Brave New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics - Softcover

Marc James Leger

3.75

8 ratings by Goodreads

9781780990507: Brave New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780990502 ISBN 13: 9781780990507

Publisher: Zero Books, 2012

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Brave New Avant Garde is a collection of essays that ask the questions: what is an adequate model of contemporary avant garde practice and what are its theoretical premises? With this it asks the related question, echoing Alain Badiou: must the avant garde hypothesis be abandoned? Brave New Avant Garde stands in opposition to postmodern post-politics and the view that radical practice has no other future than its reduction to the workings of the free market in the form of the "simple process of cultural production" or to variations on the cultural politics of representation. Today's avant garde, formed in the wake of the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of the anti-globalization movement, represents a counter-power that rejects the inevitability of capitalist integration. The way out for artists in today's world of creative industries is defined in these pages as a psychoanalytically informed sinthomeopathic practice, a critical identification with prevailing conditions of production that avoids the surplus enjoyment of the ideology of postmodern pluralism.

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Review:

L�ger gathers up what remains of the avant garde's once-vaunted radicality and hurls it into a whirling Zizekian accelerator. --(Gregory Sholette, Author of Dark Matter: Activist Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture)

About the Author:

Marc James L�ger is an artist, writer and educator living in Montreal

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