This collection examines key aesthetic avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century and their relationships with revolutionary politics. The contributors distinguish aesthetic avant-gardes —whose artists aim to transform society and the ways of sensing the world through political means—from the artistic avant-gardes, which focus on transforming representation. Following the work of philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller and Jacques Rancière, the contributors argue that the aesthetic is inherently political and that aesthetic avant-garde art is essential for political revolution. In addition to analyzing Russian constructivsm, surrealism, and Situationist International, the contributors examine Italian futurism's model of integrating art with politics and life, the murals of revolutionary Mexico and Nicaragua, 1960s American art, and the Slovenian art collective NSK's construction of a fictional political state in the 1990s. Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements traces the common foundations and goals shared by these disparate arts communities and shows how their art worked towards effecting political and social change. Contributors. John E. Bowlt, Sascha Bru, David Craven, Aleš Erjavec, Tyrus Miller, Raymond Spiteri, Miško Šuvakovic

This book reflects the most recent research devoted to a systematized perspective and a critical (re)construction of previous theoretical attempts of explaining, justifying and continuing Kuhn’s ingenious hypothesis in arts. Hofstadter, Clignet and Habermas revealed to be the most engaged scholars in solving this aesthetic "puzzled-problem". In this context, the structural similarities between science and arts are attentively evaluated, thus satisfying an older concern attributed to the historical Kuhn-Kubler dispute, extensively commented along the pages of this book. How can we track the matter of rationality and truth in art and aesthetics, inspired by scientific perspectives? Are artistic styles similar to scientific paradigms? Are we entitled to pursue paradigms and masterpieces as rational models in science, respectively in arts? On what possible grounds can we borrow from science notions such as progress and predictability, in the study of the evolution of art and its aesthetic backgrounds? Are the historical dynamics of science and art affected by political factors in the same manner? This book will be of interest to philosophers, but also to historians of science and historians of art alike in the reassessment it provides of recent debates on reshaping the art world using Kuhn's "paradigm shift".

The title of this book, The European Avant-Garde – A Hundred Years Later, implies the European avant-garde took place a century ago, that it is a thing of the past. However, it does not aim to consolidate this position, but to question it. It addresses temporality as the central dimension related to the notion of the avant-garde. The book brings forth original revisions of the theories of the avant-garde, the works of the avant-garde, the idea of the avant-garde as being the vanguard, the leading force of change. It addresses the returning of the avant-garde during the twentieth century and today.

This volume presents a selection of aesthetic and art theoretical writings by the internationally renowned philosopher Aleš Erjavec from the 1990s to the present. Erjavec was an active participant in the artistic revolt in Slovenia throughout the 1980 and became one of the most notable international theorists of late- and post-socialist developments in art. His work also extended to new, emergent forms of contemporary art and visual culture in global art and culture networks. The diverse contexts and artists with which he has engaged gives him a unique critical perspective on major debates in philosophical aesthetics and art theory.

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

The inclusion of this volume in Brill's Transcultural Aesthetics, a book series devoted primarily to multidisciplinary Western and non-Western aesthetics, is indispensable to enrich the nature and scope of contemporary aesthetics. Time and again, many aesthetic controversies have not been adequately addressed, and this has become a common concern among scholars in contemporary aesthetics. This volume therefore seeks to contribute new perspectives to these controversies by shedding light on some of the fresh views among the leading theorists working in the field today.

Exploring common themes in modern art, mathematics, and science, including the concept of space, the notion of randomness, and the shape of the cosmos. This is a book about art—and a book about mathematics and physics. In Lumen Naturae (the title refers to a purely immanent, non-supernatural form of enlightenment), mathematical physicist Matilde Marcolli explores common themes in modern art and modern science—the concept of space, the notion of randomness, the shape of the cosmos, and other puzzles of the universe—while mapping convergences with the work of such artists as Paul Cezanne, Mark Rothko, Sol LeWitt, and Lee Krasner. Her account, focusing on questions she has investigated in her own scientific work, is illustrated by more than two hundred color images of artworks by modern and contemporary artists. Thus Marcolli finds in still life paintings broad and deep philosophical reflections on space and time, and connects notions of space in mathematics to works by Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, and others. She considers the relation of entropy and art and how notions of entropy have been expressed by such artists as Hans Arp and Fernand Léger; and traces the evolution of randomness as a mode of artistic expression. She analyzes the relation between graphical illustration and scientific text, and offers her own watercolor-decorated mathematical notebooks. Throughout, she balances discussions of science with explorations of art, using one to inform the other. (She employs some formal notation, which can easily be skipped by general readers.) Marcolli is not simply explaining art to scientists and science to artists; she charts unexpected interdependencies that illuminate the universe.

Visualizing Fascism argues that fascism was not merely a domestic menace in a few European nations, but arose as a genuinely global phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Contributors use visual materials to explore fascism's populist appeal in settings around the world, including China, Japan, South Africa, Slovakia, and Spain. This visual strategy allows readers to see the transnational rise of the right as it fed off the agitated energies of modernity and mobilized shared political and aesthetic tropes. This volume also considers the postwar aftermath as antifascist art forms were depoliticized and repurposed in the West. More commonly, analyses of fascism focus on Italy and Germany alone and on institutions like fascist parties, but that approach truncates our understanding of the way fascism was indebted to colonialism and internationalism with all their attendant grievances and aspirations. Using photography, graphic arts, architecture, monuments, and film—rather than written documents alone—produces a portable concept of fascism, useful for grappling with the upsurge of the global right a century ago—and today. Contributors. Nadya Bair, Paul D. Barclay, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Maggie Clinton, Geoff Eley, Lutz Koepnick, Ethan Mark, Bertrand Metton, Lorena Rizzo, Julia Adeney Thomas, Claire Zimmerman

A groundbreaking book that describes a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and a modernity that unifies art, politics, and social life. To the extent that Chinese contemporary art has become a global phenomenon, it is largely through the groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Gao Minglu: "China/Avant-Garde" (Beijing, 1989), "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" (Asia Society, New York, 1998), and "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art" (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005) among them. As the first Chinese writer to articulate a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and modernity—one not defined by Western chronology or formalism—Gao Minglu is largely responsible for the visibility of Chinese art in the global art scene today. Contemporary Chinese artists tend to navigate between extremes, either embracing or rejecting a rich classical tradition. Indeed, for Chinese artists, the term "modernity" refers not to a new epoch or aesthetic but to a new nation—modernityinextricably connects politics to art. It is this notion of "total modernity" that forms the foundation of the Chinese avant-garde aesthetic, and of this book. Gao examines the many ways Chinese artists engaged with this intrinsic total modernity, including the '85 Movement, political pop, cynical realism, apartment art, maximalism, and the museum age, encompassing the emergenceof local art museums and organizations as well as such major events as the Shanghai Biennial. He describes the inner logic of the Chinese context while locating the art within the framework of a worldwide avant-garde. He vividly describes the Chinese avant-garde's embrace of a modernity that unifies politics, aesthetics, and social life, blurring the boundaries between abstraction, conception, and representation. Lavishly illustrated with color images throughout, this book will be a touchstone for all considerations of Chinese contemporary art.