Glória Ferreira (ed.): Crítica de Arte no Brasil: temáticas contemporâneas (2006) [BR-PT]

A collection of 91 texts by 80 authors that represent a multidisciplinary universe of ideas and opinions regarding the visual arts of Brazil from 1946-2006. The essays are divided into 7 main topics: Constructive Tradition; Avant-Garde / Experimentalism; Art Criticism; Circuits; Return / Permanence of Painting; Images and Media; and Transitive Situations.

The authors include Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Aracy Amaral, Décio Pignatari, Mario Schenberg, Frederico Morais, Paulo Sérgio Duarte, Hélio Oiticica, Reynaldo Roels Junior, Murilo Mendes, Fernando Cocchiarale, Cildo Meireles, Walmir Ayala, Ronaldo Brito, Antonio Dias, Jorge Guinle, Paulo Herkenhoff, Waldemar Cordeiro, Haroldo de Campos, Roberto Pontual, Arlindo Machado, Wilson Coutinho and Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos.

Publisher Funarte, Rio de Janeiro, 2006
Pensamento crítico series
ISBN 8575070797, 9798575070795
575 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (32 MB)

Aleksandar Bošković: Photopoetry and the Bioscopic Book: Russian and Czech Avant-Garde Experiments of the 1920s (2013)

The extraordinary junction between poetry, photography and photomontage — photopoetry — flourished in avant-garde books and journals throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The new genre aspired to appropriate the products of technological culture in creating poetry more alert to the mass sensibility of a rapidly changing mechanical age. As a new hybrid form that combines poetic text and photographic images, it was ripe for poetic experimentation and production of optical provocations.

This dissertation focuses on three avant-garde photo-poetry books — Mayakovsky and Rodchenko’s About This (1923), Nezval and Teige’s Alphabet (1926), and Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s unpublished and little known To the Workers of Kursk (1924-7) — examining them from the angle of the bioscopic book, a concept envisaged in a programmatic manner by El Lissitzky in 1923. (from the Abstract)

Dissertation
Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 2013
309 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (9 MB, updated on 2020-7-23)

See also Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s book in PDF (3 MB, via vk.com). Commentary: Bošković (2017).

Kristin Romberg: Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism, 1917-1928 (2010)

“This is the first monograph about the Russian constructivist Aleksei Gan (1887-1942) and an experiment in the formal analysis of a materialist practice.

Best known as co-founder of the First Working Group of Constructivists and author of the group’s agitational and theoretical texts, Gan’s own oeuvre was comprised of amateur performances and mass-media objects (texts, books, journals, and films). This dissertation shows that the same qualities of ephemerality and dependency that make Gan’s work resistant to art-historical analysis were also what made it representative of constructivism’s ambitions for a materialist approach to art. In exploring these forms, Gan redefined the ‘work of art’ as a labor process through which the material world, human beings, and normative (common or social) frameworks simultaneously produced one another. The result was an alternative modernism, what I call an aesthetics of embeddedness, whose objects were extensive and responsive structures designed to permeate and shape their environment. Through close readings, the dissertation redefines art-historical concepts such as style and medium in ways specific to Gan’s historical moment, also examining them as manifestations of tensions in the early Soviet imagination. Most crucially these involve the cult of labor, the politics of group formation, and the power of the mass media to mold the normative frameworks governing social reality.

Chapter 1 reevaluates the origins of Russian constructivism by examining Gan’s early career in cultural and political enlightenment organizations, particularly his work in amateur theater and as a ‘constructor of mass action’. Chapter 2 focuses on the crystallization of constructivism as a movement and aesthetic theory in 1921. Chapter 3 looks closely at Gan’s book Constructivism (1922), developing an understanding of constructivism based on a typographic rather than sculptural model of material making. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Gan’s journal projects in terms of architecture and cinema, defining a set of constructive paradigms that run throughout Gan’s work. Finally, chapter 6 treats Gan’s work as a filmmaker in relation to contemporary efforts to rationalize artistic labor.” (Abstract)

Ph.D. Dissertation
Columbia University, New York, 2010
576 pages

Publisher

PDF (24 MB, illustrations missing, updated on 2017-3-21)