Claire Huot: China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (2000)

The Cultural Revolution of China’s Maoist era has come and gone, yet another cultural revolution of a different sort has been sweeping through China in the 1990s. Although recently much interest has been focused on China’s economy, few Westerners are aware of the remarkable transformations occurring in the culture of ordinary people’s daily lives. In China’s New Cultural Scene Claire Huot surveys the wide spectrum of art produced by Chinese musicians, painters, writers, performers, and filmmakers today, portraying an ongoing cultural revolution that has significantly altered life in the People’s Republic.

Western observers who were impressed by the bravery of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square—and stunned at the harshness of their suppression—will learn from this book how that political movement led to changes in cultural conditions and production. Attending to all the major elements of this vast nation’s high and low culture at the end of a landmark decade, Huot’s discussion ranges from the cinematic works of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and others to emerging musical forms such as rock, punk, and rap. Other topics include television, theater, and avant-garde art, the new electronic media, and subversive trends in both literature and the visual arts.

With a comprehensive index of artists and works, as well as a glossary of Chinese words, China’s New Cultural Scene will enlighten students of Chinese culture and general readers interested in contemporary Asia.

Publisher Duke University Press, 2000
ISBN 0822324458, 9780822324454
258 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-14)

La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Law (eds.): An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963)

A source-book of early Fluxus classics. A collection of scores, poetry, dance constructions, and other avant-garde work. Includes Henry Flynt’s first essay on concept art.

When the poet Chester Anderson, publisher of Beatitude, exited New York for California in 1959, he asked La Monte Young to edit Beatitude East, composed from the performance scores Young had collected in Berkeley and New York. In this he was aided by Jackson Mac Low, who had attended Cage’s composition course at the New School for Social Research and worked at the Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina.

Mac Low and Young provided Maciunas with connections to “beat” ideology, encouraging him not only to present radical programming at AG Gallery, but to design An Anthology, and to organize the initial 1962 Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany. All of this was contemporaneous.

Maciunas supplied the paper, design and some money for the publishing of An Anthology, according to Henry Flynt, and had it ready for printing by October 1961. It was finally published by Young and Mac Low in 1963 as:

AN ANTHOLOGY of chance operations concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams Music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions, BY GEORGE BRECHT, CLAUS BREMER, EARLE BROWN, JOSEPH BYRD, JOHN CAGE, DAVID DEGENER, WALTER DE MARIA, HENRY FLYNT, YOKO ONO, DICK HIGGINS, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, TERRY JENNINGS, DENNIS, DING DONG, RAY JOHNSON, JACKSON MAC LOW, RICHARD MAXFIELD, ROBERT MORRIS, SIMONE MORRIS, NAM JUNE PAIK, TERRY RILEY, DITER ROT, JAMES WARING, EMMETT WILLIAMS, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, LA MONTE YOUNG/LA MONTE YOUNG – EDITOR/GEORGE MACIUNAS – DESIGNER.

The first edition (it was reprinted in 1972 by Hundermark, Germany) contains 67 leaves and three inserts. It includes multicolored and onionskin paper, card stock and two envelopes. The text was printed in offset with a heavy paper cover, collated manually with a staple and perfect binding.

Self-published, New York, Spring 1963
Layout by George Maciunas
120 pages

Wikipedia

PDF (36 MB, updated on 2012-7-9)

Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, 1-2 (1914-1915)

Issue 1, 20 June 1914

Issue 2, July 1915

“Blast was a modernist magazine founded by Wyndham Lewis with the assistance of Ezra Pound. It ran for just two issues, published in 1914 and 1915. The First World War killed it—along with some of its key contributors. Blast’s purpose was to promote a new movement in literature and visual art, christened “Vorticism” by Pound and Lewis. Unlike its immediate predecessors and rivals, Vorticism was English, rather than French or Italian, but its dogmas emerged from Imagism in literature and Cubism plus Futurism in the visual arts. The first issue of Blast includes artwork by Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, and others, along with a manifesto for Vorticism and lists of blasts, blesses, and curses of a whole range of people, concepts, and movements. It also includes a play by Lewis and fiction by Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West. The second issue includes a notice of Gaudier-Brzeska’s death in France. Despite its short life, Blast was a powerful influence in the shaping and promoting of modernism.” (Source)

Edited by Wyndham Lewis
Publisher John Lane, the Bodley Head, London
via Modernist Journals Project

Issue 1
Issue 2