CORNER's Avant-Garde Reader
Selection of invaluable books
in the field of the avant-garde published in the 1990s.
Juan Manuel Bonet. Diccionario de
las Vanguardias en España 1907-1936. Alianza Editorial,
1995. ISBN: 84-206-9455-X.
Este volumen reúne el fascinante mundo de la vanguadia
española en las artes plásticas, la arquitectura,
la fotografía, la poesía, la novela, el teatro,
el ensayo, el diseño gráfico, la música,
la danza y el cine. Ningún campo queda fuera de esta obra
en la que se subrayan las conexiones más inesperadas,
y en la que junto a figuras mayores (Picasso, Juan Gris, Julio
González, Torres García, Miró, Dalí,
Ramón Gómez de la Serna...) desfila una multitud
de personajes menos conocidos, algunos de ellos extremadamente
atractivos. Un libro, en definitva, de indispensable consulta
y el primer diccionario completo y riguroso de las vanguardias
en España 1907-1936.
Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen
Raaberg, eds. Surrealism and Women. The MIT Press, 1991.
ISBN: 0-262-53098-8.
This book presents an important revision of surrealism by focusing
on the works of women surrealists and their strategies to assert
positions as creative subjects within a movement than regarded
woman primarily as an object of masculine desire or fear. Sixteen
essays by Gwen Raaberg, Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, Ines Hedges,
Gisèle Prassinos, Renée Riese Hubert, Robert J.
Balton and Gloria Feman Orenstein, among others.
Nadia Choucha. Surrealism & the
Occult. Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic
Movement. Destiny Books, 1992. ISBN: 0-89281-373-3.
In their attempt to tap the unconscious regions of the mind,
the surrealists borrowed imagery from alchemy, the Tarot, Gnosticism,
Tantra, and other esoteric traditions and sought inspirations
from ancient myths, irrational thought, and ethnic art. This
book is an essential key to the mysteries of the surrealist movement
and the forces that gave it life.
Ken Friedman, ed. The Fluxus Reader.
Academy Editions. ISBN: 0-4719-7858-2.
Fluxus began in the 1950s as an international community of artists,
architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus had
become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic experimentation
in Europe, Asia and the United States. Fluxus was "the most
radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s." This
book offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging
and controversial group. It is written by leading scholars and
experts from Europe and the United States. The book is divided
in six parts with an introduction by Friedman and essays by Owen
Smith, Ina Blom, David T Doris, Stephen C Foster, Larry Miller,
and Dick Higgins, among others. Part VI contains documents of
Fluxus and a Fluxus Chronology of Key Moments and Events.
Juan A. Martínez. Cuban Art
& National Identity. The Vanguardia Painters 1927-1950.
University Press of Florida, 1994. ISBN: 0-8130-1306-2.
This book rediscovers the Cuban artistic avant-garde that emerged
in Havana in the twenties. Lavishly illustrated with sixty paintings,
the book describes for the first time in English the importance
of the vanguardia in Cuban history and culture.
"The most complete and lucid discussion of the vanguardia
painters of the 1920s and 1930s available anywhere."
-Louis A. Pérez, Jr., University of North Carolina.
Raimund Meyer. Dada in Zürich.
Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990. ISBN: 3-630-61903-7.
Die Besichtigung eines Schauplatzes: Zürich nahm 1914-1918
Flüchtlinge, Deserteure, Pazifisten auf, eine verzweifelte,
anarchistische Avantgarde, vereint im Abscheu gegen den Krieg.
Ihre Waffe hiess Dada.
Uber die Geschichte von Dada Zürich, einer der inspirierendsten
Bewegungen der modernen Kunst, hat Raimund Meyer "Uberraschendes
zu berichten"
-Tagensanzeiger Zürich
C. Brian Morris, ed. The Surrealist
Adventure in Spain. Ottawa Hispanic Studies 6. Dovehouse
Editions Canada, 1991. ISBN: 0-191473-82-2.
A volume of fifteen essays, which offers the most comprehensive
evaluation to date of Surrealism in twentieth-century Spanish
art and literature. Essays by C. Brian Morris, Adriana J. Bergero,
Willard Bohn, Ignacio Soldevila-Durante, Nigel Dennis, Derek
Harris, Anthony L. Geist and Jacqueline Cruz, among others. The
book contains twenty-five illustrations and an extensive bibliography.
Charles A. Perrone. Seven Faces. Brazilian
Poetry since Modernism. Duke University Press, 1996. ISBN:
0-8223-1814-8.
In this book, Perrone studies the most important poetic movements
in Brazil since modernismo : concretism and vanguard poetry,
politically committed verse of the 60s, poetry of the 70s, the
lyricism of Brazil's renowned popular music, and the rethinking
of poetry through postmodernism in the final decades of the Twentieth
century. This is the only book-length study in English of contemporary
Brazilian poetry.
"This work fills an important part of a lamentable gap in
Latin American studies in the United States. Perrone's work forms
a marvelous bridge between modernism and the contemporary Brazilian
scene."
-Santiago Colás, University of Michigan.
Juan Ramon Resina, ed. El aeroplano
y la estrella: El movimiento de vanguardia en los países
catalanes (1904-1936). Rodopi, 1997. ISBN: 90-420-0188-7.
El tema de este libro es el surgimiento de la vanguardia en la
Península Ibérica, surgimiento que, por razones
sociales e históricas precisas, tiene lugar en el marco
del debate cultural catalán. Este volumen estudia el fenómeno
de la vanguardia en el marco del fenómeno nacional. El
libro reúne ensayos inéditos sobre aspectos fundamentales
de la vanguardia en los Países Catalanes y sobre algunos
de sus protagonistas. Ensayos de Juan Ramon Resina, Giuseppe
Grilli, Joan Abelló Juanpere, Manuel Duran, Enric Bou,
Antonio Monegal y José B. Monleón, entre otros.
Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed. Women in
DADA. Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity. The MIT Press,
1998. ISBN: 0-262-19409-0.
This book is the first to make the case that women's changing
role in European and American society was critical to Dada. Debates
about birth control and suffrage, a declining male populations
and expanding female workforce, the emergence of the New Woman,
and Freudianism were among the forces that contributed to the
dadaist enterprise. Essays by Elizabeth Hutton Turner, William
A. Camfield, Amelia Jones, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Williard Bohn, Whitney
Chadwick, Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Renée Riese Hubert, among
others.
"In Naomi Sawelson-Gorse's superb anthology, we can finally
see and hear clearly the period's women artists and intellectual
entrepreneurs as they strut through and peer out the pages of
this revisionist Dada history. Equally, we see the male dadaists
in a new light as the contributors argue convincingly for a gendered
analysis of not only certain key individual art works, but of
the movement itself.
-Moira Roth, Mills College
Susan Rubin Suleiman.
Subversive Intent. Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.
Harvard University Press, 1990. ISBN: 0-674-85384-9.
With this book, Suleiman lays the foundation for a postmodern
feminist poetics of the avant-garde. She shows how the figure
of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor, has functioned in the
work of male avant-garde writers and artists in this century,
and the process offers illuminating interpretations of major
avant-garde writers.
"These revisionist essays on the writings, particularly
the écriture féminine, associated with the
French avant-garde are a model of lucidity and good sense. Susan
Suleiman is a marvelous critic-lively, energetic, incisive-and
never less than interesting."
-Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
Vicky Unruh. Latin American Vanguards.
The Art of Contentious Encounters. University of California
Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-520-08794-1.
In this first comprehensive study, Unruh explores the provocative
and polemic nature of Latin America's literary vanguards of the
1920s and 1930s. She portrays the vanguardism of Spanish America
and Brazil as a form of experimental cultural activity that was
not limited to any one mode of expression.
"Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters
will become the standard reference on the Latin America vanguard.
The time was ripe for an ambitious undertaking like this one,
and Unruh does not disappoint."
-Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Duke University
Hugo J. Verani. Las vanguardias literarias
en Hispanoamérica. Manifiestos, proclamas y otros escritos.
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995. ISBN: 968-16-4774-2.
Este libro reúne manifiestos, proclamas y otros escritos
que documentan la presencia de las vanguardias literarias en
Hispanoamérica. Verani ha rescatado documentos de enorme
valor crítico: hojas murales, artículos periodísticos,
revistas de aparición efímera, libros de ediciones
fortuitas. El volumen se inicia con un crucial ensayo sobre las
vanguardias literarias y una bibliografía selecta. Se
incluyen importantes documentos de la actividad vanguardista
en México, República Dominicana, Puerto Rico, Cuba,
Nicaragua, Venezuela, Perú, Chile, Argentina y Uruguay.
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