Description
Book SynopsisThis collection categorizes aesthetic avant-garde art as art that seeks to politically transform society and argues that such art is essential for political revolution. It provides seven in-depth analyses of twentieth-century aesthetic avant-garde art movements and examines them in relation to revolutionary politics.
Trade Review"At the crossroads of the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art, a collision occurred that released the energy fueling the various avant-gardes of the 20th century. However unfulfilled their quest to revolutionize both art and life may now seem, the shock waves it set off still reverberate in our own time. Focusing on both familiar and unfamiliar avant-garde movements around the world, the provocative texts assembled by Ales Erjavec in this scintillating collection demonstrate that they may still trigger new explosions in the years to come." -- Martin Jay, coeditor of Empires of Vision: A Reader "This is a quite remarkable collection that profiles the art/politics relationship as it was concretely negotiated at key moments throughout the twentieth century. No other study enables us to look so closely to see just what the art/politics relation amounted to-or, more exactly, what was the real relationship between artistic practice and revolutionary social transformation." -- Terry Smith, author of Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction. Aleš Erjavec 1
1. Politics as the Art of the Impossible:
The Heteronomy of Italian Futurist Art-Action / Sascha Bru 19
2. 5 X 5 = 25? The Science of Constructivism / John E. Bowlt 42
3. Convulsive Beauty: Surrealism as Aesthetic Revolution / Raymond Spiteri 80
4. Aesthetic Avant-Gardes and Revolutionary Movements from Modern Latin America / David Craven 113
5. All along the Watchtower: Aesthetic Revolution in the United States during the 1960s / Tyrus Miller 145
6. From Unitary Urbanism to the Society of the Spectacle: The Situationist Aesthetic Revolution / Raymond Spiteri 178
7. NSK: Cricial Phenomenology of the State / Miško Šuvakovic 215
Conclusion. Avant-Gardes, Revolutions, and Aesthetics / Aleš Erjavec 255
Bibliography 287
Contributors 311
Index 313
