An inquiry into the voyage of avant-garde within the domains of art and architecture makes it evident that avant-garde is ambiguous in meaning as a word, a term, a phenomenon and a concept. This study aims to decipher avant-garde and to offer a map for its conceptualization in architecture. Taken not as a monolithic statement but as a unitary concept incorporating a number of subjects and formations for granted, in this study, architectural avant-garde is conceptualized as diverse expressions of activated energy of various subjects that reveal completely different attitudes and productions. Unfolding the concept in different dimensions, this study is an endeavor to delve deeper into various layers of theoretical and historical formations / to form a framework for conceptualizing architectural avant-garde through scanning the twentieth-century avant-gardes / to focus on the avant-garde formations of the 1960s by applying this conceptual framework, and the debate on their receptions in the present architectural context of Turkey. Being on the verge of architecture, the avant-gardes during the 1960s, namely Constant Nieuwenhuys, Yona Friedman, Japanese Metabolists, Archigram, Archizoom, and Superstudio, point out that architecture is both an intellectual activity and a physical production. Projections and resonances of these avant-gardes in the Turkish architectural context of the subsequent periods are trail blazed through the expressions of a group of receiving subjects from the Turkish scene of architecture. Hence, this study offers to lay a common ground for debating on the limits of architecture by forming not only the topography of architectural avantgarde in this era, but also a &amp / #8216 / supra-discourse&amp / #8217 / on architectural avant-garde.

No description available.

Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991) was a Juilliard-trained cellist whose life and work made an indelible mark on the development of the American avant-garde. In her career, Moorman acted as a performer, collaborator, composer, administrator and muse. She solely founded the inaugural New York Avant Garde Festival, and subsequently directed fifteen of these festivals between 1963 and 1980, the feat for which she is most widely acknowledged today. Yet, her revolutionary performance practice, which blurred the lines between her life, her body, and her work, and brought into focus the dynamics of corporeality, the feminine body, female nudity and sexuality, and gendered politics within the contexts of musical performance, has so far escaped serious consideration in the written histories of the American avant-garde. This dissertation describes the nature of Moorman's practice as one that evolved to become inherently and irrevocably embodied, explores how this approach fell at odds with the pervasive avant-garde philosophies of music, and illustrates how her work troubles even a feminist musicological analysis. Further, through a contemporary critique of Moorman's oeuvre which centralizes the social, cultural, and political implications of her body in performance as integral to the work, this project offers a retrospective visibility to the artist which allows for a reframing of her practice as foundational to the aesthetic development of the postwar musical avant-garde. By way of these efforts, Moorman's legacy is presented as one that is both historically significant and vital to current and future musicological discourse.

This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian Avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.

No description available.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

anekdota is an exploration of the form of short short fiction. The exploration contains original works of fiction as short as five words and as long as twelve-hundred words. The exploration seeks new forms for fiction by frustrating and manipulating our traditional sense of story structure. At times, the exploration also investigates a form of conceptual art known as "found language" whereby original material is created by transforming, reframing, and collaging previously published material. anekdota translates from the Greek as "unpublished things." / by Scott Wood. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011.

This thesis offers a periodization of the present according to which contemporary art and visual culture are understood to be symptomatic of an increasingly pervasive pessimistic social, political and ecological outlook. This pessimism I will claim is what is authentically new about our contemporary cultural forms, which are directed towards a particular form of humour and stupidity. Core elements in the periodization include the limitation of imaginative horizons expressed in the well-known remark of Fredric Jameson’s that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as well as the pervasive sense that nature is in a state of perpetual and endemic crisis and the idea that modern computing technology is making us stupider than we have ever been before. I argue that these issues are symptomatic of what Gilles Deleuze, in 1990, termed the societies of Control – a world of corporate power, ubiquitous computing, data extraction and financial capitalism that has intensified since its early diagnosis. However, dominant narratives of art and visual culture continue to theorize artistic production according to traditionally avant-garde categories of resistance, criticality, transgression and subversion. This presumes art to have an agency that is difficult to imagine in the current social situation. In this respect, the thesis in part constitutes a critical reflection on the pressures placed upon our existing models of art and visual culture - for example, and centrally, the idea of an ‘avant-garde’ - by current social and technological conditions. Building on these observations, the thesis proposes a new model of contemporary art and visual culture that has no agency: images under control that are formed, as epiphenomena, by technological apparatuses of Control; studying examples such as extreme sports stunts, internet memes, online trolls, bad quality jpegs and impassive ‘artworks’. The purpose is to ask what value we can place on these emergent cultural forms, which seem to mirror, reflect and reiterate a pessimistic worldview deeply entrenched in the societies of Control.

This essay offers both a historical analysis of twentieth century avant-garde practices relating to representation in music, and a prescriptive model for contemporary methods of composition. I address the taxonomy problem in classical music, clarifying the ontological divide identified by German musicologist Michael Rebhahn Contemporary Classical music and New Music. I demonstrate how neoliberalism has developed a Global Style (Foster 2012) of "Light Modernity,” evident in both contemporary architecture and music alike. The central problem facing composition today is the fetishization of materials, ultimately derived from music's refusal to allow the question of representation to be addressed. I argue that composers have largely sought to define noise as sound-in-itself, eliminating the possibilities of representation in the process. Proposing instead that composers should strive to tackle representation head-on in the 21st century, I show how Jacques Rancière provides a model in which noise and sound—representation and abstraction—function in a conjoined, yet non-homogenized aesthetic regime. Governed by what he calls the "pensiveness of the image,” it allows for a renewed art form that rejects repetition and neoliberalism, re-connecting to the spirit of the avant-garde without slavishly echoing either its outmoded aesthetics or dogmatic philosophies.

This dissertation reexamines the art-into-life narrative of the historical avant-gardes through an analysis of a set of experimental life practices established by artists across Dada, Orphism, and Surrealism. Focusing on Tristan Tzara’s performances of identity, Sonia Delaunay’s fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, my project proposes a broader envisioning of avant-garde material culture to examine the ways in which artists creatively produced an “art of living” in relation to the normative types of “lifestyle” produced contemporaneously in France during the years 1910-1930. Rooted in original archival research and interdisciplinary in focus, my discussion of these artists is centered on three distinct sites within material culture (the manifesto, advertising, the office) and reveals how these activities at times challenge and at times replicate various dominant discourses. The first chapter examines how Samuel Rosenstock became the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Specifically, I focus on Tzara’s elaboration of himself through the delivery and subsequent publication of his manifestos, Sept manifestes dada (1924), which performatively cite and repeat his name throughout. Discussed alongside additional publications and events throughout Paris Dada, I detail how Tzara’s well known critique of language is geared toward a production of subjectivity that refuses to cohere to the types of categorical identity dominant within France at the time, including those of national, racial, and ethnic classification, particularly as they circumscribed the artist within the popular press. In the second chapter, I consider Sonia Delaunay’s early simultaneous dresses (1913) and the development of her commercial fashion business, Maison Delaunay (1924-1931), analyzing in particular the ways in which Delaunay deliberately intertwined her image with her business practices of publicity, from branding and advertisements to fashion photography. Elaborating the ways in which these practices evolved within the gendered constraints of the artist’s own everyday life as well as the broader feminization of the decorative arts, I argue that Delaunay strategically negotiates normative forms of marketing and commercialism in order to gain visibility and ultimately recognition as an artist. My third chapter provides the first in-depth material history of the Bureau de recherches surréalistes, which operated in Paris from October 1924 to April 1925. Focusing on the Bureau’s daily Cahier de la permanence, its promotional photographs, and press announcements, I detail the ways in which the Bureau became a site of debate among the Surrealists for issues concerning office labor and governance. Elaborating the tensions between the Surrealist pursuit of revolutionary action and the need for workplace leadership and control, I position how the daily procedures of the Bureau overlap with the rise of standardized office practices as outlined in contemporaneous trade journals and management theories. Together, these creative, material practices offer a new narrative of the avant-garde endeavor to merge art with life. Here, Dada becomes an identity, Orphism becomes a business, and Surrealism becomes a workplace, each with its own political uncertainties, each simultaneously challenging and upholding varying historical norms, each serving as an alternative to both pure critique and pure affirmation. Within this discussion, the traditional concepts of an avant-garde politics (revolution, utopia, and anti-capitalism) give way to a greater consideration of ethical practices of self-making. “The Art of Living in the Historical Avant-Garde” thus reveals the integration of art and life as neither utopian pursuit nor historical failure but rather as a series of actual life practices ambiguously enmeshed within a terrain marked by nationalism, consumerism, and bureaucracy.