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Moritz Retzsch's Prints in Circulation
In a new approach to Goethe's “Faust I”, Evanghelia Stead extensively discusses Moritz Retzsch's twenty-six outline prints (1816) and how their spin-offs made the unfathomable play available to larger reader communities through copying and extensive distribution circuits, including bespoke gifts. The images amply transformed as they travelled throughout Europe and overseas, revealing differences between countries and cultures but also their pliability and resilience whenever remediated.
This interdisciplinary investigation evidences the importance of print culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nations involved in competition and conflict. Retzsch's foundational set crucially engenders parody, and inspires the stage, literature, and three-dimensional objects, well beyond common perceptions of print culture's influence.
This study was facilitated by the Institut Universitaire de France / IUF. .
This interdisciplinary investigation evidences the importance of print culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nations involved in competition and conflict. Retzsch's foundational set crucially engenders parody, and inspires the stage, literature, and three-dimensional objects, well beyond common perceptions of print culture's influence.
This study was facilitated by the Institut Universitaire de France / IUF. .
Moritz Retzsch's Prints in Circulation
In a new approach to Goethe's “Faust I”, Evanghelia Stead extensively discusses Moritz Retzsch's twenty-six outline prints (1816) and how their spin-offs made the unfathomable play available to larger reader communities through copying and extensive distribution circuits, including bespoke gifts. The images amply transformed as they travelled throughout Europe and overseas, revealing differences between countries and cultures but also their pliability and resilience whenever remediated.
This interdisciplinary investigation evidences the importance of print culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nations involved in competition and conflict. Retzsch's foundational set crucially engenders parody, and inspires the stage, literature, and three-dimensional objects, well beyond common perceptions of print culture's influence.
This study was facilitated by the Institut Universitaire de France / IUF. .
This interdisciplinary investigation evidences the importance of print culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nations involved in competition and conflict. Retzsch's foundational set crucially engenders parody, and inspires the stage, literature, and three-dimensional objects, well beyond common perceptions of print culture's influence.
This study was facilitated by the Institut Universitaire de France / IUF. .
Abstract
This essay discusses a group of anglophone artists of the pre-First World War period who not only assimilated Parisian avant-garde practices but took the plunge of attempting to make their careers in Paris itself in the decade before 1915. The constellation of questions, both historical and theoretical, that this initiative raises provides the framework for an analysis that offers both a detailed materialist history of the emergence, consolidation and diversification of the formation of the avant-garde in these respective fields and a theoretical understanding of their dynamics—and, through this, of the character of the then emergent European artistic avant-garde.
Abstract
This paper explores how classical antiquity was dealt with by Greek radical postmodernism of the late twentieth century. It focuses on the work of the renowned writer Nanos Valaoritis, whose short story A Classical Education (1990) ironically and playfully summarizes the disenchantment, confusion, sense of inadequacy and need for transcending antiquity. The following issues are studied: a) postmodernist visualization of antiquity; b) the ‘situational’ classicism activated by aesthetic conversion (détournement) of the ‘classics’; c) anti-modernism as a critique of Greek modernists. The term ‘ “equarrent” classicism’, coined by Valaoritis, is introduced as a process of ‘paralogical’ conditioning of the classics by post-colonial contemporaneity.
Abstract
The categories of ‘art’ and ‘life’ play a central role in the critical reception of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which have predominantly been read as a generalized, “blithely affirmative” and even “faintly embarrassing” attempt to fuse the two. This paper attempts to rethink the definition and relation of these two categories in Kaprow’s work. Rather than an uncritical attempt to fuse art and life, I suggest, Kaprow’s Happenings developed an increasingly complex, branching and networked structure, capable of staging a plurality of different modes of interaction between work and world. This paper explores both the modes and the contexts of these interactions in three of Kaprow’s Happenings of the 1960s.
Abstract
This article concerns Hugo Ball’s artistic practice in performing arts, extending from his prewar years in Expressionist theater to his performances at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916–1917. In it, I examine how discourses on the crisis of modernity emerge in Ball’s theatrical practice, focusing on the performer’s physical presence in Ball’s performances and theoretical writings. To scrutinize these themes in a wider context of political and cultural discourses on modernity, I discuss the notions conceptualized by Ball and other avant-gardists concerning time and history, illustrating Ball’s view on modernity and German society while providing insight into his performative practice.
Abstract
A key aspect of avant-garde practice is the critique of the relation between medium and genre. Following Cage’s chance-procedural experiments, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell explored a radical repurposing of medium as technology, transforming TV and radio from sites of broadcast performance to sources of indeterminate electronic sound and image. This in turn fed into a reconception of the verbo-visuo dichotomy as text-effect, or cinemato/graphy, and a parallel conceptualisation of text as sites of transmission. While new media tends towards instantaneous full-immersion virtual reality, mimetic technologies remain haunted by what does not transmit—between sound/image, speech/writing, and in the work of erasure, silence, blankness and noise (all of which acquire the status of aesthetic information). In this relation I propose to examine a piece nominally cast as “cinema”: Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), a 79-minute poetic meditation in the voices of Jarman, John Quentin, Nigel Terry and Tilda Swinton over a monochrome blue screen (inspired by Yves Klein’s Symphonie Monotone and the tonal quality of IKB). The production of Blue, in the form ostensibly of both a “transmission error” and a “radio picture,” speaks to the idea of invisible cinema. In doing so, Blue harks back to Guy Debord’s anti-cinematic pronouncement ‘there’s no more cinema, cinema’s dead’: a blank cinema broadcasting from beyond the grave.
Abstract
This article examines the history of photography in the Soviet Union through the work of three women photographers from different generations and republics: Olga Ignatovich (1905–1984), Valentina Kulagina (1902–1987), and Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011). It traces how these photographers, whose work in Russia and Latvia spanned from the 1920s through the 1970s, reconciled their oeuvres with the complex—and often competing—legacies of art and photography movements under socialism. Their choices of subject matter, form, and means of distribution present a case study of how women photographers shaped the creation of the Soviet photographic aesthetic through a combination of post-revolutionary avant-garde practices and elements of Socialist Realism.