Genealoški kompleks. Zgodovina onkraj avantgardnega mita o izvirnosti

This essay argues against Rosalind Krauss’ assertion that the classic avant-gardes’ selfacclaimed originality was an ahistorical myth. Constructing at times anachronistic genealogies tying past movements and individual artists to the present, the avant-gardes, perhaps paradoxically, were one of the first in modern art and literature to historicize their own originality. By way of a survey of a number of such genealogies stemming from futurism, Dadaism, surrealism and constructivism, this essay unearths the presentist nature of the avant-gardes and suggests that the many modes of representing history developed by the avant-gardes should be further scrutinized for their historiographical potential

Ambient Avant-Gardes in Sophie Seita’s Provisional Avant-Gardes

Sophie Sieta has filled an important gap in scholarship surrounding both theories of the avant-garde and material textual studies with her first monograph, Provisional Avant-Gardes (2019). From ‘Dada to Digital’, Sieta navigates a ‘diachronic’ investigation of the relationship between avant-garde literary communities and the print formats in which they have often published their work. In doing so, she expands the historical range within which considerations of the avant-garde and little magazines are usually framed (the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines ends in the 1960s) and intersects both areas of study with the digital turn. Sieta thus offers a fascinating and dynamic discussion of the relationship between expressive, formal innovation and the material text, which illuminates this issue’s theme of ‘ambience’. Rigorously engaging with the entanglement and the permeability of boundaries between text, form, and self-definition, this study places increasingly ripe and timely elements of ambient literature towards the forefront of modern and contemporary literary studies’ concerns

Moguća pripovijest o nemogućim povijestima

Prikaz knjige: Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, (ur.) Dubravka Đurić, Miško Šuvaković, Cambridge Mass., 2003

Ambiguous avant-gardes and their geographies: on blank spots of the postgrowth debate

In the following article, the focus is on the transformative potentials created by so-called persistence avant-gardes and prevention innovators. The text extends Blühdorn’s guiding concept of narratives of hope (Blühdorn 2017; Blühdorn and Butzlaff 2019) by considering those groups that are marginalized within debates on socio-ecological transformation. With a closer look at the narratives of prevention and blockade that these actors engage, the ambiguous nature of postgrowth avant-gardes is carved out. Their discursive, argumentative, and effective inhibition of transitory policies is interpreted as a pro-active potential, rather than a mere obstacle to socio-ecological transformation. Adding a geographical perspective, the paper pleads for a more precise theoretical penetration of the ambivalent figure of avant-gardes when analyzing processes of local and regional postgrowth

Modes of representation in contemporary Galician visual poetry

Visual poetry in Galicia had a plural and discontinuous existence in the twentieth century'! Its development in Galicia follows national (Spanish) and international artistic practices, while also engaging in the configuration of a local, national, and transnational Galician identity. The practice of different styles of visual poetry shows a rich line of creativity, especially in the last four decades. Their approaches coincide with sociocultural and economic changes in Spain, such as the end of the dictatorship in 1975, the consequent normalization of the Galician language, and more recently the progressive influence of globalization. This essay considers how current Galician visual poets reconceptualize these issues in the context of an international cultural and visual aesthetics

Print, Performance, and the European Avant-gardes, 1905-1948

Early twentieth-century Europe witnessed a particularly intense moment in the long debate concerning the relationship between the dramatic text and performance. Modernists asserted the predominance of the text, which is easily assimilated to the printed page and incorporated into the institution of literature. The avant-gardes proclaimed the primacy of the live theatrical event, and they worked to liberate performance from its association with literature. At stake was the definition of the theatre as a medium--and its power to re-enchant the modern world. This dissertation reveals that even as the avant-gardes rejected the print genre of drama, they fiercely embraced print, producing some of the century's most extraordinary publications. Focusing on the material aspects of performance-related texts from Symbolism to Surrealism, I show that the avant-gardes not only maintained but amplified the centuries-old relationship between the theatre and print. They did so in ways that profoundly altered the conventions of performance and of the visual and graphic arts, expanding our sense of what is possible onstage and on the page. Under pressure from the insurgent cinema and also from a pervasive print culture that had absorbed, and been absorbed by, realist and naturalist drama, the theatre was a medium particularly in need of formal reassessment. In response to these conditions, the avant-gardes declared (to varying degrees) that literary plays should give way to ultra-physical performance; print-friendly playwrights to stage-steeped directors; dialogue to dance, song, or non-verbal sound. Because print was still the mass medium of the early twentieth century, the avant-gardes also produced performance texts--texts which embodied their theatricalist agendas through typography, page design, and illustration. In chapters on Edward Gordon Craig, Francesco Cangiullo, Lothar Schreyer, and Antonin Artaud, I argue that print was crucial to the avant-garde attempt to redefine, renew, and revolutionize the theatre

Avant-Garde, Aestheticization and the Economy

It would very much seem as though the avant-garde in post-war Germany had initially lost sight of the previously politically grounded programmatic narratives. Moreover, it seemed quite obsolete to insist on the destruction of the affirmative. After all, had it not been the Nazis who had pursued such destruction far more successfully than the avant-gardes before them, albeit with completely opposite goals in mind?For this reason, it seemed so compelling to regard the restoration of the avant-garde via the renewed recourse to the autonomy of art as an expression of an anti-fascist stance. The linkage of emancipation of individual subjectivity and radical social change called for by the avant-gardes now collapses once again. In the years that followed, the conservative cultural position repeatedly turned on attempts to closely link aesthetic innovation with social change.This taming of a recalcitrant art was followed in the early 1970s, after a brief intermezzo at the end of the 1960s, by talk of the failure of the avant-garde, before being subjected to outrageous defamation ten years later (particularly in architecture).The question of whether today the universalization of the aesthetic has indirectly realized the hopes of the avant-gardes of an aesthetics of and in lived practice, will be the subject of my remarks