"By 1966, the composer Virgil Thomson would write, "Truth is, there is no avant-garde today." How did the avant garde dissolve, and why? In this thought-provoking work, Stuart D. Hobbs traces the avant garde from its origins to its eventual appropriation by a conservative political agenda, consumer culture, and the institutional world of art.

This book offers the first in-depth look at avant-garde theatre in the United States from the early 1950s to the 1990s looking at its origins and its theoretical foundations through an examination of literature, cinema and art.

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Based on lectures that Brakhage gave at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, this volume portrays eight artists who have electrified American independent cinema across four decades. With characteristic directness, anecdotal style, and wry humor, Brakhage, himself an influential American independent filmmaker, brings into sharp focus the life and work of Jerome Hill, Marie Menken, James Brouhgton, Maya Deren, Ken Jacobs, Sidney Peterson, Bruce Conner, and Christopher MacLaine. He also portrays the art scenes of New York and San Francisco during times of ferment and controversy. ISBN 0-914232-99-1: $20.00.

The surprising story of the relationship between experimental poetry and literary studies. In The Academic Avant-Garde, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews makes a provocative case for the radical poetic possibilities of the work of literary scholarship and lays out a foundational theory of literary production in the context of the university. In her examination of the cross-pollination between the analytic humanities and the craft of poetry writing, Andrews tells a bold story about some of today's most innovative literary works. This pathbreaking intervention into contemporary American literature and higher education demonstrates that experimental poetry not only reflects nuanced concern about creative writing as a discipline but also uses the critical techniques of scholarship as a cornerstone of poetic practice. Structured around the concepts of academic labor (such as teaching) and methodological work (such as theorizing), the book traces these practices in the works of authors ranging from Claudia Rankine to John Ashbery, providing fresh readings of some of our era's most celebrated and difficult poets.

A polemical introduction to the avant-garde and experimental in film (including making and viewing), Materialist Film is a highly original, thought-provoking book. Thirty-seven short chapters work through a series of concepts which will enable the reader to deal imaginatively with the contradictory issues produced by experimental film. Each concept is explored in conjunction with specific films by Andy Warhol, Malcolm LeGrice, Lis Rhodes, Jean-Luc Goddard, Rose Lowder, Kurt Kren, and others. Peter Gidal draws on important politico-aesthetic writings, and uses some of his own previously published essays from Undercut, Screen, October, and Millennium Film Journal to undertake this concrete process of working through abstract concepts. Originally published in 1989.

what it means to be avant-garde is David Antin's third collection of "talk poems" published by New Directions. As in his earlier talking at the boundaries (1976), and tuning (winner of the 1984 PEN/Los Angeles Literary Award for Poetry), Antin's brilliant improvised disquisitions at once challenge readers' expectations even as they instruct and entertain. A poet, performance artist, art critic, and professor of visual arts, Antin, since his college days in New York in the '50s, has been at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. The avant-garde? Yes, if by this is meant not an image of fashion but the place where art and life intersect, imparting to both a greater urgency - if is meant the place where experience and knowledge find their deepest expression, where the idea of a universal language can find shape, where the price of art is itself, where the fringe is the very center of existence.

Critics hailed previous editions of Visionary Film as the most complete work written on the exciting, often puzzling, and always controversial genre of American avant-garde film. This book has remained the standard text on American avant-garde film since the publication of its first edition in 1974. Now P. Adams Sitney has once again revised and updated this classic work, restoring a chapter on the films of Gregory J. Markopoulos and bringing his discussion of the principal genres and major filmmakers up to the year 2000.

Japanese calligraphy had its international heyday—collaborating with and yet challenging abstract painting—in the early postwar years. This book explores a Kyoto-based calligraphy group Bokujinkai, and its contribution to the Japanese, American, and European postwar avant-gardes.

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real—to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.