Constructing An Avant Garde

How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil’s avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups—including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism—but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro, Luís Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman. Martins argues that artists of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. He describes defining episodes in Brazil’s postwar avant-garde, discussing crucial critical texts, including Gullar’s “Theory of the Non-Object,” a phenomenological account of neoconcrete artworks; Oiticica, constructivity, and Mondrian; portraiture, self-portraiture, and identity; the nonvisual turn and missed encounters with conceptualism; and monochrome, manifestos, and engagement. The Brazilian avant-garde’s hijacking of modernism, Martins shows, gained further complexity as artists began to face their international minimalist and conceptualist contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s. Reconfiguring not only art history but their own history, Brazilian avant-gardists were able to face contemporary challenges from a unique—and oblique—standpoint.

Artists and critics regularly enlist theory in the creation and assessment of artworks, but few have scrutinized the art theories themselves. Here, Daniel examines and critiques the norms, assumptions, historical conditions, and institutions that have framed the development and uses of art theory. Spurred by the theoretical claims of Arthur Danto, a leader in the philosophy of the avant-garde, Herwitz reexamines the art and theory of major figures in the avant-garde movement including John Cage, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Andy Warhol.

Artists and critics regularly enlist theory in their creation and assessment of artworks, but few have scrutinized the art theories themselves. Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde is among the first philosophical texts to provide a close encounter with this theoretical tendency in twentieth-century art and aesthetics, exploring the norms, assumptions, historical conditions, and institutions that have framed the development and uses of theory in art. In a series of intricate readings of constructivism, Mondrian, and John Cage, Daniel Herwitz outlines the avant-garde's belief that theory can perfectly prefigure the avant-garde art object and invest it with utopian force. Through similarly insightful treatments of Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and postmodern art and theory, Herwitz demonstrates how the contemporary art world is heir to the avant-garde's theoretical assumptions and practices. In fact, avant-garde art objects live as art only by partly resisting the master theories of their makers and interpreters. Skillfully resisting the lure of grand theory himself, Herwitz urges the art world to be more self-critical and self-reflective about its uses of theory. Making Theory/Constructing Art is as accessible and entertainingly written as it is philosophically incisive. Since the book is both a philosophical and a cultural encounter with theory in twentieth-century art, it will engage all those who have tried to grapple with the inscrutability of the theoretical art muse.

Much admired as a realist painter, English artist Victor Pasmore surprised the art world in 1948 by suddenly directing his efforts toward the making of constructed abstract art. Pasmore was followed by Kenneth and Mary Martin, Adrian Heath, and the sculptor Robert Adams, and the group was later joined by John Ernest and Gillian Wise. This book follows the development of this major avant garde group and explores why they have received so little attention until now. Alastair Grieve draws on personal discussions with these artists over many years and on extensive archival materials, including ephemeral catalogues which are difficult to find today. He offers much new information about the group and their theories, the Continental roots of their constructed abstract art, and their links with such contemporaries as American relief artist Charles Biederman and English constructivist Stephen Gilbert. The book features over 300 illustrations, many in color, and a full chronology and bibliography.

Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde describes the rise and gradual consolidation of the visual arts avant-garde, which came to local and international attention in the 1990s. The book is centered on the critical and aesthetic strategies employed by this avant-garde to repudiate the previous generation’s commitment to modernism and anti-colonialism. In three sections, it highlights the many converging factors, which have pushed this avant-garde to the forefront of the region’s contemporary scene, and places it all in the context of growing dissatisfaction with the post-colonial state and its cultural policies. This generational transition has manifested itself not only in a departure from “traditional” in favor of “new” media (i.e., installation, performance, and video rather than painting and sculpture), but also in the advancement of a “postnationalist postmodernism,” which reaches for diasporic and cosmopolitan frames of reference. Section one outlines the features of a preceding “Creole modernism” and explains the different guises of postnationalism in the region’s contemporary art. In section two, its momentum is connected to the proliferation of independent art spaces and transnational networks, which connect artists across and beyond the region and open up possibilities unavailable to earlier generations. Section three demonstrates the impact of this conceptual and organizational evolution on the selection and exhibition of Caribbean art in the metropole.

"The groundbreaking new study on the early Soviet Union's Higher Art and Technical Studios, known as Vkhutemas, and their pioneering curriculum that has been a source of inspiration for generations of architects, designers, and artists until the present day."--Provided by publisher.

Eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years, each looking at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. Some critics view the postwar avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most insightful art critics and theoreticians of recent decades, argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.This collection contains eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years. Each looks at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. The art movements covered include Nouveau Realisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villegle) art in postwar Germany (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and pop art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham). Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); or he addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman). One of the book's strengths is its systematic, interconnected account of the key issues of American and European artistic practice during two decades of postwar art. Another is Buchloh's method, which integrates formalist and socio-historical approaches specific to each subject.

This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe?s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism? The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists? strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period. ÿ