Surface Forms

Dynamic Form ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 178-225
Author(s):  
Cara L. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Contact Zone ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Saturated Media ◽  
Experimental History ◽  
Formal Theories

This chapter investigates how Gertrude Stein plays with the Künstlerroman. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she offers her own assessment of the position of the artist in a saturated media marketplace. Reading The Autobiography alongside Stein's other work, the chapter examines Stein's deployment of photographic illustrations, tropes, and techniques as a crucial strategy in her attempt to picture the history of modernism and to secure her spot within it. In particular, The Autobiography's underexamined photographs show how an ostensibly formless form—the surface—becomes the instrument of Stein's experimental history, as she skims across major developments in modernist and avant-garde art and literature and touches on as many famous figures as possible. In this way, while earlier chapters discuss the forms that populate modernist texts or the formal theories that purport to elucidate them, the chapter turns to the forms taken by modernism itself, which takes shape in the “contact zone” of The Autobiography.

Avant-gardes in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
NORBERT BANDIER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.

Cubo-Futurism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Parton
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Italian Futurism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Artistic Works ◽  
Transitional Phase ◽  
Innovative Approaches

Cubo-Futurism (Kubo-Futurizm) was a term used by the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde to describe literary and artistic works that represented a fusion of Cubist and Futurist styles and principles. The term surfaced in 1912, at a point when the Russian avant-garde were exposed simultaneously to Analytical Cubism and Italian Futurism. At this stage in their development, young Russian poets and painters were beginning to move away from forms of Expressionism and to explore more innovative approaches. Cubism and Futurism offered the ideological and practical means to engage with abstraction and, ultimately, non-objectivity, in a serious and distinctive manner. By 1915, however, Cubism and Futurism had exhausted their usefulness for these poets and painters, who had now passed into completely new territory in the form of Velimir Khlebnikov’s and Aleksei Krucheynykh’s zaum (transrational) poetry, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism and, subsequently, Vladimir Tatlin’s and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Constructivism. A distinctive movement of the pre-war period, Cubo-Futurism possessed an episodic character and manifested as a transitional phase in the history of Russian avant-garde art and literature in the early 20th century. It was a bridge by which the Russians approached their radical non-objective conclusions of the 1920s.

scholarly journals Danish Sixties Avant-Garde and American Minimal Art

Nordlit ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Max Ipsen
Keyword(s):  
American Art ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Minimal Art ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Denmark is peripheral in the history of minimalism in the arts. In an international perspective Danish artists made almost no contributions to minimalism, according to art historians. But the fact is that Danish artists made minimalist works of art, and they did it very early.Art historians tend to describe minimal art as an entirely American phenomenon. America is the centre, Europe the periphery that lagged behind the centre, imitating American art. I will try to query this view with examples from Danish minimalism. I will discuss minimalist tendencies in Danish art and literature in the 1960s, and I will examine whether one can claim that Danish artists were influenced by American minimal art.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

National Institute of Art and Design named after Kamoliddin Behzod

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 104-108
Author(s):  
Dilzoda Alimkulova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
20Th Century Art

The art of Uzbekistan of the first decade of 20th century (1920-30s) is worthily recognized as the brightest period in history of Uzbek national art. We may observe big interest among the artwork which was created during the years of Independence of Uzbekistan towards the art of 20th century and mainly it may be seen in form, style, idea and semantics. Despite the significant gap between the 20th century art tendencies and Independence period, there is very big influence of avant-garde style in works of such artists as Javlon Umarbekov, Akmal Ikramjanov, Alisher Mirzaev, Tokhir Karimov, Daima Rakhmanbekova and others.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.

The Musicality of Canadian Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 390-408
Author(s):  
Michael Brendan Baker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Account

This chapter offers a narrative account of music in Canadian cinema that highlights the contributions of its pioneers. Case studies spanning the critically acclaimed, the curious, and the marginalized allow for an effort to flesh out the place of music, particularly popular music, in this national cinema. While the esthetics and dollars-and-cents of music in film may be similar in Canada as elsewhere, the expectations of filmmakers and audiences are perhaps uniquely Canadian as a result of industrial and institutional forces. Animation, the avant-garde, and documentary are particularly vibrant spaces for the innovative use of music and differentiate the history of music in Canadian cinema from other more commercially oriented contexts.

Ästhetisch konstruierte Traditionen?

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-470
Author(s):  
Torsten Voß
Keyword(s):  
Discursive Practice ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Concept Of Beauty

Abstract Throughout various literary and artistic periods, artists have referred to or even converted to Catholicism as a means of conjuring a certain perception of a European tradition. In doing this, they seek to create an aesthetic of romanticism and/or an idea and concept of beauty, the artist, artwork etc. After giving a brief overview of this discursive practice in modern avant-garde movements, this article focuses on early forms of literary Catholic movements, such as the French Renouveau catholique and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), as well as Novalis’ ‘invention’ of German romanticism in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe). It shows that there are a variety of parallels to be identified across these periods and places, namely, in programs, performances, rhetoric-building and group-building processes, and in cultivating an anti-bourgeois distinction, both in the texts themselves and in the positioning of the artists within the literary field. Despite accusations of being reactionary, writers and artists who elaborate a Catholic concept of art and literature aim to develop a traditionalist and anti-modern stance within (aesthetical and social) modernity.

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