning to Japan, Murayama held his first solo exhibition in Tokyo in 1923, where he developed a theory of ‘conscious constructivism’ that called for the incorporation of everyday life into aesthetic practice. As the founding member and spokesman of the art collective Mavo, Murayama challenged prevailing notions of pure art—his mixed media assemblages included references to popular culture and industrial materials. In addition to his mixed media pieces, Murayama produced work across a range of media including children’s illustration, commercial design, theater, and film. Murayama’s theater affiliations included the Kokoro-za Theatre and the New Cooperative Theatre, and he designed the constructivist-style set for the Tsukiji Little Theatre production of From Morning Till Midnight (1924). An active member of proletarian art associations, Murayama was detained multiple times under the Peace Preservation Law, and was forced to renounce his political affiliations in 1933. In 1940, the New Cooperative Theatre and New Tsukiji Little Theatre were disbanded, and Murayama imprisoned. Following his sentence, Murayama spent the remainder of the war in Korea and Manchuria, returning to Japan after the war in 1945. His late novel Shinobi no mono (1960–1962) was adapted as a film series, play, and television program. Prior to his death, he completed a four-volume autobiography.

Intersectional Avant-Garde: Paul Leni’s Rebus-Film Series and the Confluence of Experimental Visual Styles

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-115
Author(s):  
Erica Tortolani
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Magazine Articles ◽  
The City

This chapter focuses on Leni’s eight-part short film series, Rebus-Film (1925-26), and the ways that it relates to various avant-garde art movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Using Rebus-Film Nr. 1 as a starting point, the essay analyses the series’ connections to contemporaneous artistic movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Dada and to cinematic styles and genres of the time, including Soviet montage and the ‘City Symphony’ films. To supplement this analysis, the essay draws upon reviews, trade magazine articles, and other written records from the period. This chapter sheds light on the ways that critics and audiences received the films and regarded Leni’s use of experimental aesthetic styles. While it is debatable as to whether Leni considered himself a modern art practitioner, a close reading of these short films shows that they are in dialogue with the visual avant-garde. This chapter also discusses the ways that the series fits into, and extends, Leni’s German and American careers.

Parade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Bellow
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Production Team ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Cabaret Songs ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
One Act

A one-act ballet on the theme of a fairground sideshow, Parade was produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. According to Jean Cocteau, the poet who wrote the ballet’s libretto, the impetus for Parade originated in 1912 with Diaghilev’s command, ‘‘Astonish me!’’ To fulfill Diaghilev’s mandate, Cocteau assembled a production team drawn from the Parisian avant-garde: for the score, he recruited the composer Erik Satie, known for experimental piano compositions such as Gymnopédies (1888) and for cabaret songs performed at the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir. In 1916, Cocteau secured the participation of Pablo Picasso, a painter associated with the Cubist movement of the early 1910s, to design the overture curtain, set, and costumes. Working with the choreographer Léonide Massine, this group produced a ballet-pantomime featuring familiar characters from the circus, variety shows, and cinema. Mixing various forms of art and entertainment, Parade used dance to explore the unstable relationship between elite and popular culture.

Fictional German governesses in Edwardian popular culture: English responses to German militarism and modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Bayley
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Selection Of

Historians have tended to focus on propaganda when assessing Edwardian attitudes towards Germans, but a shift of focus to fiction reveals a rather different picture. Whereas propaganda created the cliché of ‘the Hun’, fiction produced non- and even counter-stereotypical figures of Germans. An analysis of German governess characters in a selection of short stories, performances, novels, and cartoons indicates that the Edwardian image of Germans was not purely negative but ambivalent and multifarious. Imagined German governesses appeared as patriots and spies, pacifists and warmongers, spinsters and seducers, victims and evil-doers. A close look at characterisations by Saki [H. H. Munro], M. E. Francis [Margaret Blundell], Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Hart and others reveals not only their variety but also their metaphorical use as responses to Germany’s aggressive militarism and avant-garde modernity. Each governess figure conveyed a positive, negative or ambivalent message about the potential impact of German militarism and modernity on England and Englishness. The aggregate image of German governesses, and by inference Germans, was therefore equivocal and demonstrates the mixed feelings of Edwardians toward their ‘cousin’ country.

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.

Avant-Garde Lot’s Wife: Natalia Goncharova’s Salt Pillars and the Rebirth of Hospitality

Sodomscapes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Innovative Treatment ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
New Beginnings ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Forward Looking

Chapter four shows how the innovative treatment of the flight from Sodom by the avant-garde Russian painter Natal’ia Goncharova (1881-1962) presents a figural merger of messianic expectation and cosmopolitan hope in the artist’s experimental hybridizing of secular and sacral components to aesthetic practice. The strangely oneiric and mortified landscape conveyed by Goncharova’s proto-cubist vocabulary in Salt Pillars (ca. 1909) assembles a prescient image of Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality, which Arendt draws from Augustine’s definition of the human as inherently endowed with the capacity for gratitude and the ability to begin again in the midst of uncertainty. Put simply, the painting gives figural expression to the fundamental ambiguity of Arendt’s notion of natality, its backward- and forward-looking turn toward givenness and new beginnings. Through this gesture, Salt Pillars presents a patient attentiveness to the complicity of worlding and unworlding gestures in the rhythm of being with others.

Lassaw, Ibram (1913–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther T. Thyssen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
New York School ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
The Family ◽  
Galactic Cluster ◽  
Brooklyn Museum

A sculptor of the New York School, Ibram Lassaw was born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, in 1921, where Lassaw learned modeling, casting, and carving. He discovered avant-garde art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and continued to study sculpture at the Clay Club from 1927 to 1932. An active participant in New York modernist circles, Lassaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group (1935), and The Club (1949). Lassaw’s interest in cosmic and religious themes culminated in abstract sculptures for Jewish synagogues, such as Pillar of Fire (1953) at Temple Beth El, Springfield, MA. Known for his web-like structures, Lassaw dripped, fused, and spattered metal, embracing the resulting accidental contours that accrued on his gridded designs, as in Galactic Cluster #1 (1958, Newark Museum). He wielded the oxyacetylene torch like a paintbrush and the intricately structured wires twist, turn, and redouble like skeins of paint by Jackson Pollock. His work was included in the 1959 Kassel Documenta, which showcased American Abstract Expressionism.

Blather, Razzle and Dada: Contextualizing Brian O'Nolan's Early Journalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-171
Author(s):  
Tobias Harris
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Shed Light

This essay develops recent critical discussions of Brian O'Nolan's short-lived comic periodical, Blather, by further contextualizing the magazine amidst the popular and avant-garde print culture of its period. First, I undertake a detailed comparison of Blather with the English comic periodical Razzle, revealing the features which are lifted directly from this model and exploring the significance of Razzle's use of metaleptic humour for O'Nolan's work more widely. Subsequently, I place Blather in the context of the publications and activities of the Berlin Dadaists and specifically their magazine Der Dada. I propose three characteristics it shares with Blather: what I term the ‘extended identity trope’; the subversion of popular culture with photomontage techniques; and an engagement with the creative possibilities of advertising. In conclusion, I propose that these contexts shed light on the cohabitation of modernist experimentation and a popular orientation which characterises Blather and O'Nolan's wider literary project.

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