Octavian Eşanu: The Transition of The Soros Centers to Contemporary Art: The Managed Avant-Garde (2008)

“As in other transitological regions of the world, in Eastern Europe, throughout the 1990s, this “neo-liberal discourse of radical reform” became a new ideology. It quickly installed itself in the vacuum left after the collapse of Marxism-Leninism, and its working postulates (directed primarily at politics and economics) soon reached into the domain of art and culture, altering not only pre-established artistic and aesthetic conventions but changing also the social status of art in the post-communist society. While in such fields as politics and economy this doctrine has been recognized and accepted from the very beginning as a legitimate discourse – prompting some scholars to call for “the end of the transition paradigm” – by contrast, in art no analysis has been done on the importance of the notion of “transition” and the impact of transitology. The effect of this paradigm on art, however, was significant. Many individual changes within art resemble the pattern of political and economic reforms to such a degree that one may infer the existence of a “cultural transitology” – a hidden managerial agenda that monitored and implemented reforms in the field of culture. One of the first points on this agenda was the transition to a Western artistic model, and this was one of the main tasks of the SCCAs. One can set a parallel and compare the role of the SCCA network with that played by such active participants in the process of transition as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. While these international organizations have been concerned in such fields as economics and politics with various aspects of social transformation – disputing such issues as the conversion of planned economies into free markets, or the dissemination of liberal democratic values at the expense of other political doctrines – the SCCAs dealt mainly with the emancipation of art and culture from the ideological, political and economic control of the state. On the aesthetic level this transition was manifested in the attempt to break with the doctrine of Socialist Realism, with its aesthetic and ideological principles; artists were encouraged to work with new media whereas art historians were to write new art histories, which would evolve around the narrative of the formerly suppressed non-conformism. Economically the SCCAs provided expertise for developing local networks of Western styled private and corporate art institutions capable of accommodating to the logic of the free market. After escaping the ideological and material control of the state the centers were to help local artists adjust to a new order, devoting a good part of their efforts to cultural management and fund raising.” (excerpt)

Published by CCCK, Kyiv, at Periferic 8 “Art as Gift” Biennial for Contemporary Art in Iaşi, Romania
20 pages

Author
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-10-22)

Open Hardware Journal, No. 1 (2011)

“Open Hardware means sharing the design of physical or electronic objects with the public, similarly to Open Source software. The right to use, modify, redistribute, and manufacture, commercially or as a non-profit, is granted to everyone without any royalty or fee. Thus, Open Hardware designers hope to enrich society by developing a library of designs for useful objects that everyone can make, use, and improve.” (editor)

Editor: Bruce Perens
Published by Open Hardware organisation, 1 November 2011
30 pages
Compilation licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
Articles licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States

authors

PDF
PDF

Adalaide Kirby Morris (ed.): Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (1997)

By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to ‘turn up the volume’ on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life.

The collection’s twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist ‘sonosphers’ to Henri Chopin’s electroacoustical audio-poämes, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements–statements held only partially in check by meaning. The accompanying CD offers soundtracks of early radio sounds, poetry readings, Dada cabaret performances, jazzoetry, audiopoems, and contemporary Caribbean DJ dub poetry.

The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.

Publisher University of North Carolina Press, 1997
ISBN 0807846708, 9780807846704
349 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-8-3)