Sarah Schulman: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1980s, 1990s, aids, gentrification, new york, queer
“In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.”
Publisher University of California Press, 2012
ISBN 0520264770, 9780520264779
179 pages
via I. I. Rubin
Review: Emily Douglas (Los Angeles Review of Books).
PDF (updated on 2023-7-21)
Comment (0)Peter J Schmelz: Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music During the Thaw (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1950s, 1960s, 1990s, classical music, cold war, composing, music, music history, music theory, soviet union
Following Stalin’s death in 1953, during the period now known as the Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev opened up greater freedoms in cultural and intellectual life. A broad group of intellectuals and artists in Soviet Russia were able to take advantage of this, and in no realm of the arts was this perhaps more true than in music. Students at Soviet conservatories were at last able to use various channels–many of questionable legality–to acquire and hear music that had previously been forbidden, and visiting performers and composers brought young Soviets new sounds and new compositions. In the 1960s, composers such as Andrey Volkonsky, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Valentin Silvestrov experimented with a wide variety of then new and unfamiliar techniques ranging from serialism to aleatory devices, and audiences eager to escape the music of predictable sameness typical to socialist realism were attracted to performances of their new and unfamiliar creations.
This “unofficial” music by young Soviet composers inhabited the gray space between legal and illegal. Such Freedom, If Only Musical traces the changing compositional styles and politically charged reception of this music, and brings to life the paradoxical freedoms and sense of resistance or opposition that it suggested to Soviet listeners. Author Peter J. Schmelz draws upon interviews conducted with many of the most important composers and performers of the musical Thaw, and supplements this first-hand testimony with careful archival research and detailed musical analyses. The first book to explore this period in detail, Such Freedom, If Only Musical will appeal to musicologists and theorists interested in post-war arts movements, the Cold War, and Soviet music, as well as historians of Russian culture and society.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 0195341937, 9780195341935
408 pages
review (Pauline Fairclough, Notes)
review (Kiril Tomoff, The American Historical Review)
review (Solomon Volkov, Radio Svoboda, in Russian)
3/4 magazine, 27-28: Media Art History: Remake (2012) [English/Slovak]
Filed under magazine | Tags: · 1990s, 2000s, appropriation, art, art history, computer art, experimental film, film history, media art, media culture, remake, remix, sound art, streaming
Special bilingual issue of 3/4 magazine dedicated to media art history. Serves as a catalogue of a travelling exhibition Remake. It also brings, for the first time, selection of interviews done by Dušan Barok with personalities and media art and culture history-makers Diana McCarty, Michal Murin, Călin Man, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits. Interviews are complemented by a passage from monograph about Steina and Woody Vasulka, entitled Dialogue with Daemons of Tools by art historian Lenka Dolanová, views on art scenes in Ukraine and Iceland and appendix showing the process of development of works for Remake exhibition.
Editor: Barbora Šedivá
Editor-in-chief: Slávo Krekovič
Contributing editors: Dušan Barok, Katarína Gatialová, Oliver Rehák, Mária Rišková, Catherine Lenoble
Publisher Atrakt Art, Bratislava, Slovakia
ISSN 1335-5309
134 pages