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Situating the Danish artist Asger Jorn’s work in an international, post-World War II context, Karen Kurczynski offers an account of the essential phases of this prolific artist’s career, and addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and collaborations. The study reframes our understanding of the 1950s, and foregrounds the idea that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social and political impact.
Gaps and the Creation of Ideas: An Artist’s Book is a portrait of the space between things, whether they be neurons, quotations, comic-book frames, or fragments in a collage. This twenty-year project is an artist’s book that juxtaposes quotations and images from hundreds of artists and writers with the author’s own thoughts. Using Adobe InDesign® for composition and layout, the author has structured the book to show analogies among disparate texts and images. There have always been gaps, but a focus on the space between things is virtually synonymous with modernity. Often characterized as a break, modernity is a story of gaps. Around 1900, many independent strands of gap thought and experience interacted and interwove more intricately. Atoms, textiles, theories, women, Jews, collage, poetry, patchwork, and music figure prominently in these strands. The gap is a ubiquitous phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of neuroscience, rabbinic thinking, modern literary criticism, art, popular culture, and the structure of matter. This book explores many subjects, but it is ultimately a work of art.
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.
This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948–1951). Although the name stood for the organizers’ home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra’s experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history.
This volume is the first English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s tried to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and critiquing the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.
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Highlights the art of the radical post-war Cobra group of artists and poets including works by Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Constant, Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen.
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Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles. McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rat...