Abstract Space – Concrete Media

Thema der Tagung sind die translokalen und transkulturellen Austauschbeziehungen zwischen den historischen Avantgardebewegungen, die sich in den zehner bis vierziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts in zentral-/osteuropäischen und außereuropäischen Ländern formiert haben. Die für die Internationalisierung avantgardistischer Bild- und Objektsprachen maßgeblichen und häufig die Angleichung von Ausstellungs- und Medienpraktiken vorantreibenden Beziehungen manifestieren sich auf signifikante Weise in einer Vielzahl an Zeitschriften. Dienten diese einerseits der über die konventionellen Kunstinstitutionen hinausgehenden öffentlichkeitswirksamen Verbreitung künstlerischer Ideen und politischer Projekte oder als Ersatz für das Fehlen solcher Institutionen (z.B. in den Kolonien), so bildeten sie auch ein ideales Instrument der Kommunikation zwischen Künstler_innen, Architekt_innen, Grafiker_innen, Schriftsteller_innen, Theoretiker_innen und politischen Akteur_innen.

Diese Form der Vernetzung, die sich in kollektiven Projekten, in gegenseitigen Einladungen zu Vorträgen und in dem gemeinsamen Verfassen von Manifesten äußerte, muss als konstitutiv für die Herausbildung ästhetischer und politischer Avantgarde-Konzepte angesehen werden - sowohl für die Entwicklung der geometrischen Abstraktion und der konkreten Kunst, von der sich die Beteiligten nichts Geringeres als den Entwurf einer neuen, egalitären Gesellschaft versprachen, als auch für anti-imperialistische Gegenstrategien zu kolonialen Konzepten von Kultur und Moderne. Zugleich legen die Magazine jene Spannungen und Konflikte zwischen den unterschiedlichen Akteur_innen und Gruppierungen offen, die sich auch in den Werk- und Ausstellungsdesigns niederschlugen: Spannungen, die aus den unaufgelösten Widersprüchen zwischen Abstraktion und Figuration, Individualität und Kollektivität, Handwerk und Industrieproduktion, Expression und Rationalität, regionaler Identitätspolitik und Internationalismus resultierten. Lassen sich solche Konflikte zum einen mit lokalen Bedingungen und geopolitischen Verhältnissen erklären, so kommen hier auch Ambivalenzen der Avantgarden selbst zum Tragen, deren kritische und befreiende Potenziale zugleich mit kolonialistischen Implikationen verknüpft sein konnten.

Die Tagung "Konkrete Medien" stellt somit den Versuch dar, anhand von exemplarischen Ausstellungen, Zeitschriften und den um sie zentrierten Diskursen eine "Soziogeografie der Avantgarden" nachzuzeichnen.

Freitag, 27. Mai 2011
Central/Eastern European avant-gardes

Moderation: Sabeth Buchmann & Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen

14:00 Uhr
Einführung
14:15 Uhr
Krisztina Passuth
Theater und Utopie. Über die MA-Ausgabe "Musik und Theater" und die "Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik"

1924 erscheinen in Wien zwei Publikationen über dasselbe Thema - herausgegeben von zwei verschiedenen Persönlichkeiten und mit je unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen: Friedlich Kiesler organisiert die "Internationalen Aussstellung neuer Theatertechnik" und veröffentlicht deren Katalog, während der ungarische Emigrant Lajos Kassák die MA-Sondernnummer "Musik und Theater" publiziert. Im Vortrag gilt es zu fragen, was Kassáks Position von Kieslers Theorie und Realisationen unterscheidet und warum das Problem von Theater und Utopie gerade auch für das damalige Ungarn von großer Relevanz ist. Dabei werde ich ebenso auf die gesellschaftsutopischen Momente in Kassáks Theorie eingehen wie auf seine Vision von Theater, Film und Musik sowie des internationalen Konstruktivismus'.

Krisztina Passuth is an art historian and Professor Emerita at the Department of Art History at Eötvös Loránd University,
Budapest. Her books include "Lajos Tihanyi" (Dresden 1977), "Moholy-Nagy"
(London/New York 1985), "Les avant-gardes de l'Europe Centrale 1907-1927" and "Treffpunkte der Avantgarden: Ostmitteleuropa 1907-1930"
(Budapest/Dresden 2003) and, most recently, "Beöthy István" (Budapest, 2010). Futhermore she curated crucial exhibitions concerning the avant-gardes e.g. in Paris and Budapest.

15:45 Uhr
Karel Srp
The Society of the Future

After 1918, when Czechoslovakia was established as a new state, a small group of young visual artists, writers and architects gathered as a group named Devětsil, which devoted itself to a new language of art that pointed against all common art forms of that time. My lecture will stress the question why the so called avant-garde language spread so rapidly that as leading and most vivid expression it very soon dominated other art forms. I will concentrate especially on typographic forms of layouts, front pages and illustrations in Czech art of the 1920s. Most important for this avant-garde language were its international forms and contents, which were immediately recognizable in other central European countries - whereas in the Austria-Hungary Empire every nation had spoken in a different language incomprehensible to the others. A main focus will be devoted to the connection between the international avant-garde language and the Soviet revolution respectively Marx's and Engel's revolutionary ideas in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. From a historical point of view it is possible to recognize a double shift contained in the international language of the
historical avant-gardes: on the one side it became a historical form of expression, on the other side it still has a strong impact on young artists, in whose outputs one can not only find inspirations but even direct quotations of key avant-garde pieces.

Karel Srp is a chief curator at the Prague City Gallery. He organized numerous exhibitions concerning Czech avant-garde artists like Karel Teige (1994, 2009), Toyen (2000), Jindřich Štyrský (2007), Josef Šíma (2006) and co-curated a show on Czech Surrealism (1996). Furthermore he concentrates on contemporary art and published books on Karel Malich (2007) and Václav Boštík (2011). Most recently he is working on František Kupka.

17:30 Uhr
Margarita Tupitsyn
Media Fever

This talk tackles key moments and iconic images associated with a media fever that by the mid-1920s descended on the Soviet abstract avant-garde and transformed creative consciousness of the most significant male and female artists. Among my examples are Kazimir Malevich's dissemination of Suprematist compositions by means of mechanical reproduction in 1919, Aleksandr Rodchenko's abandonment of painting in 1921, for the sake of designing printed matter, Gustav Klutsis' first photomontage illustrations in political magazines, Valentina Kulagina's ability to intensify the materiality of the abstract image and increase its faktura through the technique of lithography, and finally Popova's insertion "Into Production" with radical educational campaign.

As independent curator, critic, and art historian, Margarita Tupitsyn is the author of The Soviet Photograph (1996).  She authored catalogues and organized many shows including El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet (1998), Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York (2000), Against Kandinsky (2006), and Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism (2009).

19.00 Uhr
Barbara Piwowarska:
Footnote 5: Screening Space

This presentation - understood as a 'footnote' intervention to the conference and exhibition - will focus on the 'avant-garde margins' and international reception of the work of Polish early avant-garde sculptor and theorist Katarzyna Kobro. It will attempt to take the perspective of the contemporary artists that contributed to the topic and revisit marginalized avant-garde phenomena (referencing AR group, Concretism, Neo-concretism, or 'neoplasticist room' legacy at Muzeum Sztuki in Łodź). It will include screenings of: Józef Robakowski's Kompozycje Przestrzenne Katarzyny Kobro (Spacial Compositions by Katarzyna Kobro), 1971 and Karin Schneider's & Nicolás Guagnini's Phantom Limb, 1997/1998, which combines works by Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, Raul Lozza, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica. Schneider and Guagnini were first matching together Kobro and Clark in the 1990s, and as first 'scholars' noticed compelling relation between two women artists and their understanding of sculpture as laboratory of 'social space' and open spatial structure. This film includes a unique material shot at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 1997 of the artists playing with original Kobro's sculptures arranging them in 'performative' sequences.

Barbara Piwowarska is an independent curator based in Warsaw. She is author of Jadwiga Maziarska. Atlas of Imaginary (2009) and co-editor of Star City. The Future under Communism published by Nottingham Contemporary and tranzit.at (2011). Since 2010 she runs the Footnote project employing 'methodology of margins', referencing existing institutions, statements and concepts in format of exhibitions and interventions. Her recent 'footnotes' are devoted to the contemporary  reception of Polish avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s.

Saturday, 28. Mai 2011
Non-European avant-gardes

Moderation: Christian Kravagna & Florian Pumhösl

14:00 Uhr
Einführung
14:15 Uhr
Michael Asbury
Modernismo in São Paulo and L'Esprit Nouveau in Paris

The term Modernismo relates to a period in Brazilian culture between the late 1910s and the late 1930s. It involved a loose gathering of artists and writers who expressed the desire to be up-to-date with European developments at the same time as reacting against the local conservative and provincial environment. In Brazil the predominant interpretation of Modernismo has been viewing it as a necessary but tentative stage in the drive for cultural emancipation of the nation. Such a conclusion is reached by comparing Modernismo to the consensual interpretation of modern art: namely an autonomous universalising language that naturally tended towards abstraction. More recently, the concept of Anthropophagy - developed by the poet and art critic Oswald de Andrade who equated the absorption of the European modern aesthetics by the modernistas with the cannibalism of the Brazilian natives - has been largely accepted in Europe and North America as an early example of the strategic appropriation within the field of contemporary art. This paper investigates the relation between painting and art writing during the 1920s - particularly through the influence of the Journal L'Esprit Nouveau on the São Paulo group - to argue that it was neither the case of an alternative and incomplete modernism nor that of being before its time, but that the strategies adopted by Modernismo coincided with contemporaneous European regionalist factions and the return to figuration within the context of the Rappel a L'Ordre.

Michael Asbury is a British/Brazilian art historian, art critic and curator. He is Associate Professor at the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts London. His PhD investigated the work of Hélio Oiticica and its relation to modernism and Brazilian popular cultures. He was associate curator for the Rio de Janeiro section of 'Century City: Art and the Modern Metropolis', Tate Modern, London (2001). He has curated exhibitions such as 'Antonio Manuel: Occupations/Discoveries' 2005, 'Detanico & Lain: After Utopia' 2006, 'Anna Maria Maiolino: Order and Subjectivity' 2007, 'José Patricio: Connections' 2008, 'Cao Guimarães: Gambiarras' 2008, 'Cildo Meireles: Occasion' 2008, 'Rosangela Rennó: Ring' 2009, 'Shirley Paes Leme: quotidian heterotopias' 2009 and 'Maiolino: Continuous' 2010.

15:45 Uhr
Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff
Il y a aux Antilles un vide culturel
The periodical "Tropiques" (Martinique 1941- 45)

In 1941 André Breton and André Masson stayed some days in the French colony Martinique, breaking the journey from Marseille to their exile in New York. Breton discovered by chance the periodical Tropiques with breathtaking, surrealistic poems and became friends with the editors Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, who had founded in 1934 the journal Etudiant Noir in Paris. The story is often told to illustrate the expansion of French Surrealism into the Caribbean. Yet this was by no means the objective of Tropiques. On the contrary, the idea was to construct an independent, local culture, which could not be based on indigenous traditions, the absence of which Aimé Césaire described as an absolute cultural void. The authors of Tropiques did not offer invented traditions or racial identity-concepts like Négritude, but an amazing textual patchwork, borrowing from a broad variety of sources. While European fascism, second world war and censorship by the local Vichy-government isolated black intellectuals at Martinique, the periodical celebrated an outburst of poetical and critical energy. Tropiques defined Martinique as a site of cross-cultural relations between avant-garde movements in the Caribbean, Europe and the USA. The debates about esthetics and politics, surrealism and realism, slavery and emancipation are referring predominantly to poetry and language, but also to natural history, music and painting.

Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff is Professor Emerita of art history at University of Trier, Germany, where she is a board member of the Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies. She is the author of Ästhetik der Differenz: Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert. 15 Fallstudien (2010) and (co-)editor of Weiße Blicke: Geschlechtermythen des Kolonialismus (2004); Postkolonialismus, Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft (2002); Das Subjekt und die Anderen: Interkulturalität und Geschlechterdifferenz vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (2001).

17:30 Uhr
Richard J. Powell
Ethiopia awakened, Harlem sublimated

This paper contemplates the conceptual realignments and aesthetic usurpations that occurred among American artists within the 1920s and 1930s cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Starting with the metaphor of a cultural reawakening (or "rebirth") among peoples of African descent, selected artists envisioned this formerly denigrated constituency as a rich and vital element in America, whose cultural contributions led to a native, largely uncharted modernism. Ending with an artistic turn towards a folk and/or populist aesthetic, the Harlem Renaissance (or, as it was then known, the "New Negro arts movement") was eventually understood in terms of an elitist conceit whose cultural aspirations were ultimately seen as incongruous with the political and economic realities facing most Americans. The visual manifestations of the Harlem Renaissance - paintings, sculptures, graphics, and media arts - were the vehicles for this radical re-imagining of black America: representations that, with their emphasis on the rural/urban dichotomy, primitivism and/or the racial/sexual outsider, and the mythologizing of African Americans as a panacea for society's ills, prompted heated debates about the role and function of the arts in modern times.

Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author of Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008); Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (1997); The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989). He (co-)curated exhibitions such as Conjuring Bearden, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham (2006); Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2005); Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance, Hayward Gallery, London (1997).

19:00 Uhr
Partha Mitter
Rabindranath Tagore, Okakura Tenshin and the Creation of a Regional Modernist Art in Asia

This paper will focus on Indian and Japanese efforts to create a regional discourse of art within transcultural modernism that emerged in the early 20th century.  In this period, worldwide circulation of ideas and artistic styles was the outcome of print culture that created a 'virtual cosmopolis' of Eastern and Western intellectuals, giving rise to an alternative form of modernism in India and Japan. Behind this 'movement' were great Indian poet Tagore, the leading Japanese art theorist Okakura Tenshin and several likeminded Europeans. Tagore's belief in alternative cosmopolitan values based on ancient Indian thought, and Okakura's slogan 'Asia is one', helped create a powerful though short-lived vision of regional anti-colonial modernity.

Partha Mitter is Emeritus Professor of art history at University of Sussex, England, and has been Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK) Project "Modernity and National Identity in Art, 1860s-1940s: Japan, India and Mexico". He is the author of Much Maligned Monsters. A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (1977); Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994); Indian Art (2001) and The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde 1922-1947 (2007)