Mirjam Hildbrand, "Circus and the Avant-Gardes: History, Imaginary, Innovation "
English | ISBN: 0367757281 | 2022 | 268 pages | PDF | 33 MB
This book examines how circus and circus imaginary have shaped the historical avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century and the cultures they help constitute, to what extent this is a mutual shaping, and why this is still relevant today.

The Idea of the Avant Garde: And What It Means Today, Volume 2 By Marc James Léger (editor)
2019 | 434 Pages | ISBN: 178938088X | PDF | 25 MB
The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today's world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another fifty artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theater, performance, intermedia, and music.

Karen Kurczynski, "The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up"
English | 2014 | ISBN: 1409431975, 1138575062 | PDF | pages: 276 | 12.7 mb
A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements - yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study corrects that imbalance, offering a synthetic account of the essential phases of this prolific artist's career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists' groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn's work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics. Kurczynski engages with issues of interest to twenty-first-century artists and scholars, highlighting Jorn's proposition that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social impact. Perhaps most significantly, this study foregrounds Jorn's assertion that creativity is crucial to subjectivity itself in our increasingly mediated 'Society of the Spectacle.'

London's Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde By David Curtis
2020 | 212 Pages | ISBN: 0861967488 | PDF | 56 MB
This is the story of two short-lived artist-run spaces that are associated with some of the most innovative developments in the arts in Britain in the late 1960s. The Drury Lane Arts Lab (1967-69) was home to the first UK screenings of Andy Warhol's twin-screen 3 hour film Chelsea Girls, challenging exhibitions (John and Yoko / John Latham / Takis / Roelof Louw), poetry and music (first UK performance of Erik Satie's 24-hour Vexations) and fringe theatre (People Show / Freehold / Jane Arden's Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven / Will Spoor Mime Theatre). The Robert Street 'New Arts Lab' (1969-71) housed Britain's first video workshop TVX, the London Filmmakers Co-op's first workshop and a 5-days-a-week cinema devoted to showing new work by moving-image artists (David Larcher / Malcolm Le Grice / Sally Potter / Carolee Schneemann / Peter Gidal). It staged J G Ballard's infamous Crashed Cars exhibition and John & Dianne Lifton's pioneering computer-aided dance/mime performances.The impact of London's Labs led to an explosion of new artist-led spaces across Britain. This book relates the struggles of FACOP (Friends of the Arts Council Operative) to make the case for these new kinds of space and these new art-forms and the Arts Council's hesitant response - in the context of a popular press already hostile to youth culture, experimental art and the 'underground'. With a Foreword by Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern & Contemporary British Art and Archives, Tate Gallery.

The English Theatrical Avant-Garde 1900-1925
English | 2023 | ISBN: 0367470853 | 180 Pages | PDF (True) | 10.4 MB
The English Theatrical Avant-Garde, 1900-1925 unearths an extensive range of hitherto forgotten or ignored theatre practices. In doing so it reveals some of the well-known figures of the early twentieth-century English theatre in a strikingly new light. It fluently describes an intensity of innovation and experiment that together made the Edwardian theatre rather more radical, and rather more queer, than we've ever thought.

Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Film By Agnieszka Kiejziewicz
2019 | 336 Pages | ISBN: 363179813X | PDF | 4 MB
The book shows the connections between Japanese historical avant-garde movements and new Japanese experimental films. The author provides insight into the development of Japanese avant-garde visual culture and experimental aesthetics, also featuring the expanded cinema after 2000. The author focuses on the detailed presentation of the chosen aspects, artists and films of the Japanese avant-garde from its origins to the post-2000 period. The analysis is built around themes, objectives and aesthetics introduced by such artists as Shūji Terayama, Takahiko Iimura, Masao Adachi, Takashi Itō, Toshio Matsumoto, Mako Idemitsu, Japanese feminist filmmakers, video artists and the new wave of experimenting independent directors: Takashi Makino, Rei Hayama, Shinkan Tamaki and Kazuhiro Goshima.

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, "Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan"
English | 2005 | ISBN: 0824827961 | 335 pages | EPUB | 2.1 MB
Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) was one of postwar Japan's most gifted and controversial playwrights/directors. Since his death more than twenty years ago, he has been transformed into a cult hero in Japan. Despite this notoriety, Unspeakable Acts is the first book in any language to analyze the theater of Terayama in depth. It interrogates postwar Japanese culture and theater through the creative work of this unique yet emblematic artist. By situating Terayama in his historical milieu and by using tools derived from Japanese and Western theories of psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and aesthetics, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei has woven a sophisticated and provocative study.

Timothy Brown, Lorena Anton, "Between the Avant-garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present"
English | 2011 | ISBN: 0857450786 | PDF | pages: 306 | 24.9 mb
The wave of anti-authoritarian political activity associated with the term "1968" can by no means be confined under the rubric of "protest," understood narrowly in terms of street marches and other reactions to state initiatives. Indeed, the actions generated in response to "1968" frequently involved attempts to elaborate resistance within the realm of culture generally, and in the arts in particular. This blurring of the boundary between art and politics was a characteristic development of the political activism of the postwar period. This volume brings together a group of essays concerned with the multifaceted link between culture and politics, highlighting lesser-known case studies and opening new perspectives on the development of anti-authoritarian politics in Europe from the 1950s to the fall of Communism and beyond.

Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception By Ryan Bishop, John Phillips
2010 | 248 Pages | ISBN: 0748639888 | PDF | 2 MB
New in Paperback. Examines the tensions between the aims of military technology and modernist aesthetics in relation to perception. This book analyses the operation of mechanical and electronic technologies in connection with two seemingly disparate fields: state-of-the-art military equipment of the 20th and 21st centuries and the experimental art, music and writing of the late-19th and early-20th century. Reading the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Stephane Mallarme, the Italian Futurists and H. G. Wells against Apache attack helicopters, Network-Centric Warfare, satellites, decoys, sirens and radios, this book addresses issues such as targeting, surveillance, visibility and the invisible, broadcast and media, the military body, diasporas, geopolitics and beauty.

Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde by David Cottington | 13.65 MB
English | 542 Pages

Title: Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde
Author: David Cottington
Year: 2022