Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017)

“A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people’s working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.”

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804796415, 0804796416
viii+231 pages

Reviews: Stevphen Shukaitis (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Vince Carducci (Public Seminar, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Francis D. Klingender: Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947–) [EN, IT, ES]

A classic of Marxist art history.

“Drawing on his unique command of the contemporary visual and literary record, Francis Klingender analyzes and documents the inter-reaction between the sociological, scientific and cultural changes that moulded the 19th century. His subjects range from the development of the railways to the poetry of Erasmus Darwin, from the construction of bridges and aqueducts to the aesthetic concepts of the Sublime and the Pictoresque, from the Luddite riots and the English ‘navvy’ to those artists most profoundly affected by the climate of the Industrial Revolution, among them John Martin, Joseph Wright of Derby, J.C. Bourne, and J.M.W. Turner.” (from back cover)

Publisher N. Carrington, London, 1947
Edited and revised by Arthur Elton
Revised and expanded edition by Adams & Dart, 1968
Publisher Paladin, St Albans, 1972
ISBN 0586081224, 9780586081228
xv+272 pages

Review: Fred H. Andrews (J Royal Society of Arts, 1949).

WorldCat

Art and the Industrial Revolution (English, 1947/1968, 60 MB, no OCR)
Arte e rivoluzione industriale (Italian, trans. Elena Einaudi, 1972)
Arte y revolución industrial (Spanish, trans. Pilar Salso, 1983)

Aleksandar Bošković: Photopoetry and the Bioscopic Book: Russian and Czech Avant-Garde Experiments of the 1920s (2013)

The extraordinary junction between poetry, photography and photomontage — photopoetry — flourished in avant-garde books and journals throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The new genre aspired to appropriate the products of technological culture in creating poetry more alert to the mass sensibility of a rapidly changing mechanical age. As a new hybrid form that combines poetic text and photographic images, it was ripe for poetic experimentation and production of optical provocations.

This dissertation focuses on three avant-garde photo-poetry books — Mayakovsky and Rodchenko’s About This (1923), Nezval and Teige’s Alphabet (1926), and Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s unpublished and little known To the Workers of Kursk (1924-7) — examining them from the angle of the bioscopic book, a concept envisaged in a programmatic manner by El Lissitzky in 1923. (from the Abstract)

Dissertation
Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 2013
309 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (9 MB, updated on 2020-7-23)

See also Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s book in PDF (3 MB, via vk.com). Commentary: Bošković (2017).