Photomontage Between the Wars, 1918-1939 (2012) [EN, ES]

This publication offers an overview of the birth of the photomontage process specifically in Germany and the Soviet Union. The extensive range of posters, collages, maquettes, postcards, magazines, and books attests to the large influence of photomontage in politics, social protest, and advertising, while also demonstrating the popularity of the technique among avant-garde members during these two decades.

The catalogue features an essay by Adrian Sudhalter, as well as a chronology of the era, a selection of period texts—several published in translation for the first time—by some of the represented artists, and facsimile reproduction and translation of the catalogue of one of the most important exhibition devoted to this artistic technique at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin in 1931 (with essays by Curt Glaser, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, and Gustav Klutsis). The exhibition is drawn primarily from the Merrill C. Berman Collection in the United States.

Publisher Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2012
ISBN 9788470755972
184 pages

Review: Paul Messaris (Advertising & Society Review, 2014).

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

English: PDF, PDF (23 MB), View online
Spanish: PDF, PDF (24 MB), View online

R. Bruce Elder: Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (2013)

“This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.

This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.”

Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2013
Film and Media Studies series
ISBN 9781554586257, 1554586259
x+765 pages

Reviews: John W. Locke (Canadian J of Film Studies 2014), Robin Walz (Canadian J of History 2014), Bart Testa (U Toronto Quarterly 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (8 MB, updated on 2019-12-14)
EPUB (added on 2019-12-14)

William Burroughs: The Dead Star (1969)

Originally appeared in a different form in Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag printed in the UK.

Publisher Jan Jacob Merman / Nova Broadcast Press, San Francisco, 1969
Nova Broadcast series, 5
single folded sheet
via Reality Studio

Commentary: Jed Birmingham (Reality Studio 2015).

PDF (3 MB)