Diasporic Avant-Gardes draws into dialogue two differing traditions of poetic practice: the diasporic and the avant-garde. This interdisciplinary collection examines the unacknowledged affinities (and crucial differences) between avant-garde and diasporic formal strategies and social formations. The essays foreground the creation of experimental forms and investigate the specific contexts of cultural displacement and language use that inform their poetics.

What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine—from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks—to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.

An exploration of avant-garde games that builds upon the formal and political modes of contemporary and historical art movements. The avant-garde challenges or leads culture; it opens up or redefines art forms and our perception of the way the world works. In this book, Brian Schrank describes the ways that the avant-garde emerges through videogames. Just as impressionism or cubism created alternative ways of making and viewing paintings, Schrank argues, avant-garde videogames create alternate ways of making and playing games. A mainstream game channels players into a tightly closed circuit of play; an avant-garde game opens up that circuit, revealing (and reveling in) its own nature as a game. We can evaluate the avant-garde, Schrank argues, according to how it opens up the experience of games (formal art) or the experience of being in the world (political art). He shows that different artists use different strategies to achieve an avant-garde perspective. Some fixate on form, others on politics; some take radical positions, others more complicit ones. Schrank examines these strategies and the artists who deploy them, looking closely at four varieties of avant-garde games: radical formal, which breaks up the flow of the game so players can engage with its materiality, sensuality, and conventionality; radical political, which plays with art and politics as well as fictions and everyday life; complicit formal, which treats videogames as a resource (like any other art medium) for contemporary art; and complicit political, which uses populist methods to blend life, art, play, and reality—as in alternate reality games, which adapt Situationist strategies for a mass audience.

Edited by ?ukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang, 1,2,3? Avant-Gardes includes texts by David Crowley, Steven Ball and David Curtis, Anselm Franke, Leire Vergara, Jan Verwoert, Axel John Wieder and Micha? Wolinski. Artist pages by Pawe? Althamer and Artur ?mijewski, Bernadette Corporation, Matthew Buckingham, Judith Hopf and Katrin Pesch, Igor Krenz, Jonathan Monk, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, and Wilhelm Sasnal complete this compendium as a contribution toward an extended examination of the history and practice of experimental filmmaking and art.Artists: Akademia Ruchu, Antosz & Andzia, Pawe? Althamer/Artur ?mijewski, Piotr Andrejew, Bernadette Corporation, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Matthew Buckingham, Bogdan Dziworski, Marcin Gi'ycki, Janusz Haka, Oskar Hansen, Judith Hopf / Katrin Pesch, Tadeusz Junak, Jacques de Koning, Igor Krenz, Grzegorz Krolikiewicz, Zo'a Kulik, Pawe? Kwiek, Przemys'aw Kwiek, Natalia LL, Jolanta Marcolla, Jonathan Monk, Ewa Partum, Andrzej Paw'owski, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Jozef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczy'ski, Zygmunt Rytka, Wilhelm Sasnal, Jadwiga Singer, Zdzis'aw Sosnowski, Mieczys'aw Szczuka , Micha? Tarkowski, Stefan & Franciszka Themerson, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ryszard Wa'ko, Jan S. Wojciechowski, Krzysztof Zar'bski, Florian Zeyfang

A philosopher and an artist place the phenomenon of avant garde in different perspectives. They wonder how avant garde artists navigate the cultural, financial and technological challenges in past and present. They draw the conclusion that artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Questions such as “How do you imagine Latin America?” and “What should American art be?” issued by avant-garde magazines like Imán, a Latin American periodical based in Paris, and Cuba’s Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and readers all grappled with the concept of “America,” particularly in relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like “American art,” as well as “modernism” and “avant-garde,” were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the Renaissance paragone, or “comparison of the arts,” through the rise of enquêtes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole indicates how they helped shape artists’ and writers’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive archival research, this book reorients our understanding of modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole’s original and compellingly crafted work.

A history of the Czechoslovakian military’s connection to some of the nation’s most innovative and subversive cinema. During the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet-led invasion and occupation that followed, Czechoslovakia’s Army Film studio was responsible for some of the most politically subversive and aesthetically innovative films of the period. Although the studio is remembered primarily as a producer of propaganda and training films, some notable New Wave directors began their careers there, making films that considerably enrich the history of that movement. Alice Lovejoy examines the institutional and governmental roots of postwar Czechoslovak cinema and provides evidence that links the Army Film studio to Czechoslovakia’s art cinema. By tracing the studio’s unique institutional dimensions and production culture, Lovejoy explores the ways in which the “military avant-garde” engaged in dialogue with a range of global film practices and cultures. (The print version of the book includes a DVD featuring sixteenth short films produced by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense. The additional media files are not available on the eBook.) “Alice Lovejoy’s revelatory study of the cinema culture wrought by the Czechoslovak Army Film studio is a cause for celebration among both cinephiles and media scholars. . . . Lovejoy’s curatorial enterprise brings these fascinating films to us for fresh examination. Seeing these artful army films nearly half a century later opens our eyes to work that requires us to reassess what we thought we knew about documentary, new waves, and world cinema itself.” —Dan Streible, New York University “Lovejoy restores these sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and always innovative films to their proper place in film history, while explaining the unique cultural politics that allowed them to blossom beneath the noses of the Stalinist government.” —Tom Gunning, University of Chicago “Filled with surprises for readers who thought they knew their Czech film history, this insightful book refutes many received ideas about Eastern European cultural politics during the Cold War and sketches a complex and nuanced relationship between artists and the socialist state.” —Rick Prelinger, UC Santa Cruz