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In the present article, L'Arbre de Guernica (Fernando Arrabal, 1975) is analysed. The aim of this paper is to study the suitability of an experimental film as a representation of the past. In the first part, I analyse its aesthetics, following the research developed by authors such as González, Monreal or Sánchez, who have studied Arrabal's Panic Theatre. The goal of this subchapter is to apply the traits of his theatre to his cinema – which has been scarcely studied—, in order to conclude whether his films can also be considered as part of his panic creations or not. In this part, the concept of the 'Panic Ceremony' will be crucial to understand the logic of the film. The second part delves into historical film studies. Following the works of post-modern historians such as Rosenstone, White or Ferro, I study if the film works not only as a panic film, but also as a valuable experimental historical film. I conclude that L'Arbre de Guernica can be understood as a panic creation, in which the Panic Ceremony is crucial for its representation of the past, thus successfully working as an experimental historical film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the planning history of the first major housing projects built in Soviet Leningrad: the Traktornaya Ulitsa and Serafimov site housing estates. Initiated by municipal authorities in 1924, they were built according to the designs of its own Design Buro and the architects Aleksandr Nikolsky, Aleksandr Gegello, and Grigorii Simonov in 1925–1926. Spearheading the reconstruction of a large industrial suburb, these projects offer an original example of the role of housing in urban development in the Soviet Union and in one of Europe’s largest cities. The planning history of the projects illuminates the way urban development unfolded in the early Soviet context: through practice and negotiation with multiple contexts, both the historic, imperial city and the revolution. The article shows the exemplary quality of these projects and their power and means to reinvent the historic forms and meanings of the city, and reconfigure its spatial hierarchies. It analyses the sources and means at play from revolutionary ideals and avant-garde ideas on form to western models of housing, the surrounding classical city and Byzantine and Russian vernacular architecture. It thus delineates the means through which architecture acts as an instrument of social and cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the notebooks of Lebbeus Woods (1940–2012) as a substantive document in the œuvre and critical practice of the New York architect. Dating from 1988 to 1997, this previously unpublished trove includes hand-written notes and over three hundred drawings. Held at the Getty Research Institute, these twenty notebooks cover a wide range of topics, from theoretical musings, to political statements, to fragments from everyday life. Crucially, these documents also reflect the period of Woods' interest and involvement in the Bosnian War, leading to the publication of War and Architecture in 1993. Complementing his published and exhibited works, Woods' notebooks are a daily register of his travels, stochastic thoughts, and of his struggles with a continued belief in the possibility of architecture as an intellectual pursuit against the context of modern geopolitical catastrophe. Our brief examination presents these important documents from three major vantage points: drawings, writings, and their theoretical synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses several of Franz Kafka's recently published drawings in the estate of Max Brod from the materialist perspective of the social art history of art, reflecting on their ideological possibilities and effective limits. It relates the form and iconography of these drawings to long-standing traditions of political representation and social critique in art history and visual culture, in particular the nineteenth-century image of the barricade and the culture of satirical caricature that flourished in Central Europe at the fin-de-siècle. It situates them within the framework or field of avant-garde practice in Prague, in which Brod was an important figure. It sees in them largely private evidence of Kafka's interests and ambitions as a largely auto-didactic, idiosyncratic amateur visual artist—a body of work that excited Brod, but failed to resonate in Prague's modernist artistic culture. While distinguishing these drawings quantitatively, qualitatively, and functionally from the work of contemporaneous professional modern artists, the article nonetheless concludes that Kafka's drawings can be fruitfully studied as visual expressions of Kafka's complex class and ethnic background, ideological sympathies and political diffidence, and all-too-hegemonic conception of sex, gender, and artistic creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, César Aira took a negative view of artistic professionalization in his essays, but he also wrote a biographical novel about a professional artist: Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero, which depicts landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas' South American travels in the 1830s. In his essays, Aira characterizes professionalization as a freezing of artistic form, and he positions the avant-garde as a dynamic process emerging out of a static professionalism. This essay argues that his novelistic treatment of Rugendas follows, but also diverges from, the ideas in his essays, exposing dynamics internal to professionalism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No other early twentieth-century avant-garde project and aesthetic movement occupied itself with its history and legacy to such a large extent as Dada. This urge to write their history is one of Dada's complexities. It attests to their critical engagement with the discourses forming and informing the artistic work in the early twentieth century. Dada's revolt against the art establishment and bourgeoise society is found not only in their compositions and "artworks" but also in how they conceived of the idea of their legacy and history and, thus, of the canonical formation as a venue for their nonsense. Working within the parameters of historiography, the histories discussed in this article by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, and Raoul Hausmann transgress the set boundaries between historical fact and artistic expression by performatively undermining the conventions of writing and making history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The avant-garde is a socially grounded world-making practice, an aesthetic tradition envisioning collectively produced futures. By examining the modernist verses of José García Villa, this article locates Filipinx avant-garde poetry as an ecopoetic site, where nature, the environment, and human actors produce collective-making and consciousness-building exercises. Villa's poetry does not only connote the bizarreness of being Filipinx American in the early twentieth century, but also illustrates how invoking queerness conjures new worlds outside our precarious moment. Filipinx avant-garde poetry demonstrates why the ecopoetic should not only seek to protect what is scarce but envision what lies beyond our present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to identify and standardize 2 pineapple-based recipes from the municipality and to evaluate the effect of the use of avant-garde culinary techniques on sensory acceptance. First, an ethnographic study was carried. The study showed that in the rural area, the only preparation made with pineapple is juice; in the urban area, the preparations included ice cream, yogurt, cake and caramelized pineapple, the latter being the most traditional. The pineapple cake obtained greater sensory acceptance with the avant-garde culinary technique used, given that the foaming technique made it possible to obtain a spongier cake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent podcast Kateryna Mishchenko asked whether she, as a Ukrainian author, has the right to participate in German discourses, and whether she can do so through the German language. This refers both to the public debate on the 'Krieg in Europa', following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and, inextricably linked to it, memory discourses on the Holocaust and World War II. This article discusses Mishchenko's perspective on the war in Europe in literary and non-literary texts in comparison to that of Katja Petrowskaja. Petrowskaja moved to Berlin in 1999 and made a name for herself with her family history Vielleicht Esther (2014). Both authors can be regarded as prominent voices within a post-Soviet exile community in Berlin. The article asks how contemporary authors from Ukraine who find themselves exiled in Germany are contributing to a politicization of the German literary field, and what role their contribution to a transnational memory of the Holocaust and World War II plays within this process, drawing on Hannah Arendt's understanding of refugees as a transnational avant-garde in her essay of 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have long debated the degree to which Gabriele D'Annunzio should be viewed as a fascist and an imperialist, a virtual daguerreotype for Mussolini. But D'Annunzio's evolving investment in an Italian empirestate suggests that we should complicate our understanding of his links to fascism. This essay traces correspondences between "savage thought," coming out of ethnographic anthropology from Latin America, and D'Annunzio's "recovery" of Hellenistic Greece at the turn of the century. It examines three important moments in D'Annunzio's literary career: his tour-de-force novel of scandal, Il piacere (Pleasure, 1889), his famous 1895 yachting tour of the Greek islands, and then the writing of Maia (1903), the first book of his epic poem in praise of empire, Le laudi (1903-1917). By reexaming these texts through a transnational lens, the essay demonstrates the global scope of the author's avant-garde literary project and considers its impact on colonial contexts across the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dissent has its own special place in art education. It has two stereotypical, polarized faces. The first is a classical institution modelled on Italian and French academies. As official places, they aimed at elevating art to the rank of science and making it an expression and instrument of power. The opposite image of the school is an oasis of intellectual freedom, a space for inventiveness, a place for applying unusual teaching methods and organizing the academic community. The most famous examples are avant-garde acctivities. This historical division is unreliable in fact. Dissent or even rebellion can be an instrument of morality and principles that could be followed. Quite unexpectedly, a peculiar anarchism can be found in the first art academy run by the Carracci. The name 'academy' popularized among the Italian humanists and Marsilio Ficinno, drew attention to the informal nature of scientific associations, opposing the fossilized formula of the university existing since the Middle Ages. It is surprising then that Joseph Beuys just created the Free International University. The very name of school and its understanding indicate a significant dichotomy not only in art education, but also in art theory. The point is not that the model of education has simply loosened over time. The above-mentioned facts reflect great disputes about the essence of art, about its relationship with science, everyday life, and practical application. An analysis of specific programs will allow us to see the sense of the mutual connections between rebellion and principles in modernizing artistic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an experimental work based loosely around my stop-motion animation, "Scare Quotes." It asks – what is it like to live life as a textile? By imagining the self as a textile in my visual practice and writing, I consider Ornamentalism as an embodied reading and creative practice. I perform constructions of Asian femininity to critique their role in the avant-garde poetry of Gertrude Stein and Susan Howe. By stitching together the work of Lisa Lowe, Anne Cheng, and Mel Chen in this performance, I envision Asian Americanist critique as poetry and as a mode of living and feeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the terms avant-garde and vanguard as keywords for teaching English through the concept of political agency. For example, political theorist Lea Ypi has conceptualised an 'avant-garde political agency' as an experimental process that is meant to be both rhetorically effective and grounded in historical context; however, this approach also presents an opportunity for teachers and students to revisit how Black Power traditions in the USA, for instance, have used the related term vanguard to imagine alternate futures. To reconcile this disconnection, I examine excerpted uses of the two terms from select BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) artists, scholars, and activists. This keyword analysis can provide a useful lesson for teachers and students in English classrooms about the importance of historical context when engaging with challenging texts or experimental artwork. Keyword analysis is a useful way to provide that kind of context, and further, when these two terms are combined, the resulting 'vanguard avant-garde' perspective encourages historicised forward thinking through an understanding of agency that foregrounds experimentation, public communication, and student-centred teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Glauber Rocha's Di-Glauber as a filmic rereading and interrogation of Brazilian Modernismo and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti's position in the Brazilian artistic tradition. Di-Glauber transforms Di Cavalcanti's funeral into an anthropology of images, exploring established and possible relations between art, death, and society. Its unorthodox cinematic approach deconstructs Modernismo and Di Cavalcanti's canonisation within Brazil's "official" and transcendental national identity. First, Di-Glauber presents an affective account of Rocha and Di Cavalcanti's friendship, diverting the painter's institutionalisation through an immanent prism. Then, the film deconstructs its own representational status, self-reflexively exposing itself as an audiovisual artefact and hindering its eventual utilisation as part of an essentialist Brazilian identity. Di-Glauber paradoxically draws upon avant-gardist means to question the avant-garde's canonisation: Rocha's anthropophagy devours Di Cavalcanti and Modernismo to reclaim the political potential of the Brazilian artistic avant-garde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous article for Stanislavski Studies I examined the discourse in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand regarding Stanislavsky, providing a series of descriptive snapshots of how his name is invoked in teaching within the region. From this and the concluding piece published here, I argue that although theatre and training have evolved over the last forty years, the symbolic capital associated with Stanislavskian realism remains relatively unchanged. Ian Maxwell's contention that Australasian practitioners are "bowerbirds" who scavenge detritus to adorn idiosyncratic theatrical assemblages holds true. Artists and pedagogues see Stanislavskian technique as part of an instrumentalised "toolkit" which could potentially give the precarious actor an edge within a restricted labour market. Glenn d'Cruz however suggests that actors might be considered akin to Walter Benjamin's ragpickers, producing pulpy theatrical fusions out of the refuse of history. The at times overdetermined political, discursive and ideological baggage associated with Stanislavsky persists in rendering him a problematic figure within teaching and practice, even as the identification of Stanislavsky with character-based social realism offers precedents for new, radical dramaturgies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a selection of poems from Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1929), to consider the ideology that underpins it. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s idea of the ‘political unconscious’, whereby every text can be read as a socially ‘symbolic act’, the author will argue that the poetic subject in Lorca’s New York poetry gives voice to a crisis of bourgeois selfhood, which is set against the backdrop of economic collapse and experimental aesthetic renewal that coalesced in the late 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces Roberto Bolaño's fictionalized imprint in Diego Trelles Paz's El círculo de los escritores asesinos and Alejandro Zambra's Poeta chileno. These novels thematize Los detectives salvajes' repercussions and effects on the Latin American literary scene, translating Bolaño's imaginary around a poetic ethos into narrative dilemmas and strategies. El círculo de los escritores asesinos and Poeta chileno not only reflect on how to write but on how to be writers after Bolaño, once Ulises Lima and Roberto Belano established the Latin American poet's pervasive and idealistic role model. Just as Bolaño's real visceralistas are more concerned with living a poetic life than writing an oeuvre, Trelles Paz and Zambra portray communities of poets where affects and books permeate and reinforce each other. Ultimately, they draw opposing ethical outcomes from Los detectives salvajes' iconic interweaving of literature, friendship, love and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first of a pair of articles examining the discourse in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand regarding Stanislavsky. Moving from a brief description of my own encounter with Stanislavsky in student and fringe theatre of 1990s Melbourne, I provide a series of descriptive snapshots gathered through an informal survey of how Stanislavsky is invoked in teaching and practice in the region. I conclude that although theatre and training have evolved over the last forty years, the symbolic capital associated with Stanislavskian realism remains relatively unchanged. Ian Maxwell's contention that Australasian practitioners are "bowerbirds" who scavenge detritus to adorn idiosyncratic theatrical assemblages holds true. One clear irony emerges, namely that although Stanislavsky considered his focus to be the practice of acting, his methods are most often taught as an aid in analysing written playscripts – perpetuating a distinction between historical "outside in" psychological approaches, versus allegedly more innovative "inside out" methods. Stanislavskian concepts are, in essence both remembered and forgotten when navigating acting in the region today. These tensions within Stanislavskian discourse complicate his reputation even as his link with realist dramaturgy ensures his relevance. The rhetorical, ideological and political implications of these associations are further developed in the second article to follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth century saw the emergence of an avant-garde culture, which marked a turning point in the literary history of Spain. Until recently, the dominant approach to Spanish avant-garde poetry has been a generational one. Critics have mainly focused on male poets identified with the Generation of 1927, which has been seen as a predominantly Spanish phenomenon. This study takes a different approach by questioning Spain's exclusion from studies of the transnational avant-garde. By looking at literary circles and avant-garde magazines, this article provides an insight into the transnational exchanges between Spanish and Latin American women poets, who shared an aesthetic approach and engaged with avant-garde themes. It also examines the correspondence between Carmen Conde and Ernestina de Champourcín and highlights their connections to Alfonsina Storni, Gabriela Mistral, Juana de Ibarbourou, and Delmira Agustini. A study of the transatlantic connections among these women poets aims to offer a better understanding of the influences on their work, the impact they exerted beyond national borders, and the mediating role they played across cultural and geographical boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historiography of modern art recognizes numerous cases of influence and impact that artist from the so-called 'Western centres' had on their 'Eastern peripheral' colleagues. Reverse examples, however, are rarely recognised. This article gives such an example, by demonstrating the influence of Katarzyna Kobro on Georges Vantongerloo, two prominent avant-garde sculptors. Analysis of historical material (e.g. letters and publications) and selected artworks clearly indicates that the pioneering sculptures of Kobro, who lived and worked mostly in Poland, had profound impact on Vantongerloo, a Belgian artist related to the Dutch formation 'De Stijl'. In time Vantongerloo's works evolved from compact sculptures-masses to open spatial compositions that came to share the spirit of Kobro's unique works. This case thus serves as evidence of two-way artistic influences and mobility that took place within the supranational network of the avant-garde, contrarily to historiographical assumptions such as the 'centre-periphery' paradigm or the East-West dichotomization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, Japan's own "season of politics" was full of strikes, protests, and university closures. Much of the exigence behind students' revolutionary fervor revolved around a "self-revolution in everydayness," as activists sought to criticize capitalist consumerism and imperialism, and aimed to transform their own depoliticized consciousness. The films of the Art Theater Guild (ATG) reflect these desires. This paper argues that the films produced by ATG are a deeply political film cycle united by a "house style" which serves to destabilize and dehabituate our perception, and echoes the student protesters in their desire for a self-revolution of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To discuss Serbian twenty-first-century avant-garde music means to address two key phenomena: (1) the avant-garde's position in postmodernism, which—established in its form in the mid-1970s—has persisted over the past two decades of the twenty-first century; and (2) a modification of that position, which has concurrently manifested itself in Serbian music since the late 1980s. The first phenomenon refers to the condition of treating the avant-garde in postmodernism, like any other style from the musical past, as devoid of its internal hierarchy and authentic being. More precisely, it has been treated as a 'collection' of artefacts, i.e. constitutive components, into which the avant-garde has been 'disassembled' or 'dismantled'. The second phenomenon concerns a certain tendency to transcend that de-hierarchising impulse precisely by using postmodernist tools. Namely, it concerns the postmodernist 'validation' of indicators associated with various creative tendencies from the past, among them also some modernist concepts, including those that once qualified as avant-garde. In other words, in neither of those two instances does the avant-garde in Serbian twenty-first-century music exist the way it did before the advent of postmodernism, but instead becomes part of a phenomenon that I regard as postmodernist modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first Biennale opened in 1895 without a decorative arts section, which was a blow for the Venetian glass masters who hoped to take advantage of the new platform. In reaction to the successful 1902 exhibition of decorative arts in Turin, the Biennale realized that excluding the decorative arts represented a loss in terms of profit and attractiveness. It therefore introduced a decorative arts section in 1903 and from 1909 Murano glass held a central position within the exhibition. Its status evolved and reached a climax with the opening of a dedicated space, the Padiglione Venezia (Venice pavilion) in 1932. This article investigates the influence exerted by the on the market for Murano glass. It also analyses how it acted as an international springboard for the local industry and the evolution of taste from reproduction to bolder, more modern pieces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article dissects the audiovisual essay Found Found Found (de Bruyn [2014]. "Found Found Found" NECSUS: Autumn, 2014. ). Through a study of its formalist influences and strategies it is argued that it is possible to arrive at the audiovisual essay as a creative research methodology from a different practice trajectory. The originating point is the avant-garde split documented in Peter Wollen's Two Avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]. "The two avant-gardes." In Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies, 92–114. London: Verso.), which articulated a formalist avant-garde, focusing on perceptual processes, as utopian in its extreme dismissal of the signified, as non-narrative and unreadable as political discourse. Vilém Flusser's 'technical image' is enlisted to place such practice into a productive relationship with the audiovisual essay. This formalist cinema has already been re-read through the digital turn as producing forms of traumatic memory (de Bruyn [2014]. The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.) and performing the formalist methods of surveillance technology (de Bruyn 2014. "Structuralist Film and the Birth of Surveillance: The 2013 Alternativa Film/Video Festival." Senses of Cinema 70 March 2014: htt.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it has never constituted itself as a genre within the French sphere, within the cannon of twentieth-century "Literature" are many texts that share the characteristics traditionally associated with "nature writing" (first person observational prose infused with a consciousness of natural history), including those of Francis Ponge and René Char. While ecocriticism has expanded to examine many different types of literature, these two authors represent a strain of nature writing in France, through dialogue with ancient Greek philosophy and the use of poetic techniques that create space for the autonomous existence of non-human entities, anticipate the dismantling of the human/nature divide. Their work also, just as crucially helps to break down the division between ecological writing and ecological action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of Hollywood Arensberg will appeal to those interested in the history of collecting, and domestic display of modern art. Incorporating pre-existing literature on Walter and Louise Arensberg, the review discusses their close relationship with Marcel Duchamp, their illegal acquisition of pre-Columbian art, their determination to prove Sir. Francis Bacon authored the work of William Shakespeare, and their collecting and display preferences. While Hollywood Arensberg sets the bar high for other researchers in the history of collecting, this review notes that further research is needed on the role Louise Arensberg played in forming this rare avant-garde collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the Beatles drew inspiration from avant-garde composer John Cage in songs like "A Day in the Life," Cage himself had little interest in popular music. In one isolated statement, though, Cage expressed uncharacteristic admiration for the Beatles. This article explores what, for Cage, made the Beatles important by considering his statement within the context of a cross-influential network of musicians and thinkers that included Cage, the Beatles, philosopher Marshall McLuhan, and artist Yoko Ono. This study reveals an overlooked line of reasoning in Cage's mind while also lending to a fuller understanding of the Beatles' effect beyond popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Zadie Smith's pronouncement of Tom McCarthy's fiction as an exemplar of the contemporary avant-garde in 2008, many critics have enthusiastically – at times hastily – embraced the label, classifying him variedly as nihilist, late modernist or even a pessimist. Yet, much of the existing criticism on McCarthy has tended to focus on the formal-aesthetic tropes and the generic classification of his novels. Given his penchant for hermeneutics and deconstruction, McCarthy may well entertain such wide array of perspectives and readings, even if he might disagree with a neat categorisation of his work – as he does in this interview. This conversation, which took place in a public park in central Berlin, moves away from the undue scholarly emphasis on formalistic devices and experimental nature of McCarthy's work, and attempts to bring the politics of theory, text, and postcolonialism in his writing to the reader's attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I, Caustic [Moi, l'aigre], published in 1970, may very well be Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's literary masterpiece. Not only is it his most vitriolic condemnation of colonization and political repression, it is also his most daring literary experiment, composed of multiple literary genres that Khaïr-Eddine strove to master and innovate throughout his literary career. Equal parts fiction, memoir, poetry, drama, historical narrative, and reportage, I, Caustic is an astounding literary feat of strength that moves freely in and out of genres on a whim, generating one uniquely surreal and vertiginous polyvocal collage. Disorienting time and space, Khaïr-Eddine defamiliarizes the language, the history, and the mouthpieces of the colonizer, thereby reproducing the diasporic and alienating effects of colonization, while also highlighting the permutable possibilities of language in the hands of the repressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a remarkable case study of artistic influences between two avant-garde artists who still gain insufficient recognition in international accounts of European modern art, namely between Mieczysław Szczuka and Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman – eminent representatives of Polish and Dutch interwar avant-gardes, respectively. They both lived and worked far from historiographical artistic 'centres', did not travel much, yet their work indicates considerable influence exerted by one of these 'peripheral' artists on the other. Interestingly, it is the Polish artist Szczuka whose works became a source of artistic inspiration for the Dutchman Werkman, providing a remarkable example of East-West artistic influence that has so far rarely been recognized by the historiographers of the avant-garde. This particular case study is based on an analysis of preserved historical material and selected artworks that give evidence of Szczuka's influence on Werkman and at the same time question historiographical assumptions regarding cultural mobility 'from centres to peripheries' and 'from West to East'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is a genderqueer narrative of alternating identities related to artist Marcel Duchamp's appearance as his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy (Man Ray 1920–1921; Man Ray 1921b). Art historians assume that Stein's textual word play and outsized personality influenced Duchamp. Few scholars, however, have addressed the possible influence of Duchamp on Stein's work. The similar ways in which Duchamp and Stein play with gender privileges gender ambiguity above gender identity. Seeing Stein's work in relation to Duchamp's genderqueer performance enables Stein to be recognized as an innovator of genderqueer aesthetics, which also leads to a recognition of Stein's alternative approach to fine art: as this article will discuss, Stein's interwar essay 'Pictures' (1935) reveals an undoing of such distinctions as copy and original that anticipates the achievements of the avant-garde and the Pop art movement of the late twentieth century. Stein's gender play was integral to her development as a writer, popular author, and artists' muse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2016, the Fiscal Monitor of the IMF issued a report which stated that the global debt 'is currently at an all-time high'. Both before and after the crisis of 2007–2008, the levels of debt have simply exploded. No wonder, then, that a lot of contemporary artists have responded to this unprecedented historical situation. In this article, I focus on the artist duo Claire Fontaine, through three key concepts: debt, depression, strike. First, I analyse the ways in which the artist intervenes in the disastrous debt situation in the southern part of the Euro zone. Second, I argue that Claire Fontaine is concerned with the psychopathological consequences of the debt economy, in particular with the political problem of depression. Last, I show how the work of Claire Fontaine anatomises depression not only as a passive symptom, but also a paradoxical form of active resistance to the neoliberal debt regime, ie as a human strike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the avant-garde fashion of Los Angeles-based designer Bernhard Willhelm and how it simultaneously traverses the border between bourgeois respectability and "bad" taste, and challenges codes of heteronormative dress. Through analyses of specific collections and their representations, it demonstrates how Willhelm and his business partner Jutta Kraus interrogate and trouble fashion industry norms of beauty, gender, sexuality and race. Past menswear collections have featured traditionally feminine garments—skimpy body tanks, revealing hot pants, frilly peplums or "super mini-skirts"—while corresponding womenswear collections have comprised in part similar, if not identical garments. This crossover reflects Willhelm and Kraus's desire to diversify menswear and challenge the fashion system's divisions between gendered dress. Their decorative, feminine forms dispute notions of propriety and directly contravene interpretations of modern (read: masculine) design as stripped of ornamentation. This article also considers the transgressions enacted when such garments are modeled by gay, pornographic and black male bodies. In so doing, Bernhard Willhelm actively refuses to perpetuate homogeneity by supporting diversity in its various forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moments of deep crisis destabilise artistic autonomy, as such autonomy usually relies on arts' submission to the laws of the markets. When markets collapse, like they did in Argentina in 2001, artistic production is emancipated from the duties of money-making. This is the moment when original, 'amateur' artistic practices emerge that find another social and political function, in which writing is not contained by the rules of business. In contemporary Latin America, trespassing the limits of artistic autonomy is not a decision of the artist but rather a material condition of production. This article analyses three moments in which a post-autonomy literature emerged as a formation of a minoritarian, queer language of the locas: Brazilian poesia marginal (1970s), the Argentinian independent publishing projects Belleza y felicidad and Eloísa Cartonera (early 2000s), and the recent global feminist activist movement Ni una menos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a focus on Aleksei Fedorchenko's Angels of Revolution, the article examines the director's authorial style and his approach to established hierarchies of representation, specifically folklore, twentieth-century avant-garde art, and official Soviet ideology. Through a narration that lays bare discursive ruptures, Fedorchenko's film attempts to document a multiplicity of symbolic formations. The article investigates three features of this ruptured narration: first, the multiplicity of symbolic systems; second, the postmodern author as a formal aspect of the text; and third, the filmmaker's reflections on art and cinema tools for the (re)production of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this bilingual, collaborative, many-voiced essay is to distill the dynamic, insightful and at times polemical exchange of ideas that took place during the "Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Spain: A Debate from the Perspectives of the United States and Spain" symposium organized by Susan Larson and Juan Herrero-Senés on July 17 and 18, 2019 in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. The gathering brought together 14 scholars (seven based in Spain and the rest in the United States and Great Britain) whose research stems from a wide variety of methodologies and intellectual traditions. This encounter was a unique opportunity to engage directly with each other's work, to answer key questions about promising theoretical approaches and to share strategies to collectively solve some of the most pressing problems that are commonly faced by researchers and students in this rapidly-changing field. After the co-authors consider some of the most important ideas that came out of the encounter, this essay ends with the brief interventions of the participants in the dialogues: Andrew A. Anderson, Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, Nicolás Fernández-Medina, Leslie J. Harkema, Juan Herrero-Senés, Juli Highfill, Susan Larson, Abelardo Linares, José-Carlos Mainer, Domingo Ródenas de Moya, Nil Santiáñez, Renée M. Silverman, and Andrés Soria Olmedo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the common historiography about the avant-gardes in the interwar period, in which Paris is often considered the international avant-garde capital city, with surrealism as its perfect model. It starts with the idea that the history of the avant-gardes (artists and artists' groups who considered themselves or who were considered innovative) could be studied as "a social field," but also an international field structured by mobility. It focuses on the circulation of avant-garde artists and their works, as well as the social, economic, financial, geopolitical, and colonial bases of these circulations, to understand how some groups, artists, stories, and centers managed to establish themselves better than others. Contrary to the regular narrative based on Parisian domination, a circulatory approach highlights that Paris isolated itself from avant-gardes in the 1920s, unlike the opening of Germany and Central Europe, and that the surrealists themselves were not so international until 1929. Looking at social groups, at their movements and circulation, as well as the various strategies deployed and the underlying geopolitical positions taken by artists after 1929, it shows that from 1929, the Parisian scene, and the surrealist movement in particular, very slowly became a new focus for new artistic generations. Paris only became a global center of avant-garde circulation after 1934 and surrealism then gradually became the focus of international artists' careers. In this process, artists coming from the peripheries of Europe and the Americas, cultural transfers, and resemanticization processes played a central role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The October Revolution of 1917 transformed the world of arts in Russia and led to an unprecedented proliferation of performative events. Examining performances through the lens of extant exhibition documentation dating from the two decades following the revolution, the author attempts to tease out relevant information from exhibition-related pamphlets and checklists, demonstrating the value of an often overlooked kind of small publication as primary source material for the study of the performing arts. Based on materials collected by the Frick Art Reference Library, the author gives an overview of the challenges of describing, preserving, and making digitally accessible rare ephemeral documents of Russian and Soviet arts from first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'It is important to note that a photomontage need not necessarily be a montage of photos', the Constructivist writer Sergei Tretiakov declared in 1936. 'No', he clarified; 'It can be photo and text, photo and colour, photo and drawing'. In 2019, 'photo and smartphone' might also appear in Tretiakov's list. The volatile image, filtered through applications and shared across shifting platforms, is far from a new phenomenon. Networks of photographic dissemination and manipulation, traceable to the medium's origins, have long precluded the possibility of a still photograph. As digital processes abstract cutting and pasting from scissors and glue, avant-garde photomontage offers a useful model with which to regard today's unprecedented fluidity of images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades now, Douglas Crimp's landmark 1980 essay 'The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism' has shaped our understanding of modernism's aftermath, at least as it unfolded in North America and Western Europe. Less remembered, however, is the degree to which the procedures of disjunction, copying, appropriation, and outright theft that he highlighted were epitomised not just by contemporary photography, but by photomontage in particular. This article recovers the debates that led critics such as Crimp, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Christopher Phillips, Benjamin Buchloh and others to turn to photomontage as one of their principal objects of concern in what became known as the postmodern critique of photography. Why was montage tasked to perform this critical function, particularly by people around the journal October who had not otherwise devoted the balance of their writing to photography's history? The article suggests that these men and women, along with the contemporary artists they foregrounded, manifested what Mary Anne Doane has called a 'desire for signification', a reaction in the late 1970s against the mute theatricality of minimalist and conceptual art. Photomontage reintroduced representation to contemporary art and to the canon of art history. But unlike the reemerging illusionism in painting that also manifested this desire, montage guarded against an uncomplicated realism by highlighting and critiquing operations of representation in a manner that painting no longer could. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salvador Dalí's Autorretrato cubista is his only major painting done predominantly in the style of Analytic Cubism, although it also incorporates various examples of collage, typically associated with Synthetic Cubism. Close analysis of the compositional structure of the self-portrait, together with the identification and interpretation of the various objects and newspaper fragments glued to its surface, suggest the representation of a self divided and pulled simultaneously in different directions. The major lines of tension involve two oppositions: one between Cataluña and Castilla, that is to say, between a sympathetic stance towards Catalan nationalism versus Castilian centralism (tempered by the positive and horizon-expanding experience of student life in Madrid), and the other between the avant-garde and other artistic styles. This second tension manifests itself in the espousal of Analytic Cubism (with some features of Synthetic Cubism) and, at the same time, the inclusion of certain elements deriving from earlier tendencies, notably Noucentisme, a movement that in turn had very close links with Catalanism. In Autorretrato cubista, painted at the very end of 1923, it therefore seems possible to discern a complex and unresolved psychomachia of diverse and sometimes contradictory allegiances and influences played out on the canvas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical work on media, which brings together certain lines of development from both the modern exact sciences and the human sciences, has elevated the pressing global question of the place of the human—the development of technology and ways of relating to it, the possible routes for artistic thought and practice—to a new level. Fueled by the powerful legacy of the avant-garde and supported by the contemporary development of engineering, Russian media philosophy continues today, on the one hand, in the forms and terms of direct interaction with technology and technological innovations, and on the other hand, in a distant, poetic-metaphorical contemplation of this technology. As the articles included in this issue demonstrate, environmental activity, collectivity, and a particular humanism could be identified as the implicit characteristics of this field of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes as its starting point the involvement of exiled Spanish composers Salvador Bacarisse and Roberto Gerhard with the public radio broadcasters of the countries to which they were exiled. It examines the music (both incidental and autonomous) they composed and arranged, as well as features on music they wrote, presented or contributed to. In doing so, it articulates a critique of the dominant historiographical narratives that understand Spanish twentieth-century music as a continuous, monolithic advance toward a single ideal of modernity. Such narratives were first introduced by Federico Sopeña and Tomás Marco under Francoism, yet they continue to be influential in the present day. I examine how the music for radio of Bacarisse and Gerhard forces us to consider key components of these narratives, such as the understanding of exile as either assimilation or resistance to the host culture, the role of artistic collaboration in the careers of many exiles, and the dichotomy of commercialism and absolute music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the relationship and influence of North African and Middle Eastern architectures on the birth and development of modern architecture in Central European countries during the first three decades of twentieth century. The authors examine the contacts that the Central European architectural avant-garde had with the architecture of North Africa and the Middle East, and analyse how certain German and Austrian architects reacted to what they witnessed and how they interpreted it in their ensuing designs and projects. Architects in both countries were seeking a new formal code that responded to the needs of the era. The authors' aim here is to determine how and to what extent each country's avant-garde adopted the repertoire of vernacular Mediterranean architecture during the critical period of development of the Modern Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1936, the American critic Curtis Canfield stated that there was no longer any need for "the usual naturalistic form" in a modernising Ireland whose theatre was "in an interesting state of transition from Realism to Experimentation and Expressionism". As Terence Brown suggests, however, whatever subversive energies there were in Irish theatre in this period "became unthreatening in the provincial Irish air". This article evaluates the realities of plays and theatre in the thirty years after the founding of the Free State within the context of the changes celebrated by Canfield and the timidity and stasis identified by Brown. It focuses in particular on the eight plays in Canfield's edited collection, Plays of Changing Ireland (1936), and considers the extent to which they can be advanced as convincing examples of modernist theatre when set alongside the radical styles and staging of the contemporaneous European stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay argues that the Crakers—genetically modified human beings appearing in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy—should be seen not only as a result of techno-scientific brilliance but also as a product of artistic creativity. Starting with close reading of several passages which indirectly but effectively indicate that the Crakers should be regarded as a form of art, the essay then moves on to the consideration of probable predecessors of the kind of artistic creativity that the Crakers represent. Models for Crake’s creation of human beings are seen in the avant-garde idea of the New Man, which goes back to the first half of the twentieth century, and in the more recent transgenic art. Crake’s creative act is also shown in the context of the classic works of literature which deal with a similar theme, namely Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘New people create new buildings, but new buildings also create New people’, so wrote the German art critic Fritz Wichhert in The New Building: Art as Educator in 1928. The social and psychological legacy of the First World War was deeply profound and affected how people thought about the future. Children were seen to symbolise a new and better future and Modernist architects saw their role as helping to build a new society, a society where the design of schools was seen as an agent of social change. The focus of this article is on the role of the avant-garde in this reforming social project and its impact on school design. It is organised into four sections. The first section introduces the terms modernism and avant-garde in relation to (school) architecture, particularly British modernism. The second section focuses in on the experiences of émigré architects in conservative 1930s England, and in particular the support they received from refugee organisations and their treatment by the state as war in Europe became a reality. The third section discusses the role of these architects in the construction of modernist schools in England. In the fourth and final section the impact of émigré architects on modernist schools in England is discussed along with the concepts of transnational history and cultural transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of Spain’s historical Avant-Garde remember Ángeles Santos (Port Bou, 1911-Madrid, 2013) as one of its leading female artists and one who earned an early notoriety in 1929 for a large-format oil painting titled Un mundo (housed in the Reina Sofia Museum). None the less, for a combination of reasons—personal crisis, the outbreak and aftermath of the Civil War, the loss of her audience and peers—Santos’ major accomplishments in the pre-war period were largely forgotten. This essay revisits an earlier article on the mythic and feminist dimensions of her work to consider Santos’ productions in the key years of 1929-1930 more fully, in the context of Josep Casamartina i Parassols’ research into the biography of the artist and intellectual influences. Bringing forth new data about her reception in 1929 and 1930, I argue that her aerial perspective of the planet is at once the product of myth and marginalization, marking the female artist’s liminal position vis-à-vis her contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While male artists dominated the Avant-Garde movement in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid in the first third of the twentieth century, women began to make their mark simultaneously. In Spain artists such as Remedios Varo, Maruja Mallo, the Argentinian Norah Borges, Ángeles Santos and María Blanchard, as well as several female artists working outside Spain such as Raquel Forner and Leonora Carrington, because of their experiences as outsiders, searched for the absolute, for transcendence through their art. In general, the originality and the ultimate success of these artists were derived from a heavy dose of what Freud labelled das Unheimliche, the uncanny, the ineffable, the dreamlike qualities which result from the subversion of reality and the unwitting inspiration to transgress the boundaries of the male establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierrot the clown is a recurring figure in David Bowie’s oeuvre. In this article we examine Bowie’s use of Pierrot in his self-directed homemade video for the single release of ‘Love is Lost’ (2013). The article demonstrates how an understanding of Pierrot (and all he represents), as well as Bowie’s engagement with avant-garde Jewish composers and artists, is vital to interpreting ‘Love is Lost’. We provide a reading of Bowie’s use of Pierrot as an avatar for everyman, for creativity and for the struggles over identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]