Owen Hatherley: Militant Modernism (2009)

“This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film, pop and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat. Militant Modernism features new readings of some familiar names – Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier – but more on the lesser known, quotidian modernists of the 20th century. The chapters range from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen – all arguing for a Modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics and technology.”

Publisher Zero Books, 2009
ISBN 1846941768, 9781846941764
146 pages

Reviews: Will Self (London Review of Books, 2012), PD Smith (The Guardian, 2009), Jonathan Meades (New Statesman, 2009), Dan Hicks (Planning Perspectives, 2009), Kat Koh (2011).

Interview (Andrew Stevens, 3:AM Magazine, 2009)

Publisher

EPUB

Dawn Ades, Simon Baker (eds.): Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (2006)

“In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled “enemy within” surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille’s still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso’s Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille’s radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.”

With contributions by Fiona Bradley, Neil Cox, Caroline Hancock, Denis Hollier, William Jeffett, CFB Miller, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker.

Publisher Hayward Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2006
ISBN 1853322504, 9781853322501
272 pages

Exh. reviews: Peter Suchin (Frieze), Benjamin Noys (Radical Philosophy), John Phillips and Ma Shaoling (Theory, Culture & Society).
Wikipedia

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Publisher

PDF (104 MB, updated on 2020-2-20)

Karel Teige: O humoru, clownech a dadaistech, I-II (1928-30/2004) [Czech]

Dvousvazková kultovní práce vůdčího teoretika české avantgardy je unikátní studií o dadaismu.

První svazek obsahuje kapitoly “pojednávající o humoru, o světském a neliterárním dadaismu a o poezii cirkusu, music-hallu a lunaparku”. Druhý svazek “kreslí svět moderní básně, svět, který voní; podává genezi dadaismu přehledem vývoje od Baudelairea až k Tzarovi, charakteristiku hnutí dada i surrealistické revoluce a v závěru pokouší se formulovat teorii a estetiku nové poezie pro všecky smysly, podloženou fakty korespondence a analogie mezi jednotlivými obory ‘umění’..”, to, co “je jádrem nové estetické teorie, která se zve poetismem”. S doslovem Jiřího Brabce.

O humoru, clownech a dadaistech, I: Svět, který se směje
Originally published by Odeon, Prague, 1928, 112 pp
Publisher Akropolis, Prague, 2004
ISBN 8073040425
114 pages

O humoru, clownech a dadaistech, II: Svět, který voní
Originally published by Odeon, Prague, 1930, 240 pp
Publisher Akropolis, Prague, 2004
ISBN 8073040530, 9788073040536
244 pages

review (Vol. 1, Andrea Jochmanová, Literární noviny, in Czech)
review (Vol. 2, Jan Nejedlý, Čro Vltava, in Czech)

publisher

PDF (Vol. I)
PDF (Vol. II)