Dear friends,
I am very happy to announce the publication of my
book Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu" (The
Avant-Garde in the Rear-View Mirror). The Slovene
edition - which is an updated version of my 2004
PhD thesis - will be published at the end of
November by Maska, Ljubljana.
There will be a book presentation on November 27,
2006, in Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana - separate
announcement to follow!
Many greetings,
Inke Arns
* * *
Inke Arns
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they
appear! Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu (The
Avant-Garde in the Rear-View Mirror), Ljubljana:
Maska, 2006
The book researches a paradigmatic shift in the
way artists reflect the historical avant-garde in
visual and media art projects of the 1980s and
1990s in (ex-) Yugoslavia and Russia. The reasons
for this paradigm shift can be found in the
changing relationship to the notion of utopia,
both in its political and its artistic
connotation. In the 1980s, the reception both in
so-called Soviet postutopianism (Il'ja Kabakov,
Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vasil'ev, Komar & Melamid,
Collective Actions) and in the Yugoslav
retro-avant-garde (NSK, Mladen Stilinovic,
Malevic from Belgrade etc.) is characterized by a
'discourse archeological' interest in the
potentially totalitarian elements of the
avant-garde. Yet this point of view changes
fundamentally during the 1990s within a younger
generation of artists (neoutopianism and
retroutopianism). Retroutopianism (Marko Peljhan,
Vadim Fishkin) no longer primarily equates the
utopianism of the avant-garde with totalitarian
tendencies, but this utopianism is reexamined
with regard to its media technological
projections and designs, which were not only
developed by individual avant-garde artists,
writers and theoreticians (Velimir Khlebnikov,
Bertolt Brecht) but also by scientists and
engineers during the early 20th century (Nikola
Tesla, Herman Potocnik Noordung). Contemporary
artistic projects reveal an increasing
'media-archeological' fascination for the
avant-garde's early utopian fantasies of
technology. This fascination, in turn, is
symptomatic for a significant change in the
relationship to utopia and utopian thinking on
the whole: utopian thinking per se separates from
its unambiguously negative,
political-totalitarian aftertaste (understood as
'utopianism') and takes on a new positive
political connotation. It is now understood as an
emancipatory or visionary-spectral potentiality
('utopicity').
Inke Arns
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they
appear! Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu,
Ljubljana: Maska, 2006
Approx. 320 pages
Illustrations in b/w
Format 170 X 240 mm
Slovene language
Price: 4.900 SIT (20.48 EUR)
25 % discount for Maska magazine subscribers: 3.675 SIT (15.34 EUR)
www.maska.si
--
Dr. Inke Arns
Künstlerische Leiterin / Artistic Director
Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Güntherstrasse 65 * D-44143 Dortmund
T ++49 (0) 231 - 823 106
F ++49 (0) 231 - 882 02 40
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.inkearns.de
You have definitely missed:
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF IRATIONAL.ORG
PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Aug 30 - Oct 29, 2006
www.hmkv.de
WHAT IS MODERN ART? (GROUP SHOW)
Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Sep 29 - Oct 29, 2006
www.whatismodernart.de
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