Owen Hatherley: Militant Modernism (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, architecture, avant-garde, constructivism, design, film, modernism, theatre, vorticism
“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)
Comment (0)Anthony Enns, Shelley Trower (eds.): Vibratory Modernism (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avant-garde, dada, modernism, occultism, performance, photography, sound, theatre, vorticism
“Vibratory Modernism is a collection of original essays that will enable scholars and students to explore how vibrations provided a means of bridging science and art – two fields that became increasingly separate over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book demonstrates the vital role played by vibrations in the fields of physics, physiology, spiritualism, and by new vibratory technologies, in helping to shape the way modernist art was made and viewed. The chapters are placed into three connecting parts focusing on literature, the visual arts and theatre, each part highlighting the diverse ways in which writers, artists and performers engaged with the fascinating world of vibrations.”
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 1137027258, 9781137027252
288 pages
Jeffrey Herf: Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (1985)
Filed under book | Tags: · engineering, enlightenment, fascism, germany, marxism, modernism, national socialism, nationalism, nazism, politics, romanticism, technology, weimar republic
“In a unique application of critical theory to the study of the role of ideology in politics, Jeffrey Herf explores the paradox inherent in the German fascists’ rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. He documents evidence of a cultural tradition he calls ‘reactionary modernism’ found in the writings of German engineers and of the major intellectuals of the Weimar right: Ernst Juenger, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. The book shows how German nationalism and later National Socialism created what Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, called the ‘steel-like romanticism of the twentieth century’. By associating technology with the Germans, rather than the Jews, with beautiful form rather than the formlessness of the market, and with a strong state rather than a predominance of economic values and institutions, these right-wing intellectuals reconciled Germany’s strength with its romantic soul and national identity.”
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1985
ISBN 0521338336, 9780521338332
251 pages
Reviews: R.J. Overy (English Historical Review), Geoff Eley (Telos).
Commentary: Thomas Rohkraemer (Contemporary European History).