The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (October Books) - Hardcover

Mcdonough, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262134772 ISBN 13: 9780262134774

Publisher: MIT Press, 2007

Synopsis

"The Beautiful Language of My Century" describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today.
McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of detournement and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War ("La France dechiree"), Godard's early film Le Petit Soldat, and Christo's Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums. He discusses the French left's adoption in the mid-sixties of the "end of art" as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the fete as a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low.

About this title

About the Author

Tom McDonough is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (MIT Press).

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262134772
• ISBN 13: 9780262134774
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288