Neo-Avant-Garde

by David Hopkins (Editor), Editorial Assistant: Anna Katharina Schaffner

The neo-avant-garde of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, is due for a thoroughgoing reassessment. This collection of essays represents the first full-scale attempt to deal with the concept from an interdisciplinary standpoint. A number of essays in this book concentrate on fine art, particularly painting and sculpture, thereby adding significantly to the growing art historical literature in the field, but a number of the contributions also focus on poetry, performance, theatre, film, architecture and music. Given that there are also major essays here dealing with geographical blindspots in current neo-avant-garde studies, with thematic issues such as art's entanglement with gender, mass culture and politics, with key neo-avant-garde publications, and with the purely theoretical problems attaching to the theorisation of the topic, this collection offers a multi-dimensional approach to the subject which is noticeably lacking elsewhere. Taken together these essays represent a consolidated attempt at re-thinking the 'cultural logic' of the immediate post-World War II period. Contents Preface David Introduction I. Art and David 'Art' and 'Life'… and Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris and Neo-Avant-Garde Irony Mark Working in the Gap between Art and Frank O'Hara's Process Poems Anna 'Neo-Dada', 'Junk Aesthetic' and Spectator Participation II. Across Art Guenter Neo-Dada Performance Art Anna Katharina Inheriting the On the Reconciliation of Tradition and Invention in Concrete Poetry R. Bruce The Structural Ruptures and Continuities in Avant-Garde Art III. Centres/ Tania Ø Minimal Requirements of the Post-War Avant-Garde of the 1960s Claus The "Ruptura" Proclaimed by Brazil's Self-Styled "Vanguardas" of the Fifties Richard J. Towards an Aesthetics of Architecture and the Neo-Avant-Garde in 1960s Brazil IV. 'High'/'Low' : K

464 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2006