The Experimental Gothic

This essay proposes that the crucial movements of the historical avant-garde looked to the first wave of Gothic literature (1760s–1820s) in developing their respective variants of experimental prose. To date, the linguistic and textual characteristics (non-mimesis, ineffability) of the literary mode here called Experimental Gothic have not been comprehensively investigated, neither in Avant-Garde nor Gothic Studies. The proposed poetics of the Experimental Gothic indicates that the early avant-gardes did not straightforwardly recycle Gothic material but rather wove the praxis of contemporary theories of representation into their prosaic exploits, which were immersed in the imaginary, supernatural and irrational. The linguistic features of recognised works of avant-garde prose by luminaries such as Carl Einstein, Hugo Ball and Julien Gracq reveal the Experimental Gothic to be a language project spawned from anarchist backgrounds, which leads readers to reject their naïve belief in conventional representation in order to gain a renewed sense of reality.

The Avant-Garde Monument

This article homes in on monuments designed by proponents of the historical or classic avant-gardes. After the First World War, monuments by, among others, Kurt Schwitters and Johannes Baader, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, began to articulate a new function for the genre of the monument: no longer was it to commemorate the past, but to memorialize the present and time to come. This new architecture of memory also led to an expansion of the genre, which in the hands of avant-gardists further came to include temporary pavilions. Paying attention to theoretical writings on the monument, among others, by László Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Giedion and Robert Smithson, the article concludes by referencing more recent experimentation in monument design by artists such as Flavin, Oldenburg and Hirschhorn, arguing that a comprehensive history of the avant-garde monument is long overdue.

Retroactivating the Idea of the Avant Garde

In the late 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production was distinguished along class lines by three different modes of cultural habitus: bourgeois disinterestness, petty-bourgeois allodoxia and working-class necessity. Since that era, the petty-bourgeois habitus has become the dominant predisposition. Adding Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to Peter Bürger’s historicized theory of the emergence of the avant garde as a critique of the “institution art,” a new “avant garde hypothesis” becomes possible for today’s age of post-Fordist biocapitalism. Based on Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses, the contemporary situation is shown to privilege specific forms of cultural production, in particular an activist Discourse of the Hysteric and a technocratic Discourse of the University. Psychoanalysis reveals the limits of these tendencies while also underscoring the archaic aspects of an aestheticist Discourse of the Master and the transferential logics of Analyst avant gardes.

“What is 291?”

“What is 291?” The results of this survey, issued in 1914 by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to artists, writers, and patrons of his gallery, known by its address at 291 Fifth Avenue, were published in his magazine Camera Work (1903–1917). However, just as Stieglitz was issuing the questionnaire, his associates—Marius de Zayas, Paul Haviland, Agnes Ernst Meyer, and Francis Picabia—were already planning a magazine called 291 (1915–1916), thereby transforming the question even as it was being asked. Read as a response to the questionnaire, the publication 291 destabilizes and amplifies the community Stieglitz had established, while visually embedding its history into the pages of the new magazine. Taking 291 as a case study of the avant-garde and its legacies, this essay traces the origins of the magazine from its predecessors—that is, the periodical Camera Work and the gallery 291—to consider “What is 291?” and its afterlife. Emerging from the intersection of a magazine and gallery as a new iteration of print culture, 291 worked to expand the American avant-garde and to reimagine the magazine as a medium.

The Future of Avant-Garde Studies

A decade ago at a conference in Poznań, leading scholars of the avant-garde were asked to share their thoughts on the future of their discipline. Now we are launching the first Journal of Avant-Garde Studies it is time to reflect on these visions from scholars mainly based in Europe. Have we moved in different directions or have promises remained unfulfilled? Contemporary scholars of the avant-garde reflected on the round table discussion and offered their views on where we will go from here.