Local Contexts / International Networks: Avant-Garde Journals in East-Central Europe (2018)

“This volume presents papers based on the presentations held at the conference Local Contexts / International Networks – Avant-Garde Magazines in Central-Europe (1910-1935) held at the Kassák Museum in September 2015. The Museum is the only Hungarian museum devoted entirely to the avant-garde and its documents. It launched a programme centred around the presentation of archives and private collections, contemporary reflections on the avant-garde, and a reconsideration of Kassák’s oeuvre.

The avant-garde journal was arguably the most important medium of communication for progressive literature and visual arts in the region during World War I and the interwar period. The conference brought together researchers of different disciplines and approaches to analyse the multifaceted nature of the avant-garde journal. It aimed to draw attention to the tensions between national/local and international/cosmopolitan and offer possible answers to the question: how did the different cultural and historical characteristics affect the local avant-gardes of Central Europe?” (from Introduction)

With texts by Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi, Eszter Balázs, Jindřich Toman, Gábor Dobó, Piotr Rypson, Michalina Kmiecik, Przemysław Strożek, Klára Prešnajderová, Sonia de Puineuf, Michał Wenderski, Dušan Barok, György C. Kálmán and András Kappanyos, and Irina Denischenko.

Edited by Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi
Publisher Petőfi Literary Museum & Kassák Museum, Kassák Foundation, Budapest, 2018
The Avant-Garde and Its Journals series, 2
Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License
ISBN 9789631259728
192 pages

Conference
Publisher

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Maja Fowkes: The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde Art and Ecology Under Socialism (2015)

“Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, The Green Bloc uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. Focussing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Štembera, Maja Fowkes’s innovative research brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among socialist citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the artists’ sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale. ”

Publisher Central European University Press, New York and Budapest, 2015
ISBN 9789633860687, 9633860687
viii+299 pages
via Memory of the World

Reviews: Katalin Cseh-Varga (Springerin, 2015, DE), Juliane Debeusscher (Critique d’art, 2018).

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

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Branislav Jakovljević: Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945-91 (2016)

“In the 1970s, Yugoslavia emerged as a dynamic environment for conceptual and performance art. At the same time, it pursued its own form of political economy of socialist self-management. Alienation Effects argues that a deep relationship existed between the democratization of the arts and industrial democracy, resulting in a culture difficult to classify. The book challenges the assumption that the art emerging in Eastern Europe before 1989 was either “official” or “dissident” art, and shows that the break up of Yugoslavia was not a result of “ancient hatreds” among its peoples but instead came from the distortion and defeat of the idea of self-management.

The case studies include mass performances organized during state holidays; proto-performance art, such as the 1954 production of Waiting for Godot in a former concentration camp in Belgrade; student demonstrations in 1968; and body art pieces by Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and others. Alienation Effects sheds new light on the work of well-known artists and scholars, including early experimental poetry by Slavoj Žižek, as well as performance and conceptual artists that deserve wider, international attention.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License
ISBN 9780472900589
xii+369 pages

Reviews: Jestrović (Contemp Theatre Rev), Goulish (TDR), Tepavac (arcadia), Halilbašić (rezens.tfm), Radosavljević (Modern Drama), Jovićević (Peščanik).

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

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Images, PDF (HathiTrust)
PDF chapters (Jstor)