Dubravka Djurić, Miško Šuvaković (eds.): Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991 (2003)

“Impossible Histories is the first critical survey of the extraordinary experiments in the arts that took place in the former Yugoslavia from the country’s founding in 1918 to its breakup in 1991. The combination of Austro-Hungarian, French, German, Italian, and Turkish influences gave Yugoslavia’s avant-gardes a distinct character unlike those of other Eastern and Central European avant-gardes. The book explores movements such as Belgrade surrealism, signalism, Yugo-Dada, and zenitism; the groups Alfa, Exat 51, Gorgona, OHO, and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater; or the magazines Danas, Rdeči pilot, Tank, Vecnost, and Zvrk.

The pieces in this collection offer comparative and interpretive accounts of the avant-gardes in the former Yugoslavian countries of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The book is divided into four sections: Art and Politics; Literature; Visual Art and Architecture; and Art in Motion (covering theater, dance, music, film, and video). All of the contributors live in the region and many of them participated in the movements discussed. The book also reprints a selection of the most important manifestos generated by all phases of Yugoslav avant-garde activity.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262042169, 9780262042161
xviii+605 pages
via agitprop

Reviews: Suzana Milevska (Springerin, 2004), Matthew S. Witkovsky (caa.reviews, 2004), Yevgeniy Fiks (Art Journal, 2004), Tyrus Miller (Modernism/modernity, 2005), Igor Marjanović (Design Issues, 2007).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (22 MB)

Douglas Kahn, Gregory Whitehead (eds.): Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (1992)

“Wireless Imagination addresses perhaps the most conspicuous silence in contemporary theory and art criticism, the silence that surrounds the polyphonous histories of audio art. Composed of both original essays and several newly translated documents, this book provides a close audition to some of the most telling and soundful moments in the ‘deaf century,’ conceived and performed by such artists as Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, Hugo Ball, Kurt Weill, and William Burroughs.

From the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, the essays uncover the fantastic acoustic scenarios projected through the writings of Raymond Roussel; the aural objects of Marcel Duchamp; Dziga Vertov’s proposal for a phonographic ‘laboratory of hearing’; the ZAUM language and Radio Sorcery conjured by Velimir Khlebnikov; the iconoclastic castaways of F.T. Marinetti’s La Radia; the destroyed musics of the Surrealists; the noise bands of Russolo, Foregger, Varèse, and Cage; the contorted radio talk show delivered by Antonin Artaud; the labyrinthine inner journeys invoked by German Hörspiel; and the razor contamination and cut-up ventriloquism of William S. Burroughs.”

With essays by Douglas Kahn, Charles Grivel, Craig Adcock, Christopher Schiff, Mel Gordon, Gregory Whitehead, Allen S. Weiss, Mark E. Cory, Frances Dyson, and Robin Lydenberg.

Publisher MIT Press, 1992
ISBN 0262111683, 9780262111683
xi+452 pages

Reviews: Timothy Dean Taylor (Postmodern Cult, 1993), David L. Austin (Art Doc, 1993), Gerald Hartnett (Leonardo Music J, 1994), Stephen Miles (Notes, 1994), Ágnes Ivacs (Artpool, n.d.).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (98 MB, no OCR)

Alvin Lucier: Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (2012)

“Composer and peformer Alvin Lucier brings clarity to the world of experimental music as he takes the reader through more than a hundred groundbreaking musical works, including those of Robert Ashley, John Cage, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Lucier explains in detail how each piece is made, unlocking secrets of the composers’ style and technique. The book as a whole charts the progress of American experimental music from the 1950s to the present, covering such topics as indeterminacy, electronics, and minimalism, as well as radical innovations in music for the piano, string quartet, and opera. Clear, approachable and lively, Music 109 is Lucier’s indispensable guide to late 20th-century composition.”

With a Foreword by Robert Ashley
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 2012
ISBN 0819572977, 9780819572974
236 pages
via Sorin

Reviews: Richard Kade (Leonardo, 2013), Dave Mandl (LA Review of Books, 2013), Michael Waugh (Popular Music, 2013).

Publisher

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