BiblioVault - Books by Morgan, Daniel

Czech Action Art

Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain

Pavlína Morganová

Karolinum Press, 2014

Czech action art—a medium similar to performance art that does not require an audience—emerged out of the political and social turmoil of the 1960s. This movement has received little critical attention, however, as the Iron Curtain prevented its dissemination to an international audience. Here theorist and art historian Pavlína Morganová gives this art scene its due, chronicling its inception and tracing its evolution through to the present.

Morganová explains the various forms of action art, from the “actions” and “happenings” of the 1960s; to the actions of land art that encompass stones, trees, water, or fire; to recent displays of body art; to the actions of the latest generation of artists, who are using the principles of action art in contemporary postconceptual and participative art. Along the way, she introduces the most prominent Czech artists of each specific niche, including Milan Knížák, Zorka Ságlová, Ivan Kafka, Petr Štembera, Karel Miler, Jirí Kovanda, and Katerina Šedá, and demonstrates not only the changes in the art forms themselves but also the shifting roles of artists and spectators after World War II.

With over one hundred illustrations, Czech Action Art introduces this heretofore overlooked but fascinating art form to a global readership.

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From Laughter to Forgetting

A Source-Book of Czech Avant-Garde Discourses

Edited by Zuzana Ríhová and Peter Zusi

Karolinum Press, 2023

A comprehensive reader on the Czech literary avant-garde.

In recent years a prominent trend in the study of European modernism and the avant-garde has been increased attention to texts and traditions that have long stood in the shadow of the French, German, and British traditions that dominate the canon. Yet this more expansive view of European modernism and the avant-garde has been hindered by the limited range of texts available outside the original languages. This book addresses that problem by offering a wide-ranging selection of literary, theoretical, and documentary sources from one of the most dynamic and original European avant-garde traditions: that of the first Czechoslovak Republic and of the Bohemian lands. The Czech avant-garde is in many respects the ideal “alternative” avant-garde to present in detail to a wider readership: it tracks Central European developments and was often influential internationally while being deeply embedded in particular cultural dynamics that produced original forms. This volume returns interwar Czech avant-garde writings to their place as a firmly embedded component of the European avant-garde.

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Laughing to Keep from Dying

African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

Danielle Fuentes Morgan

University of Illinois Press, 2020

By subverting comedy's rules and expectations, African American satire promotes social justice by connecting laughter with ethical beliefs in a revolutionary way. Danielle Fuentes Morgan ventures from Suzan-Lori Parks to Leslie Jones and Dave Chappelle to Get Out and Atlanta to examine the satirical treatment of race and racialization across today's African American culture. Morgan analyzes how African American artists highlight the ways that society racializes people and bolsters the powerful myth that we live in a "post-racial" nation. The latter in particular inspires artists to take aim at the idea racism no longer exists or the laughable notion of Americans "not seeing" racism or race. Their critique changes our understanding of the boundaries between staged performance and lived experience and create ways to better articulate Black selfhood.

Adventurous and perceptive, Laughing to Keep from Dying reveals how African American satirists unmask the illusions and anxieties surrounding race in the twenty-first century.

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Spartakiads

The Politics of Physical Culture in Communist Czechoslovakia

Petr Roubal

Karolinum Press, 2018

Every five years from 1955 to 1985, mass Czechoslovak gymnastic demonstrations and sporting parades called Spartakiads were held to mark the 1945 liberation of Czechoslovakia. Featuring hundreds of thousands of male and female performers of all ages and held in the world’s largest stadium—a space built expressly for this purpose—the synchronized and unified movements of the Czech citizenry embodied, quite literally, the idealized Socialist people: a powerful yet pliant force directed by the regime.

In this book, Petr Roubal explores the political, social, and aesthetical dimensions of these mass physical demonstrations, with a particular focus on their roots in the völkisch nationalism of the German Turner movement and the Czech Sokol gymnastic tradition. Roubal draws on extensive interviews and archival research to investigate the many facets of this sporting tradition, from the reactions of ordinary, non-political gymnasts who appropriated and challenged official rituals to the organizational demands of the Spartakiads, such as the incredible finances involved and the knowledge and skills required from hundreds of former Sokol officials. Featuring an abundance of archival photographs, Spartakiad takes a new approach to Communist history by opening a window onto the mentality and mundanity behind the Iron Curtain.

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The Specter and the Speculative

Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora

Mae G. Henderson

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.

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Teachers on the Waves of Transformation

School Culture Before and After 1989

Dana Moree

Karolinum Press, 2020

It is known that a society in transformation undergoes significant changes on many levels, but structural and cultural changes are arguably two of the most significant. How do such monumental changes affect the lives of individuals and small communities?

Teachers on the Waves of Transformation aims to answer this question through the lens of education. With careful exploratory research at two schools in a small town in central Bohemia, anthropologist Dana Moree follows the fates of two generations of teachers at the schools. Through interviews with teachers, school administrators, and the students’ parents, Moree focuses on the relationships, values, shared stories, and symbolic and ritual worlds that create the culture of the schools. Teachers on the Waves of Transformation offers a unique perspective of cultural flux as witnessed in the classroom.

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Thinking in the Dark

Cinema, Theory, Practice

Pomerance, Murray

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Today’s film scholars draw from a dizzying range of theoretical perspectives—they’re just as likely to cite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as they are to quote classic film theorist André Bazin. To students first encountering them, these theoretical lenses for viewing film can seem exhilarating, but also overwhelming.

Thinking in the Dark introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made a great impact on film scholarship today, including Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, and Judith Butler. Rather than just discussing each theorist’s ideas in the abstract, the book shows how those concepts might be applied when interpreting specific films by including an analysis of both a classic film and a contemporary one. It thus demonstrates how theory can help us better appreciate films from all eras and genres: from Hugo to Vertigo, from City Lights to Sunset Blvd., and from Young Mr. Lincoln to A.I. and Wall-E.

The volume’s contributors are all experts on their chosen theorist’s work and, furthermore, are skilled at explaining that thinker’s key ideas and terms to readers who are not yet familiar with them. Thinking in the Dark is not only a valuable resource for teachers and students of film, it’s also a fun read, one that teaches us all how to view familiar films through new eyes.

Theorists examined in this volume are: Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Michel Chion, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Douchet, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Vachel Lindsay, Christian Metz, Hugo Münsterberg, V. F. Perkins, Jacques Rancière, and Jean Rouch.

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