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24 books match the query 'Arts, American'

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Anarchist Modernism

Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde

Allan Antliff

University of Chicago Press, 2001

The relationship of the anarchist movement to American art during the World War I era is most often described as a "tenuous affinity" between two distinct spheres: political and artistic. In Anarchist Modernism—the first in-depth exploration of the role of anarchism in the formation of early American modernism—Allan Antliff reveals that modernists participated in a wide-ranging movement that encompassed lifestyles, literature, and art, as well as politics. Drawing on a wealth of hitherto unknown information, including interviews and reproductions of lost works, he examines anarchism's influence on a telling cross-section of artists such as Robert Henri, Elie Nadelman, Man Ray, and Rockwell Kent. He also traces the interactions between cultural figures and thinkers including Emma Goldman, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Pound, and Ananda Coomaraswamy.

By situating American art's evolution in the progressive politics of the time, Antliff offers a richly illustrated chronicle of the anarchist movement and also revives the creative agency of those who shaped and implemented modernism for radical ends.

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Art, Music, and Literature, 1897-1902

Theodore Dreiser. Edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Dreiser's captivating portraits of turn-of-the-century America's famous figures

In this volume, liberally seasoned with period illustrations, Yoshinobu Hakutani has collected and annotated a rich selection of Theodore Dreiser's pre-fame writings on the cultural milieu of his day.

In these brief essays, Dreiser sallies into the vibrant world of creative work in turn-of-the-century America. He inspects the eccentric and revealing paraphernalia of artists' studios, probes the work habits of writers, and goes behind the scenes in the popular song-writing business, where this week's celebrity is next week's has-been. He profiles famous figures and introduces numerous women artists, novelists, and musicians, including the prolific and tireless Amelia Barr (mother of fourteen children and author of thirty-two novels), the illustrator Alice B. Stephens, and the opera singer Lillian Nordica. Hakutani's notes provide biographical detail on dozens of now-obscure individuals mentioned by Dreiser.

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Containment Culture

American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age

Alan Nadel

Duke University Press, 1995

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history.

Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

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Criticism Without Authority

Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices

Jennifer Sichel

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A reframing of the history of 1960s New York avant-garde art centered on the queer, genre-bending criticism of Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston.

In the early 1960s, Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston began to imagine art criticism as something unruly and expansive, rejecting modernist appeals to purity and coherence that had overtaken the field. These critics were deeply enmeshed in New York’s avant-garde art scene, and both were explicitly and unapologetically queer. First working independently of one another, then later in dialogue, Swenson and Johnston demanded criticism become life-sustaining, subverting protocols and distorting its form beyond recognition. They utilized criticism as a means of navigating queer existence and reclaimed terms like lesbian, homosexual, mad, and psychotic as their own.

Jennifer Sichel follows the intertwined paths of Swenson and Johnston, providing a history of queer practices that were central to the development of avant-garde art but have been largely overlooked. Criticism Without Authority makes their work visible not just as criticism, but as its own form of art. As Sichel shows, Swenson's and Johnston’s practices, bucking categories and disciplinary formations, resist historical streamlining and stand as a key for unlocking the queerness of postwar art history.

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Cultural Democracy

The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

James Bau Graves

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Cultural Democracy explores the crisis of our national cultural vitality, as access to the arts becomes increasingly mediated by a handful of corporations and the narrow tastes of wealthy elites. Graves offers the concept of cultural democracy as corrective--an idea with important historic and contemporary validation, and an alternative pathway toward ethical cultural development that is part of a global shift in values.

Drawing upon a range of scholarship and illustrative anecdotes from his own experiences with cultural programs in ethnically diverse communities, Graves explains in convincing detail the dynamics of how traditional and grassroots cultures may survive and thrive--or not--and what we can do to provide them opportunities equal to those of mainstream, Eurocentric culture.

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Dangerous Knowledge

Art Simon

Temple University Press, 1996

Association of American University Presses Book Jacket Award, 1996 "Beginning with a description of a poster for a punk band and ending with a critique of the movie JFK, this work marshals an impressive array of cultural information in attempting to provide an overall history of the genre. Simon closely examines images and films, relating them to the continuing struggle over the authoring and interpretation of the story of Kennedy's death." --Library Journal The assassination of John F. Kennedy provoked intense public debates and focused the world's attention on the recorded details of the event in still and moving images. Intense scrutiny of the testimony and images became a national obsession. Dangerous Knowledge argues that the very currents that powered the debates also prompted a crisis in interpretation that profoundly affected American culture. From 1963 to the present day, amateur sleuths have proposed compelling theories of who was responsible for Kennedy's death and why. In the process they entered into an ongoing struggle centered in questions of authority: Who has access to evidence and the power to interpret history? What is the relation of photographs and films to the writing of history? To show how this struggle literally changed history and figured in the avant-garde's artistic production, Art Simon considers a wide range of cultural work shaped by the assassination. Simon reveals the influence of the assassination theorists on commercial films such as JFK and Parallax View and shows how the images that blanketed the media resurfaced in Andy Warhol's silk screens, work and underground film of Bruce Conner, and other 1960s artists where they become vehicles for challenging the truth value of photographs or the public's endless fascination with celebrities. "This history of the representation of the JFK assassination makes a terrific contribution to film studies and indeed to cultural studies generally. Moving with wit and erudition across political history, avant-garde film, serigraphy, journalism, and mass-market film, Simon transcends the banalities of the high culture/low culture binary to produce a study of exemplary range and insight." --David E. James, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California

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Dangerous Knowledge

The JFK Assassination in Art and Film

Art Simon

Temple University Press, 2013

Fifty years ago, the assassination of John F. Kennedy shocked the world and focused attention to the 8mm footage shot by Abraham Zapruder. The event fueled conspiracy theories and repeated viewings of Zapruder's film as seemingly everyone in the world searched for motive and conclusive proof of a single gunman.

In his new Preface to this edition of Dangerous Knowledge, Art Simon discusses public fascination with celebrity deaths and recent assassination-related media-from documentaries to scholarly books to the scandalous video game JFK Reloaded-to show that the assassination continues to inspire writers, artists, and filmmakers.

Dangerous Knowledge examines the seminal works of art associated with the assassination, including Andy Warhol's silk screens, the underground films of Bruce Conner, and provocative Hollywood films like The Parallax View and JFK. Simon's investigation places assassination art and images within a historical context-one that helps us understand what the assassination has meant to American culture.

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Eloquent Obsessions

Writing Cultural Criticism

Marianna Torgovnick, ed.

Duke University Press, 1994

Out of the core of experience, these essays began as obsessions. Whether founded in some strongly lived moment, deeply held conviction, long-term interest, or persistent and unanswered question, these essays reveal the writer’s voice—personal, often passionate, full of conviction, certainly unmistakable. Marianna Torgovnick has drawn together writings by leading contemporary scholars in the humanities, representing fields of literary criticism, American and Romance studies, anthropology, and art history. Eloquent Obsessions presents cultural criticism at its thoughtful and writerly best.

This collection explores a wide range of issues at the intersection of personal and social history—from growing up in the South to exploring a love for France or Japan, from coming of age as a feminist to mapping the history of National Geographic, from examining the cultural "we" to diagnosing class structures in Israel or showing how photography deals with AIDS. The authors here bring writerly genres—autobiography, memoir, or travel narrative—to intellectual tasks such as textual readings or investigating the histories of institutions. Continuing a tradition of cultural criticism established by writers such as Samuel Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt, or Raymond Williams, these essays seek to make a difference, to have an impact, and are based on the fundamental premise that writers have something to say about society. Simply put, this collection offers models for writing eloquently about culture—models that are intellectually and socially responsible, but attuned to the critic’s voice and the reader’s ear.

Aimed not just at academics but also at a more general audience alive to the concerns and interests of society today, Eloquent Obsessions, a revised and expanded version of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Winter 1992), will extend beyond the academy contemporary ways of writing about culture.

Contributors. Jane Collins, Cathy N. Davidson, Virginia R. Dominguez, Mark Edmundson, Gerald Graff, Richard Inglis, Aldona Jonaitis, Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Catherine Lutz, Nancy K. Miller, Linda Orr, Andrew Ross, Henry M. Sayre, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick

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Greenwich Village 1963

Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body

Sally Banes

Duke University Press, 1993

The year was 1963 and from Birmingham to Washington, D.C., from Vietnam to the Kremlin to the Berlin Wall, the world was in the throes of political upheaval and historic change. But that same year, in New York's Greenwich Village, another kind of history and a different sort of politics were being made. This was a political history that had nothing to do with states or governments or armies--and had everything to do with art. And this is the story that Sally Banes tells, a year in the life of American culture, a year that would change American life and culture forever. It was in 1963, as Banes's book shows us, that the Sixties really began.
A leading writer on cultural history, Banes draws a vibrant portrait of the artists and performers who gave the 1963 Village its exhilarating force, the avant-garde whose interweaving of public and private life, work and play, art and ordinary experience, began a wholesale reworking of the social and cultural fabric of America. Among these young artists were many who went on to become acknowledged masters in their fields, including Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Brian de Palma, Harvey Keitel, Kate Millet, and Claes Oldenburg. In live performance--Off-Off Broadway theater, Happenings, Fluxus, and dance--as well as in Pop Art and underground film, we see this generation of artists laying the groundwork for the explosion of the counterculture in the late 1960s and the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s. Exploring themes of community, freedom, equality, the body, and the absolute, Banes shows us how the Sixties artists, though shaped by a culture of hope and optimism, helped to galvanize a culture of criticism and change. As 1963 came to define the Sixties, so this vivid account of the year will redefine a crucial generation in recent American history.

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In the Shade of the Pine

Artists, Writers, and Trees in America, 1825-1876

Christiana Payne

University of Arkansas Press, 2026

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of trees both as allies in the fight against climate change and as sources of emotional well-being. In nineteenth-century America, against a backdrop of accelerating deforestation much like today’s, writers and artists found emotional solace and symbolic meaning in the woods, identifying trees as a civic and spiritual good in need of preservation.

In the Shade of the Pine: Artists, Writers, and Trees in America, 1825–1876 explores the significance of trees in the visual and literary imagination of mid-nineteenth-century America through the work of seven artists and writers: Thomas Cole’s explorations of the Catskills; Albert Bierstadt’s portrayal of the splendid trees of California, including the ancient giant sequoias; the paintings and drawings of Asher Brown Durand and Frederic Edwin Church; the photographs of William James Stillman; and the environmental writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau.

This richly illustrated volume shows the unique influence the ecology of their land had on the emotional and intellectual landscapes of a generation. In their careful study of the woods—the beauty of trees, their practical importance to human beings and other living creatures, and the power of the forest to confer spiritual and emotional benefits—these artists and writers laid the groundwork for an ecological consciousness that remains vitally relevant today.

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Long Suffering

American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness

Karen Gonzalez Rice

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Long Suffering productively links avant-garde performance practices with religious histories in the United States, setting contemporary performances of endurance art within a broader context of prophetic religious discourse in the United States. Its focus is on the work of Ron Athey, Linda Montano, and John Duncan, American artists whose performances involve extended periods of suffering. These unsettling performances can disturb, shock, or frighten audiences, leaving them unsure how to respond. The book examines how these artists work at the limits of the personal and the interpersonal, inflicting suffering on themselves and others, transforming audiences into witnesses, straining social relations, and challenging definitions of art and of ethics. By performing the death of self at the heart of trauma, strategies of endurance signal artists’ attempts to visualize, legitimize, and testify to the persistent experience of being wounded. The artworks discussed find their foundations in artists’ early experiences of religion and connections with the work of reformers from Angelina Grimké to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who also used suffering as a strategy to highlight social injustice and call for ethical, social, and political renewal.

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Loss within Loss

Artists in the Age of AIDS

Edited by Edmund White; In Cooperation with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a project of the Alliance for the Arts

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

When an artist dies we face two great losses: the person and the work he did not live to do. Loss within Loss is a moving collaboration by some of America's most eloquent writers, who supply wry, raging, sorrowful, and buoyant accounts of artist friends and lovers struck down by AIDS. These essayists include Maya Angelou, Alan Gurganus, Brad Gooch, John Berendt, Craig Lucas, Robert Rosenblum, and eighteen others. Many of the subjects of the essays were already prominent—James Merrill, Paul Monette, David Wojnarowicz—but many others died young, before they were able to fulfil the promise of their lives and art. Loss within Loss spans all of the arts and includes portraits of choreographers, painters, poets, actors, playwrights, sculptors, editors, composers, and architects.

This landmark book is published in association with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a national organization that preserves art works created by artists living with HIV or lost to AIDS. Loss within Loss stands as a powerful reminder of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts community and as the first real survey of that devastation. Though these accounts are often intensely sad, Loss within Loss is an invigorating, sometimes even exuberant, testimony to the sheer joy of being an artist . . . and being alive.

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Nuyorican Feminist Performance

From the Café to Hip Hop Theater

Patricia Herrera

University of Michigan Press, 2020

The Nuyorican Poets Café has for the past forty years provided a space for multicultural artistic expression and a platform for the articulation of Puerto Rican and black cultural politics. The Café’s performances—poetry, music, hip hop, comedy, and drama—have been studied in detail, but until now, little attention has been paid to the voices of its women artists. Through archival research and interview, Nuyorican Feminist Performance examines the contributions of 1970s and ’80s performeras and how they challenged the Café’s gender politics. It also looks at recent artists who have built on that foundation with hip hop performances that speak to contemporary audiences. The book spotlights the work of foundational artists such as Sandra María Esteves, Martita Morales, Luz Rodríguez, and Amina Muñoz, before turning to contemporary artists La Bruja, Mariposa, Aya de León, and Nilaja Sun, who infuse their poetry and solo pieces with both Nuyorican and hip hop aesthetics.

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Off Limits

Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963

Marter, Joan

Rutgers University Press, 1999

Off Limits is the first examination of the Rutgers group, artists who came together on the Rutgers University, New Brunswick campus during the 1950s and revolutionized art practices and pedagogy. Based on interviews with artists, critics, and dealers from the period, the book connects the initiation of major trends such as Happenings, Pop Art, and Fluxus to the faculty, students, art curriculum, and events at the university. It is the first book to look not only at the work of individual artists, but to consider how interactions between these artists influenced their groundbreaking work.

Rutgers was clearly the place to be for experimental artists during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Allan Kaprow’s first Happening was presented at Rutgers. Roy Lichtenstein’s first Pop paintings, George Segal’s earliest figurative tableaux, Lucas Samaras’s radical exploration of media, and proto-Fluxus events by Robert Watts and George Brecht all took place on and around the campus. The innovative group rejected Abstract Expressionism for art based on the immediate experience of urban and industrial life, creating startling new artforms which remain startling and provocative.

Led by the theoretical writings and art practice of Kaprow, the group created a New Art—art beyond the limits of the conventional and predictable, even beyond accepted notions of progressive trends. Lichtenstein recalls in an interview, “Kaprow showed us that art didn’t have to look like art.” Along with Lichtenstein, Kaprow, Segal, and Watts taught at Rutgers and challenged one another to take art “Off Limits” — beyond the limits of the conventional, the predictable — even beyond the progressive, as defined by Abstract Expressionist gesturalism. Their art incorporated the gritty environs, the technological, the everyday, making art radical, outrageous, disturbing, and humorous.

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Romance of Commerce and Culture

Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform, Revised Edition

James Sloan Allen

University Press of Colorado, 2002

The Romance of Commerce and Culture is a lively and provocative history of how art and intellect formed an alliance with consumer capitalism in the mid-twentieth century and put Aspen, Colorado, on the map.

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Selected Writings, Volume 1

Toward a New African Art Discourse

Okwui Enwezor. Edited by Terry Smith.

Duke University Press, 2025

Okwui Enwezor is widely regarded as a leader among the brilliant curators who emerged in the 1990s to set agendas for understanding the global expansiveness of contemporary art. Among his pathfinding exhibitions were the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the paradigm-shifting Documenta11 (2002), Archive Fever (2008), and Postwar (2016). In addition to breaking ground as a curator, Enwezor was also a prolific critic, essayist, and theorist. Selected Writings—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Enwezor’s most influential and foundational works. Spanning a quarter-century, these selections reflect the depth and breadth of Enwezor’s writing and its role in his tireless efforts to decolonize the art world. Volume 1, Toward a New African Art Discourse, includes fifteen essays written between 1994 and 2006. Drawn from exhibition catalogs, art journals, interviews with artists, art reviews, curatorial statements, historical studies, and book chapters, these texts show him striving to fulfil the first main ambition that drove his career: to found and sustain what he called a “New African Art Discourse.” Demonstrating that his writing helped fulfill this goal, this collection reaffirms Enwezor’s status as a transformational figure in the global contemporary art world.

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Selected Writings, Volume 2

Curating the Postcolonial Condition, Volume 2

Okwui Enwezor. Edited by Terry Smith.

Duke University Press, 2025

Okwui Enwezor is widely regarded as a leader among the brilliant curators who emerged in the 1990s to set agendas for understanding the global expansiveness of contemporary art. Among his pathfinding exhibitions were the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the paradigm-shifting Documenta 11 (2002), Archive Fever (2008), and Postwar (2016). In addition to breaking ground as a curator, Enwezor was also a prolific critic, essayist, and theorist. Selected Writings—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Enwezor’s most influential and foundational works. Spanning a quarter-century, these selections reflect the depth and breadth of Enwezor’s writing and its role in his tireless efforts to decolonize the art world. Volume 2, Curating the Postcolonial Condition, includes seventeen essays written between 2006 and 2019. Drawn from exhibition catalogs, art journals, interviews with artists, art reviews, curatorial statements, historical studies, and book chapters, these texts show him striving to fulfil the second main ambition that drove his career: enabling a critical, diasporic imagining of postcoloniality that would become pervasive within global art discourse. Demonstrating that his writing helped fulfill this goal, this collection reaffirms Enwezor’s status as a transformational figure in the global contemporary art world.

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Shaker Fever

America's Twentieth-Century Fascination with a Communitarian Sect

William D. Moore

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

Americans were enthralled by the Shakers in the years between 1925 and 1965. They bought Shaker furniture, saw Shaker worship services enacted on Broadway, sang Shaker songs, dressed in Shaker-inspired garb, collected Shaker artifacts, and restored Shaker villages. William D. Moore analyzes the activities of scholars, composers, collectors, folklorists, photographers, writers, choreographers, and museum staff who drove the national interest in this dwindling regional religious group.

This interdisciplinary study places the activities of individuals—including Doris Humphrey, Charles Sheeler, Laura Bragg, Juliana Force, and Edward Deming Andrews—within the larger cultural and historical contexts of nationalism, modernism, and cultural resource management. Taking up previously unexamined primary sources and cultural productions that include the first scholarly studies of the faith, material culture and visual arts, stage performances, and museum exhibitions, Shaker Fever compels a reconsideration of this religious group and its place within American memory. It is sure to delight enthusiasts, public historians, museum professionals, furniture collectors, and anyone interested in the dynamics of cultural appropriation and stewardship.

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Singular Examples

Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde

Tyrus Miller

Northwestern University Press, 2008

This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial "compositions"—verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematic—of the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book’s geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as "the free world."

The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called "neo–avant-garde" with its inherent contradiction: an avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical, contextual, and performative characteristic of neo–avant-garde practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in Singular Examples. Miller’s key readings of these major artists of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the neo–avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for "artistic politics." Underlining the relation between material particulars and their thematic implications, between particular works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics and formalist analysis, Singular Examples is exemplary in its own right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical modernism.

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Subversive Expectations

Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85

Sally Banes

University of Michigan Press, 1998

As critic for the Soho Weekly News and the Village Voice during the 1970s and 1980s, Sally Banes enjoyed an incomparable perspective on the development of what she describes as "the mongrel, elusive, indefinable genre of performance art." In fact, Banes was present during a crucial point in that development, when a previously marginalized form took, quite literally, center stage and emerged as the preeminent form of avant-garde activity. Her reviews and articles explore the work of established artists such as Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Ping Chong, and Joan Jonas; events by the Bread and Puppet Theater, Robert Whitman, Charlotte Moorman, and Chris Burden; revivals of classic avant-garde performances; and the emergence of famous (and some notorious) performers such as Anne Bogart, Karen Finley, Spalding Gray, Steve Buscemi, Tim Miller, and Whoopi Goldberg. The depth and breadth of Banes's criticism realizes not only the continuing growth and development of American performance, but also the complex and sometimes surprising intersection of performance with the "other side" of the art/life divide, the "paratheater" of Japanese tea ceremonies, cat shows, circuses, art exhibits, and amateur nights at the Apollo. Banes's work recognizes the crucial importance of the critic as a situated self that must understand not only the concepts and techniques of avant-garde art, but the rich textures of the community spaces in which that art occurs. Much as her earlier book Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body captured the elusive artistic communities of America's postwar avant-garde activity, Subversive Expectations revels in the invigorating energies of Soho. The author's approach to this complex matrix of art, community, and culture is as interdisciplinary as performance itself, drawing on the histories and theories of painting, photography, dance, theater, and folklore. Her vivid descriptions of ephemeral events and her provocative interpretations fill a gap in the history of contemporary performance, when the avant-garde met the mainstream.

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The Culture of Spontaneity

Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America

Daniel Belgrad

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The Culture of Spontaneity is the first comprehensive history of the postwar avant-garde, integrating such diverse moments in American culture as abstract expressionism, bebop jazz, gestalt therapy, Black Mountain College, Jungian psychology, beat poetry, experimental dance, Zen Buddhism, Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology, and the antinuclear movement. Daniel Belgrad shows how a startling variety of artistic movements actually had one unifying theme: spontaneous improvisation.

"A compelling narrative, putting living flesh on shorthand intuitions that connect North Beach to Black Mountain College, Fenollosa to Pollock, Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace to Todd Gitlin's The Sixties."—Joel Smith, Boston Review

"An invaluable introduction to postwar modernism across the arts."—Thomas Augst, Boston Book Review

"Belgrad's extensive probing of the artists and movements with their profound sociological roots is timely as well as comprehensive....A major contribution for serious scholars."—Choice

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The Freak-garde

Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America

Robin Blyn

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

Since the 1890s, American artists have employed the arts of the freak show to envision radically different ways of being. The result is a rich avant-garde tradition that critiques and challenges capitalism from within.

The Freak-garde traces the arts of the freak show from P. T. Barnum to Matthew Barney and demonstrates how a form of mass culture entertainment became the basis for a distinctly American avant-garde tradition. Exploring a wide range of writers, filmmakers, photographers, and artists who have appropriated the arts of the freak show, Robin Blyn exposes the disturbing power of human curiosities and the desires they unleash. Through a series of incisive and often startling readings, Blyn reveals how such figures as Mark Twain, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Nathanael West, and Diane Arbus use these desires to propose alternatives to the autonomous and repressed subject of liberal capitalism. Blyn explains how, rather than grounding revolutionary subjectivities in imaginary realms innocent of capitalism, freak-garde works manufacture new subjectivities by exploiting potentials inherent to capitalism.

Defying conventional wisdom, The Freak-garde ultimately argues that postmodernism is not the death of the avant-garde but the inheritor of a vital and generative legacy. In doing so, the book establishes innovative approaches to American avant-garde practices and embodiment and lays the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of the disruptive potential of art under capitalism.

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