Thesis (Ph. D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Advisor: Mary O'Connor. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-213). Also available via World Wide Web.

Le présent travail se fixe pour objet d’étude l’effondrement des limites entre les arts au milieu des années 1960, son lien avec la naissance des avant-gardes et la chute du système des Beaux-Arts. En remontant un fil tendu par Adorno, nous verrons que celle-ci semble suspendre la dialectique de la raison en tant qu’elle met à mal la division de l’art en genres — pendant de la division du travail dans le monde administré. L’ensemble du processus étudié, que nous avons choisi de nommer dissolution des limites entre les arts, nous conduit à remonter en amont des événements liés à ce changement de paradigme, afin d’en repérer les éléments déclencheurs — lesquels semblent contenus, comme en germe, dans les motivations à l’origine de l’éclosion des avant-gardes. Croisant la lecture d’Adorno et de Greenberg, cette analyse cherche, pour ce faire, à isoler des moments structurants, dont certains apparaissent comme des résonances, des échos amplifiés des autres, comme une manière d’en accuser réception : le contexte des années dix, par exemple, dans lequel les constructions cubistes de Picasso font d’ores et déjà trembler les lignes de démarcation des arts en sortant de l’espace confiné de la toile pour visiter celui de la sculpture ; puis celui des années cinquante et soixante, marqué par la catégorie des Specific Objects de Judd, mais aussi par les œuvres de Morris et Rauschenberg. Notre analyse porte également sur les années qui ont suivi cet effondrement des frontières entre les arts et tente de suivre une perspective herméneutique, en empruntant une voie esquissée notamment par Adorno dans L’art et les arts, lequel a observé que cette tendance à « l’effrangement » a fini par jouer un rôle dans l’antagonisme entre le public et l’art contemporain — anticipant les débats qui eurent lieu bien après sa mort, et que l’on retrouve sous le terme de « crise de l’art contemporain » dans les années 1990. Cet axe de recherche nous amène à poser à nouveaux frais la question de l’autonomie de l’art, devenue problématique depuis le passage des Beaux-Arts à l’art, tout particulièrement au cœur de la réception anglo-saxonne de l’esthétique d’Adorno, auteur d’une définition de l’autonomie de l’art tout à fait singulière — paradoxale. Il s'agit donc de commencer à procéder à l’exégèse de textes anglais et américains, qui, remettant au travail cette problématique classique, entendent montrer que la définition qu’en propose Adorno reste opérante lorsqu’on la confronte aux œuvres d’art actuelles. / This thesis is aiming at analyzing the link between the arts and between the art and what is extrinsic to art. The issue is to expand and refine Adorno’s analysis in his book The art and the arts. We will aim to provide a theoretical overview of the collapse of the artistic genres in the mid-sixties, and consider its link with the birth of French Avant-Garde and with the decline of the system of Fine Arts. The whole process that we would like to analyse starts with a mere imbrication of the arts, and reaches its culmination with a proper dislocation of its boundaries, as a result of successive stages that are locatable in the past. This will lead us to examine the stages before the outright collapse of artistic genres, to identify the triggers that ultimatly result in this paradigmatic change. Can we consider that the seeds of this dissolution are already planted in what led to the birth of the Avant-Garde? Is it reasonable to think that the postmodernity was already part of the modernity, as an inevitable shift which finds its fulfillment in the early sixties? Does the movement from the specific to the generic (de Duve) render the Adornian notion of Verfransung obsolete? What kind of “generic alterations” can we identify within the contemporary art? What is the status of non-art in regard to the Adornian negative dialectics? Can one consider that it represents a “stopped dialectics” — a moment of freedom in the dialectics of enlightenment? We will identify some structuring phases — some of which would appear as amplified echos of the others. We wish to continue our analysis from a hermeneutical perspective, and see how this dissolution has played a key role in the antagonism between contemporary art and the public. The issues related to the dissolution of boundaries between the arts will lead us to evaluate and interpret the Adornian arguments regarding the need for autonomy in art. Can we nowadays defend the idea of an autonomy of art? Is it then necessary to adapt its definition in the light of current works of art? Does the adornian conception of autonomy remain relevant? Can we consider that installation or performance perpetuate the exigences of modernism and create what could be called a new and “non-modernist" Avant-Garde?

Apollinaire, Cendrars et Maïakovski vivent une époque de changements qui modifient l’ordre des choses, offrant une mutation dont le progrès technique est l’illustration la plus évidente pour ces poètes qui glorifient les nouveaux moyens de communication comme le train dont le mouvement ininterrompu sert de fil conducteur à tout le poème de Cendrars la Prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France ou comme l’aviation chantée par Apollinaire dans « Zone » et mise en scène par Maïakovski dans Le prolétaire volant. Le voyage devient un thème privilégié de cette poésie résolument tournée vers le mouvement. Entrevoyant une transformation irréversible, ils se trouvent aussi confrontés à un monde nouveau, qu’ils appréhendent dans sa misère, sa violence et son caractère brut. La ville moderne en est l’un des motifs les plus emblématiques. Elle apparaît comme un décor théâtralisé et digne de devenir objet d’une poésie qui se veut novatrice. Chantres de cette modernité naissante, ils se font les témoins voire les porte-parole de l’humanité misérable qui hante ce décor. Apollinaire et Cendrars évoquent souvent les émigrants, populations déracinées, sans patrie, en quête d’un illusoire Eldorado, tandis Maïakovski fait défiler toute une série d’infirmes dans sa tragédie Vladimir Maïakovski tragédie. Si le monde moderne devient objet d’observation, il est aussi cadre de l’errance poétique. A la soif de voyage de Cendrars correspond une problématique interrogation existentielle, alors qu’Apollinaire, entre tradition et modernité, confronte le mal être du mal aimé au monde qui l’entoure. Maïakovski, lui, cherche désespérément, à travers un lyrisme exacerbé, à lutter contre un esprit bourgeois et ignorant de la misère et des transformations du monde et à convaincre de la nécessité d’instaurer la révolution de façon complète. Marqués par la conscience aiguë de la nouveauté, ils se trouvent cependant pris entre un monde ancien, rejeté mais toujours présent, et un avenir incertain et inquiétant. C’est dans ce contexte que se met en place la problématique quête du moi. Le poète se heurte à un monde autre, indifférent qui ne le comprend pas, qu’il cherche à apprivoiser et à façonner tout en construisant une identité bien fragile. De l’observation du monde moderne arpenté par le poète naît une esthétique de la trivialité poétisée dans l’évocation d’une réalité crue, nue sans détour ni euphémisme. Le beau y côtoie le laid, à la suite de Baudelaire qui introduisit le monde moderne dans la poésie. Ainsi l’actualité vécue de façon aiguë fait –elle l’objet de l’attention du poète et devient poésie. Rendre le réel dans son immédiateté induit un lyrisme intense et douloureux où la quête prend la forme d’une plainte, d’une supplique et d’une révolte en même temps qu’elle pose un questionnement sur la poésie, ses formes nouvelles et son rôle dans ce monde moderne. / Apollinaire, Cendrars et Maïakovski lived in an era of changes which initiated a new order of things, bringing about a transformation best illustrated by technical progress in the minds of these poets who glorified the new means of communication such as the train whose steady movement is the main thread of the whole poem by Cendrars Prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, or the plane glorified by Apollinaire in « Zone » or staged by Maïakovski in Le prolétaire Volant. Travelling became the privileged theme of this poetry consecrated to movement. Foreseeing an irreversible transformation, they were confronted with a new world that they grasped through its wretchedness, its violence and its rawness. The modern city is one of their most emblematic motives and it seems like a theatre set deserving of becoming the subject of a new poetry meant to be innovative. As the heralds of this budding modernity, they became the witnesses and even the spokepersons of wretched mankind who haunts this setting. Apollinaire and Cendrars evoke the migrants, the uprooted and stateless populations in quest for an unrealistic Eldorado whereas Maïakovski in his tragedy Vladimir Maïakovski presented a series of disabled people. If the modern world turned into a subject of observation, it is also a frame for poetic wandering. To Cendrars's thirst for travelling corresponds the problematic questioning of existence whereas Apollinaire, between tradition and modernity, opposes the malaise of the unloved one to the surrounding world. For Maiakovski's part, through heightened lyricism, he desperately seeks to struggle against a « bourgeois spirit » which ignores the misery and great changes of the world and to convince of the necessity to bring about an utter revolution. Impregnated by an acute awareness of novelty, they are caught between an old world, rejected but still present, and an uncertain worrisome future. It's within this context that the problem of the quest for the self is outlined. The poet comes up against a different and insensitive world which doesn't understand him, a world he tries to tame and shape while forging a quite fragile identity. An aesthetic of triviality poeticized in the depiction of a gritty, naked reality in an upfront way and with no hint of exaggeration is born of the poet's observation of the modern world. The beautiful is seen beside the ugly, as for Baudelaire who introduced the modern world to poetry. Thus reality experienced in a sharp way is the focus of the poet's attention and turns out to be poetry. Portraying the reality in its immediacy implies an intense and painful lyricism in which the quest turns out to be moaning, a plea and a rebellion as it questions poetry itself, its new forms and its status and role in the modern world.

Composition no 1 de Marc Saporta, Marelle de Julio Cortázar, Le Château des destins croisés d'Italo Calvino et Le Maître du Haut Château de Philip K. Dick. Écrits entre 1962 et 1973, ces quatre romans ont pour point commun l'usage qu'il font de la tradition divinatoire. Dans les trois premiers, la forme romanesque se délite en adoptant la forme des tarots. Quant au dernier roman cité, il fonde son écriture sur des consultations du Yi King, l'oracle de la tradition chinoise. Tant sur le plan politique que littéraire, le moment des années 1960 coïncidence avec une remise en cause radicale de l'autorité. Précédant la mort de l'auteur prophétisée par Barthes, des artistes s'emparent du hasard afin d'affranchir la création de tout arbitraire auctorial. Cette thèse envisage la manière dont les quatre romanciers du corpus exploitent les théories jungiennes (synchronicité, archétypes, etc.) afin de reconsidérer les rôles de l'auteur et du lecteur. En déconstruisant les formes de la linéarité romanesque, ces romans proposent une littérature expérimentale faisant fi des structures usuelles du genre. Entre poétique ludique et mysticisme, l'usage du hasard divinatoire transforme les œuvres en complexes hypertextuels. Mettant au cœur de leur poétique le sujet interprétant, ces romans donnent l'occasion d'interroger les modalités cognitives de l'interaction littéraire ; ce faisant, ils permettent d'appréhender de façon privilégiée les relations transmédiatiques entre littérature et écriture numérique. / Marc Saporta's Composition no 1, Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies, and Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. Written between 1962 and 1973, these four novels have as common denominator their use of oracular traditions. In the first three literary works, the novel form is broken by becoming one with tarot cards. In the last novel mentioned, the Chinese oracle – the I Ching – is the source of the writing process. In both political and literary fields, the 1960's consist in a radical questioning of authority. Prior to Barthes' prophecy of the Death of the Author, artists make use of chance and randomness in order to liberate creation from the arbitrary power of the author. This thesis studies the way the four aforementioned writers try to reconsider the dynamics between reader and writer by using the Jungian theories (synchronicity, archetypes, etc.). By deconstructing the linearity of the novel form, the four books are representative of an experimental literature which shows disregard to genre conventions. Between ludic poetic and mysticism, the novels are made hypertextual by oracular randomness. Focusing on the interpreting reader, the novels investigate the modalities of literary interaction ; this way, they are key materials in understanding the transmedia relations between literature and digital literacy.

In Russia and Argentina modernism arrived well before the advent of socioeconomic modernization, and found societies with restricted civil liberties, only nascent middle classes, and virtually non-existent public spheres. Despite these factors, within a span of some fifty years, Petersburg and Buenos Aires turned into vibrant literary capitals rivaling London, New York, and Paris as centers of literary modernism. This dissertation offers a new understanding of the period by exposing the critical role of publishers and cultural patrons in this extraordinary cultural advancement. I argue that they were able to reformulate their countries’ historically ambivalent positions vis-à-vis Western European civilization by working closely with avant-garde literary groups and viii promoting their literary works that combined sometimes contending, sometimes complementary cosmopolitanism and nationalism. My analysis of the interrelated processes of the development of print culture, national identity, and the literary public sphere in Russia and Argentina is informed by Benedict Anderson’s thinking about nationalism and print culture, Pierre Bourdieu’s treatment of publishers as key participants in cultural production, and the concept of the public sphere as seen by Jürgen Habermas. Close reading of select literary works of the 1920s shows that Russian and Argentine “peripheral” experiences, once transformed into artistic creation, became consonant with cultural practices of international modernism precisely because they combined both cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies. Each of the writers considered—Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Veniamin Kaverin, and Konstantin Fedin—was able to formulate highly original and yet unmistakably national response to modernity. Following the writers’ trajectories from early literary experiments to the works of the late 1920s, when they renounced their youthful deviations and joined the literary (and sometimes even political) establishment, I show how these literary texts renegotiated the issues of national identity by reworking diverse and often “foreign” literary traditions into authentically Russian and Argentine prose. / text

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>My dissertation studies the intersection of popular entertainment and the visual arts in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century and the dialogue that formed between this subculture and the avant-garde factions of Paris and Italy. While this project will focus on the Italian Futurist Gino Severini (1883-1966), it is not conceived of as a monograph. Instead I will use Severini as a case study to help make sense of a complicated world in which the boundaries between bohemia and the bourgeoisie, masculinity and femininity, and art and popular culture are transgressed and blurred. Severini is particularly well suited to this discussion because nearly all of the 170 paintings, sketches, and pastels that he produced between the time that he arrived in Paris and the outbreak of the First World War take as their subject a prime example of Parisian popular culture--Montmartre's dance-halls. My study will address how form and content interrelate in these works, analyzing the ongoing evolution of his style and the manner in which he developed his imagery to cater to both commercial and avant-garde audiences. It will also seek to make sense of the reception of Severini's work both in France and elsewhere. In order to make sense of his artistic career and to divine the importance of his life and work to the greater political and cultural environment of early twentieth-century Europe, I will also explore Severini's actual participation in dance-hall culture, his self-fashioning as a dandy and a foreigner, and his attempt to find a niche for himself in Paris while still maintaining a foothold in the Italian avant-garde. Gino Severini's unique posturing within the culture of Bohemian Paris and the rich visual record that he left behind provide a perfect platform from which to deepen our understanding of the multitude of factors influencing the Parisian avant-garde and its subsequent impact on avant-gardes throughout the rest of the Western world.</p> / Dissertation

Photomontage has more to do with film than with any other art form - they have in common the technique of montage. (Sergei Tretyakov) By considering that photomontage and film use the technique of cutting and gluing as dominant artistic device, and that montage, a technique unifying art and technology for the first time, emerged as a dominant artistic feature of the avantgarde, this thesis will explore the ideological and perceptual implications of its advent in avant-garde art and film. The technological advances of the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly the advent of photography, allowed avantgarde artists to break free from traditional concepts of artistic production – they dispensed with the old criteria of uniqueness, originality, handicraft and personal style. At a time when many avant-garde artists abruptly ceased to paint, photomontage emerged as the privileged locus for a caesura with traditional art forms. Photomontage envisioned film aesthetics insofar as it combines and juxtaposes images of various perspectival planes and angles (Raoul Hausmann described his early photomontages as “motionless moving pictures”). A corresponding observation can be made on the use of montage in cinema, a technique which crucially underpins the illusion of movement created through the succession of photographic stills. The present thesis will investigate photomontage and film in order to examine the effect technological reproduction played in revolutionising artistic production, perception and ideology – where the technique and philosophy of montage was key.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

The early twentieth-century avant-garde has cast a long shadow over the popular imagination as producers of manifestos, public scandals, and some of the most enduring art and literature of the last century. In this study, I examine the works of three poets who are not only considered leading avant-gardists, but who are foundational to how both popular consciousness and academic scholarship have understood the avant-garde’s theory and practice: Guillaume Apollinaire, F. T. Marinetti, and Ezra Pound. In particular, this study focuses on the recurring themes of prophecy and apocalypse in their work. These themes occur through reference to prophetic and apocalyptic literary or mythical figures, but also through stylistic innovations such as the use of literary personae or the attempt to synthesise diverse artistic forms. Focusing on these themes allows this study to re-engage the question of how these poets, and the avant-garde more broadly, regarded their practice as a social act. Using a comparative methodology in this thesis, prophecy is viewed not simply as a declamatory literary style that foretells the future, but as a particular kind of social relationship to an audience that is at turns mutually supportive and antagonistic. Similarly, apocalyptic thought is presented not merely as an expectation or belief in the end of the world, but as a specific method of imagining a new world that is, in spite of itself, dependent upon the social world of the present. Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound were major figures in the so-called ‘Pre-war Avant-Garde’ having established their reputations in the decade prior to World War I. While they each began formulating and proclaiming their views on aesthetics prior to the war, the experience of war had a profound impact on all three. Accordingly, this thesis examines a number of poems from Apollinaire’s two major collections: Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918), the latter containing significant reflections on avant-gardism and war. Marinetti acted as a journalist in the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912, which inspired the work central to this study: his Futurist novel-in-verse Le Monoplan du Pape (1912). Pound, unlike Apollinaire and Marinetti, did not participate in World War I, and this study explores his sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a long rumination on art, war, and his engagement with Imagism and Vorticism, but also analyses poems from his collections Personae (1908), Ripostes (1912), and Lustra (1916). This study examines how the acute crisis of the war pressed each of these poets to reconsider their view of the poet-as-prophet in society. In doing so it explores the ethical or political implications of avant-garde aesthetics influenced by and as a response to war. This study also closely compares these poets’ works to the biblical literature from which they frequently derived prophetic and apocalyptic themes. Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound’s relationship to religion, particularly Christianity, spanned from ambivalence to hostility, but they each engage biblical literature in unique and unorthodox ways. While these poets all sought to be identifiably modern, this study demonstrates the ways in which they attempted to recover values from biblical literature that each felt was necessary to establish the independence and autonomy of contemporary art and literature. Therefore, this study’s comparative framework is intended to engage the conversation over the spiritual, religious, or transcendent values to which avant-garde art aspired. And drawing significantly from the social theories of art, religion, and culture developed by Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis contributes to the study of avant-gardism as a social, as well as aesthetic, phenomenon.

George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art satisfies necessary and sufficient conditions for definition, but by leaving evaluation open cannot address artistic capacities to outstrip the usefulness of the theory for appreciating the concept of art comprehensively or meaningfully. Artworks that are known to members of the central and peripheral artworld seep into the general purview of the population at large as known “great works” of art. Upon examination of works that garner significant cultural influence, works broadly appreciated as great works, we find that their resistance to Dickie’s concept of “the artworld” and its associated behaviors is that which makes them conspicuously significant.