Roswitha Mueller: Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media (1989)

Bertolt Brecht spent a career puncturing artistic illusion while casting a spell as an innovator that has continued since his death in 1956. Best known to theater goers for “The Threepenny Opera,” “Mother Courage and her Children,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” and other production, the great playwright was, in fact, a man of all media. He was interested in radio and the cinema as soon as they appeared in Europe and brought to them, as well as to the stage, a dramatic theory so radical and influential that it has come to be known by the adjective “Brechtian.”

Publisher University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London, 1989
Modern German Culture and Literature series
ISBN 0803231326, 9780803231320
149 pages

Reviews: Katie Trumpener, Susan Bennett (Theatre Research International).

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Richard King (ed.): Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (2010)

The Cultural Revolution was a massive social and political upheaval resulting from a battle for supremacy within the ruling Chinese Communist Party, set in motion by the party’s chairman Mao Zedong. It was also a time of both brutal iconoclasm and radical experimentation in the arts, the effects of which still resonate today.

Forty years after the Cultural Revolution, Art in Turmoil revisits the visual and performing arts of the period — the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet. Probing deeply, it examines what these vibrant, militant, often gaudy images meant to artists, their patrons, and their audiences at the time, and what they mean now, both in their original forms and as revolutionary icons reworked for a new market-oriented age.

Chapters by scholars of Chinese history and art and by artists whose careers were shaped by the Cultural Revolution decode the rhetoric of China’s turbulent decade. The many illustrations in the book, some familiar and some never seen before, also offer new insights into works that have transcended their times.

Edited with Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng, and Scott Watson
Publisher UBC Press, Vancouver/Toronto, 2010
Contemporary Chinese Studies series
ISBN 0774815426, 9780774815420
282 pages

review (Stefan R. Landsberger, The China Beat)

publisher
google books

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Jozef Cseres: Hudobné simulakrá (2001) [Slovak]

“Známy estetik sa vo svojej knihe zaoberá vplyvnými svetovými umelcami, pre ktorých technológie nie sú nástrojom, zjednodušujúcim prácu, ale predovšetkým tvorivou výzvou.”

“We may not be aware of the fact that much of today’s music is created with the help of electronics. In his book, Cseres focuses on influential artists who do not use technology to facilitate their task, they rather consider it a creative challenge. With philosophical insight he pinpoints the relation between today’s music and intermedia and science, between the possibilities and constraints of technology, and most of all between human imagination and creativity in the post-modern era.”

Publisher Hudobné centrum, Bratislava, 2001
ISBN 8088884306, 9788088884309
192 pages

Reviews: Július Fujak (aluze.cz, 2002), Michal Rataj (Hudební věda, 2005).

Publisher

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