European Avant-garde Studies and the Future of Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (19) ◽  
pp. 53-55
Author(s):  
Arjun Poudel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Future

scholarly journals Other Stories: Experimental Forms of Contemporary Historying at the Crossroads Between Facts and Fictions

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Sugiera
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Rhetorical Dimension ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
Experimental History

Summary The process of questioning the authority of academic history—in the form in which it emerged at the turn of the 19th century—began in the 1970s, when Hayden White pointed out the rhetorical dimension of historical discourse. His British colleague Alun Munslow went a step further and argued that the ontological statuses of the past and history are so different that historical discourse cannot by any means be treated as representation of the past. As we have no access to that which happened, both historians and artists can only present the past in accordance with their views and opinions, the available rhetorical conventions, and means of expression. The article revisits two examples of experimental history which Munslow mentioned in his The Future of History (2010): Robert A. Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine (1988) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926 (1997). It allows reassessing their literary strategies in the context of a new wave of works written by historians and novelists who go beyond the fictional/factual dichotomy. The article focuses on Polish counterfactual writers of the last two decades, such as Wojciech Orliński, Jacek Dukaj, and Aleksander Głowacki. Their novels corroborate the main argument of the article about a turn which has been taking place in recent experimental historying: the loss of previous interest in formal innovations influenced by modernist avant-garde fiction. Instead, it concentrates on demonstrating the contingency of history to strategically extend the unknowability of the future or the past(s) and, as a result, change historying into speculative thinking.

The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Beck
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Business Strategy ◽  
Rand Corporation ◽  
Global Business ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Futures Research ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Whole Earth Catalog

The interdisciplinary field of futures research is now at the heart of policy-making and business strategy, but the serious study of the future has its roots in Cold War strategy, led by Hermann Kahn at the RAND Corporation and the Hudson Institute. The migration of futures research into business was accompanied by a burgeoning countercultural futurism, most vividly embodied in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The founding of the Global Business Network in 1987 brought together many of the key players from business futurism and the avant-garde wing of futures studies, forging a high-powered consultancy that went on to provide services for multi-national corporations and government agencies. As pressing contemporary issues such as global security and climate change prompt futures researchers to develop scenarios intended to deal with potentially extinction-level catastrophes, can an interrogation of the recent history of the future contribute to the release of a critical engagement with the future that is not beholden to the lockdown of its Cold War legacy?

John Cage (1921–1990)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Shock Waves ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Future ◽  
Musical Sounds

A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use of a naive modification of the latter’s twelve-tone system. By the late 1930s Cage had begun to pursue his own compositional interests, embarking on a career as a musical innovator who, for fifty years, would send ‘shock waves’ throughout the music world. In ‘The Future of Music Credo’, a manifesto written in 1940, Cage declared that in the future the distinction between ‘noise’ and so-called ‘musical sounds’ would no longer exist.

scholarly journals Applied Art: Innovative Thinking From a Material Perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anneli Hoel Fjærli ◽  
Ida Haugland
Keyword(s):  
New Technology ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Applied Art ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Society ◽  
On The Road

The modern world is continuously engaged in a racing processes aimed towards building a favourable future society. In this development, the apparent tools seem to be related to theoretical thought, new technology, avant-garde approaches and innovation. The bodily focus and the societal micro level processes are often left behind in this race. Though, in our aspiration towards urban development and the future society, we should not forget that the bodily functions and the possibilities that these give, represent one of the most fundamental and basic tools we have. This article would like to form an argument carrying out the seeming advantage of bringing in not just technological and theoretic avant-garde to the term of innovation and development, but to invite the whole body into the forming of the future, thereby seeing the term innovation from a material perspective. As the art field today is more often approaching subject matters that are primarily societal, we would like to introduce the potential of a mutual approach from the other end, seeing the art field as a central part in the creation of engagement and progress that can instigate another form of efficiency and present an expanded understanding of what innovative activity can be, and how it can be perceived and comprehended. We would like to debate an art form that takes the bodily, active and relational focus and its social context as a base and starting point on the road towards societal consciousness and potential development. Looking at the example of the art project «The Collectivity Project», this article takes it’s starting point in the following question; How can applied art projects in connection to social contexts, like The Collectivity Project, show the art field and the bodily sensuousness as a tool in the forming of values pointing towards an alternative way of thinking societal consciousness and development?

The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Logical Extension ◽  
As If

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

The Third Manifesto: ‘We Shall Come to See’

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (14) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
John Andreasen
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
The University ◽  
Changing Society

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.

scholarly journals Politicking for Postwar Modernism: The Architectural Research Group of Ottawa and Montreal

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-44
Author(s):  
Dustin Valen
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Research Group ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Architectural Research

The diffusion of modernist principles in Canadian building and planning occurred through many channels, but among these the Architectural Research Group of Ottawa and Montreal played a crucial role. Formed in 1938 to conduct research into postwar reconstruction, the group produced articles, radio addresses, and exhibitions in an effort to nurture modernist sentiment across the country. For these young architects, the federal government’s commitment to replanning and rebuilding postwar Canadian cities presented them with an opportunity to intervene in the future of Canadian practice. They decried the “backwardness” of conservative practitioners while promoting the ideas of a European avant-garde and orchestrating numerous transatlantic exchanges. This article discusses the group’s role in politicking for architectural and urban modernism, as well as the contributions of some of its key members. It shows that Canadian professionals were not simply passive receptors of international modernism but played an active part in shaping these ideas during the immediate postwar period, and that Canada’s federal government played a unique role in accelerating this process by allowing modernist architects and planners to operate within and through a number of government-sponsored agencies.

scholarly journals Living Simulacrum

2022 ◽  
pp. 219-229
Author(s):  
Joanna Kiliszek
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Point Of Reference ◽  
Contemporary Artists

The Neoplastic Room at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź was originally designed in 1948 by the avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. Destroyed in 1950 and reconstructed in 1960, it became the focal point of the museum, with the ‘International Collection of Modern Art’ by the a.r. group being exhibited there. At the same time, it became a point of reference for contemporary artists and a strategy for building a permanent collection for the museum, as well as a reflection on how the past can give a vision of the future. This essay focuses on the gesture of ‘re-curating’ the Neoplastic Room in relation to the performative practice of the artists involved (e.g., Daniel Buren, Elżbieta Jabłońska).

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