Marc James Léger (ed.): The Idea of the Avant Garde: And What It Means Today (2014)

8 October 2018, dusan

“This book is premised on the view that the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. A different kind of culture is possible. This collection of writings, essays, interviews and artworks by many of today’s most radical cultural practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde mediates the different strategies and temporalities of avant-garde art and politics. Tracing diverse genealogies and trajectories, the book offers an inter-generational forum of ideas that covers different arts fields, from visual art, art activism, photography, film and architecture, to literature, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.”

Texts by Marc James Léger, Adrian Piper, Andrea Fraser, David Tomas, Catherine Lescarbeau, Hal Foster, Laura Mulvey, Bruce LaBruce, Santiago Sierra, Derek Horton, Christine Wertheim, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Perloff, Wu Ming 2, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Rabih Mroué, Judith Malina, Moe Angelos, Bill Brown, The Errorist International, Jonas Mekas, Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Travis Wilkerson, Evan Mauro, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Gene Ray, John Roberts, Zanny Begg and Dmitry Vilensky, Owen Hatherley, Michael Webb, Mitchell Joachim, Beatriz Colomina, Boris Groys, Vitaly Komar, Victor Tupitsyn, Gregory Sholette and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Art Ensemble, BAVO, Alexei Monroe, Jean-Hervé Péron, Chris Cutler, Charles Gaines, Jason Robinson, Sara Marcus, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Thanos Chrysakis, Kim Cascone, Marc Couroux, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, Chrysi Papaioannou, and Bill Dane.

Publisher Manchester University Press, Manchester, with Left Curve, Oakland, CA, 2014
ISBN 9780719096914, 071909691X
285 pages

Editor
Exhibition (2018)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (16 MB)

Joshua Shannon: The Recording Machine: Art and Fact during the Cold War (2017)

14 March 2018, dusan

“A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact.

This book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968. Author Joshua Shannon reveals an oddly stringent realism in the period, tracing artists’ rejection of essential truths in favor of surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates not only the Cold War’s preoccupation with data but also the rise of a pervasive culture of fact.

Focusing on the United States and West Germany, where photodocumentary traditions intersected with 1960s politics, Shannon investigates a broad variety of art, ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. He looks closely at art by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Douglas Huebler, Gerhard Richter, and others. These artists explored fact’s role as a modern paradigm for talking, thinking, and knowing. Their art, Shannon concludes, helps to explain both the ambivalent anti-humanism of today’s avant-garde art and our own culture of fact.”

Publisher Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2017
ISBN 9780300187274, 0300187270
ix+230 pages

Review: Ina Blom (The Sixties, 2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

Henry M. Sayre: The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (1989)

21 July 2017, dusan

Looks at the development of American avant-garde art. Considers feminist performance, particularly by Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, and Carolee Schneemann; dance and collaboration as a new form of Gesamtkunstwerk; poets of the vernacular landscape and the postmodern sublime; and the application of Roland Barthes’s theories to Sayre’s own concepts of the relationship between photography and live art (ch 7).

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1989
ISBN 0226735575, 9780226735573
xvi+308 pages

Reviews: Roger F. Malina (Leonardo, 1992), George J. Leonard (LA Times, 1989).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (93 MB, no OCR)