Wow! eBook
Brave New Avant Garde Reprint Edition
Author(s): Marc Léger (Author)
- Publisher: Zer0 Books
- Publication Date: February 24, 2012
- Edition: Reprint
- Language: English
- Print length: 208 pages
- ISBN-10: 1780990502
- ISBN-13: 9781780990507
Book Description
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.
,
,
Editorial Reviews
Review
Léger gathers up what remains of the avant garde’s once-vaunted radicality and hurls it into a whirling Zizekian accelerator. Like a ‘pervert’s guide’ to contemporary art, Brave New Avant Garde reveals a multitude of interventionist practices and rapidly revolving dark particles that in light of recent events in Tunisia and Egypt no longer appear exotic, but instead vibrate prognostic, as if heralding the dawn of a sweeping phase change in twenty-first century art and politics.
– Gregory Sholette, author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture
– David Tomas, author of Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies
– Gregory Sholette, author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture
In this critical tour de force, Marc James Léger successfully exposes the contradictions that animate contemporary art and that govern the actions of those who ‘participate in the game of culture’ in the age of neoliberalism. And yet Léger is not content to simply critique, he also proposes alternatives through his concept of
sinthomeopathic cultural praxis, the product of a successful act of balancing on a pro-avantgardist tightrope woven of recent politically and socially engaged art practices.– David Tomas, author of Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies
Marc James Léger’s informed and thought-provoking analysis of critical art practices and related theories provides essential orientation for anyone looking for ways to resist and subvert what Peter McLaren has defined as the two thieves of capitalism and representative democracy.
– Oliver Ressler, artist, filmmaker, and author of
About the Author
Marc James Léger is an Independent Scholar. He author of ‘Brave New Avant Garde’ (2012) and ‘The Neoliberal Undead’ (2013), both from Zero Books, as well as ‘Drive In Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics’ (Intellect, 2015). He is editor of ‘Culture and Contestation in the New Century’ (Intellect, 2011) and of ‘The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today’ (Manchester UP, 2014).
