Ruptures and Continuities in Avant-Garde Art

465 Pages·2006·2.62 MB·English

by  David Hopkins

NEO-AVANT-GARDE
AVANT-GARDE
CRITICAL STUDIES
20
Editor
Klaus Beekman
Associate Editors
Sophie Berrebi, Ben Rebel,
Jan de Vries, Willem G. Weststeijn
International Advisory Board
Henri Béhar, Hubert van den Berg,
Peter Bürger, Ralf Grüttemeier,
Hilde Heinen, Leigh Landy
Founding Editor
Fernand Drijkoningen†
NEO-AVANT-GARDE
Edited by
David Hopkins
Editorial Assistant
Anna Katharina Schaffner
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Martin Puchner’s essay appears in a different form in ‘Poetry of the
Revolution : Marx, Manifestoes and the Avant-Gardes ( Princeton
University Press, 2006 ) and appears courtesy Princeton University Press.
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
All titles in the Avant Garde Critical Studies series (from 1999 onwards) are
available to download from the Ingenta website http://www.ingenta.com
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN-10: 90-420-2125-X
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2125-9
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS

Preface i x

David Hopkins
Introduction 1

I. ART AND LIFE

David Hopkins
‘Art’ and ‘Life’… and Death: Marcel Duchamp,
Robert Morris and Neo-Avant-Garde Irony 19

Mark Silverberg
Working in the Gap between Art and Life:
Frank O’Hara’s Process Poems 37

Anna Dezeuze
‘Neo-Dada’, ‘Junk Aesthetic’ and Spectator Participation 49

II. ACROSS ART FORMS

Günter Berghaus
Neo-Dada Performance Art 75

Anna Katharina Schaffner
Inheriting the Avant-Garde: On the Reconciliation of
Tradition and Invention in Concrete Poetry 97

R. Bruce Elder
The Structural Film:
Ruptures and Continuities in Avant-Garde Art 119
vi Table of Contents
III. CENTRES/PERIPHERIES

Tania Ørum
Minimal Requirements of the
Post-War Avant-Garde of the 1960s 145

Claus Clüver
The “Ruptura” Proclaimed by
Brazil’s Self-Styled “Vanguardas” of the Fifties 161

Richard J. Williams
Towards an Aesthetics of Poverty:
Architecture and the Neo-Avant-Garde in 1960s Brazil 197
IV. ‘HIGH’/‘LOW’

Keith Aspley
The Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde and Radio:
Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault 223

Ben Highmore
Home Furnishings: Richard Hamilton,
Domesticity and ‘Post-Avant-Gardism’ 243

V. BODY/GENDER

Katharine Swarbrick
Gender Trouble? Body Trouble?
Reinvestigating the Work of Marisol Escobar 263

Gavin Butt
Joe Brainard’s Queer Seriousness, or,
How to Make Fun out of the Avant-Garde 277
Table of Contents vii
VI. DISCOURSE/ POLITICS

Michael Corris
The Dialogical Imagination:
The Conversational Aesthetic of Conceptual Art 301
Frances Stracey
Destruktion RSG-6: Towards a Situationist Avant-Garde Today 311
VII. DISSEMINATION

Friedrich W. Block
“Movens” or The Aesthetics of Movement
as a Programmatic Perspective 333

Martin Puchner
The Avant-Garde is Dead; Long Live the Avant-Garde! 351
VIII. THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS

Hubert F. van den Berg
Towards a “Reconciliation of Man and Nature”. Nature and
Ecology in the Aesthetic Avant-Garde of the Twentieth Century 371

Martin J. C. Dixon
“Blackbirds rise from a field...”: Production, Structure
and Obedience in John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing 389

Dafydd Jones
“Jeder kann Dada”: The Repetition, Trauma
and Deferred Completion of the Avant-Garde 403

List of Illustrations 423

Abstracts 427

Contributors 437

Index 445
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PREFACE

This volume of essays represents the outcome of a conference titled
‘Mapping the Neo-Avant-Garde’ which took place at the University of
Edinburgh between 23rd–25th September 2005. Most of the
contributors took part in that conference, but I have commissioned
three new essays (from Richard Williams, Anna Katharina Schaffner
and Martin Dixon). Needless to say, the essays in the book often
depart considerably from their original form as papers, but the
affirmative ethos of this collection as a whole owes much to the spirit
of that conference. The fact that the event was so constructive in tone
was remarkable given that it took place so shortly after the tragically
sudden and unexpected death of Dietrich Scheunemann, the instigator
of the research project on the European avant-garde at the University
of Edinburgh which reaches its conclusion with the current volume.
‘Mapping the Avant-Garde’ was the fourth in a sequence of
conferences at Yale and Edinburgh concerned with re-defining the
theorisation of the concept of the avant-garde. (The first conference at
Yale resulted in the publication ‘European Avant-Garde: New
Perspectives’ in Rodopi’s ‘Avant Garde: Critical Studies’ series [no.
15, ed. Scheunemann, 2000], and the outcomes of the previous two
conferences at Edinburgh are ‘Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde’ [no
17, ed. Scheunemann, 2005] and ‘Avant-Garde Film’, to be published
later this year.) Everybody involved in the conference felt Dietrich’s
loss very deeply, and it was only due to the commitment and tenacity
of certain of his former students, notably Dr Anna Katharina
Schaffner and Dr Ruth Hemus, that I was able to go ahead with the
conference which I had originally planned in collaboration with
Dietrich. Naturally the character of the event changed fairly rapidly
with my own bias as an art historian becoming much more apparent.
The strongly interdisciplinary ethos of the event, however, which I
discuss in the introduction, still spoke of its intellectual roots in a
department of comparative literature.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of several individuals and
funding bodies in bringing this collection of essays to fruition. I am