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This chapter focuses on the origin of Kazimir Malevich's painting Black Square. It explains that although the painting was created in 1915, Malevich backdated to it 1913 because its biography had a prenatal period which did indeed begin in 1913. The chapter discusses Malevich's participation in the exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds society during this year and his development of Fevralism, which was the forerunner of his Suprematism. It also explores the nature of Fevralism and highlights its potential for constituting a serious contribution to the history of the Russian avant-garde art as an independent movement.

This chapter explores the anarchist aesthetic. All of the leading anarchist figures joined forces with influential figures from the arts. And members of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' aesthetic avant-gardes often aligned themselves with anarchists. This alliance can be attributed to “the highly individualistic, anti-official, and artistically revolutionary nature of so much avant-garde art since the late eighteenth century.” Yet although there have often been ties between aesthetic radicals and the libertarian left, it is not likely that necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of “anarchist art” will ever be formulated. A monolithic anarchist aesthetic must be dismissed as elusive and dubiously essentialist: unlike the Marxist aesthetic, the anarchist conception of art is not “normative,” but “is presented in the form of a project which leaves the door wide open to the future.” Nevertheless, superficial hints of the desire to merge aesthetic provocation with political rebellion are evident in films that deal with the antics of so-called “bohemians”; bohemianism has often been associated with anarchism.

This chapter turns to the concept of experimentation in order to establish a constructive foundation for the remainder of the book, which contends that video games enable experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media and networks. Games can be understood as experimental in ways that accord with both earlier experimental art forms (such as the modernist novel or avant-garde cinema) and with forms of scientific hypothesis testing (such as the randomized controlled trial). The unique experimentality of video games has much to do with the ways they condition experience and modulate affect as part of the video game sensorium. This chapter builds toward an engagement with two cases: Blizzard’s popular real-time strategy game StarCraft (1998) and Jonathan Blow’s independent platformer game Braid (2008).

This chapter investigates how Gertrude Stein plays with the Künstlerroman. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she offers her own assessment of the position of the artist in a saturated media marketplace. Reading The Autobiography alongside Stein's other work, the chapter examines Stein's deployment of photographic illustrations, tropes, and techniques as a crucial strategy in her attempt to picture the history of modernism and to secure her spot within it. In particular, The Autobiography's underexamined photographs show how an ostensibly formless form—the surface—becomes the instrument of Stein's experimental history, as she skims across major developments in modernist and avant-garde art and literature and touches on as many famous figures as possible. In this way, while earlier chapters discuss the forms that populate modernist texts or the formal theories that purport to elucidate them, the chapter turns to the forms taken by modernism itself, which takes shape in the “contact zone” of The Autobiography.

This chapter discusses the author's participation in the China Avant-garde Art Exhibition in Beijing, China. It explains that her participation at the exhibit was a pure coincidence because she did not receive any application form and she just received a letter saying that the installation Dialogue has been accepted for exhibition. It also relates her decision to fire a gun during the exhibit, her borrowing of the gun from Zhao Xiaoshu, and the assistance provided by Lan Jun in setting up her installation.

This chapter describes the contemporary kinetic concrete poetry and its distinction from classical concrete poetry. It identifies the connection between software art, mannerism, postmodernism, Generation Flash, and the aesthetics of the spectacle. It also compares the culture of the depthless image in the digital age to the pure painting of the avant-garde art of the previous century.

This chapter examines the relationship between private body and empire by focusing on the life experiences of two modern dancers from the colonies: Choi Seunghee (1911–1969) of Chōsen and Tsai Juiyueh (1921–2 005) of Taiwan. The stories of Choi and Tsai illustrate how the cosmopolitanism and universalism inherent in avant-garde art can overcome the colonial division between the metropole and the colonies and yet be handicapped by postcolonial conditions. These two women are prime examples of how knowledge and (colonial) modernity circulated within the Japanese empire. This chapter explores how the lives of Choi and Tsai intersected and were altered by their encounters with the Japanese modern dancer Ishii Baku. It also considers the role of dance in elucidating the diverse patterns and trajectories of knowledge flow and cultural exchanges within the empire, and in a global movement of avant-garde art.

The goal of utopias is total unity, accomplished through total order, which has also been the essential quality of totalitarian political systems in the twentieth century. Nothing proved utopias' dystopian potential more than the recognition that “ideal” states, as the existence of communist and Nazi states demonstrated, could indeed be realized, and that their realization is horrific. Utopian thinking was not limited to social theories and totalitarian political practices. Artists' interest in wholeness, perfection, and progress made them especially susceptible to utopian visions. Avant-garde art at the beginning of the twentieth century was especially utopian. Futurists' celebration of violence as a purifying force, the abstract tendencies in the Russian avant-garde, and the spiritual strivings of some expressionists all bear the mark of utopia.

This chapter recontextualizes the pivotal period of avant-garde art at the turn of the century. Based on Rahel Varnhagen’s “dance dreams,” it first describes the transition from nineteenth-century romanticism to fin de siècle. It then closes with a short look at the “dance ready-mades” of the 1990s.

This first interchapter tells the early history of ‘the Whitechapel Group’, the network of Russian Jewish artists and writers who grew up together in the East End of London. We tend to separate the members of this group into associations with different modernist sets—David Bomberg and Jacob Kramer with Wyndham Lewis’s vorticists, Mark Gertler with the Bloomsbury group, John Rodker with James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and Isaac Rosenberg with the war poets. When the Whitechapel Group’s collective identity has been considered, it has been almost exclusively in terms of the members’ Jewish ethnicity, but this chapter examines the significance of the other shared aspect of the Whitechapel Group’s heritage—that is, their families’ lives in, and departure from, the Russian Empire.

The vital terms of modernist cultural analysis and debate remain so because they constantly need to be reestablished. Cultural studies as it is defined and practiced at the beginning of the twenty-first century (at its best) takes “the new” as a task rather than a marvel, exploring the contemporaneity of culture as it is challenged and propelled by history and paying attention to the current, the ephemeral, and the marginal but always in relation to the equally modernist concept of a common culture. In combining this attention to how we live today with the modernist imperatives to, on the one hand, evaluate culture and, on the other, exhaustively document it, cultural studies is a perspective singularly attentive to the modernism that continues to define us. This chapter returns to what has so often been used as the exemplar, if not the definition, of modernism — namely, avant-garde art — and to the trouble with distinguishing between modernism and postmodernism.

This chapter examines how three different magazines — Good Morning, The Freeman, and The Modern Quarterly — contributed to political and cultural debate from a broadly leftist perspective. Two of them, Good Morning and The Freeman, did not survive the decade's first half. Good Morning was more concerned with political than cultural activity. The Freeman incorporated an assessment of avant-garde art into a broad consideration of cultural developments. The Modern Quarterly tried to fit an informed understanding of contemporary cultural trends into an overarching argument for fundamental social change.

This chapter focuses on the Jazz Composers Guild and the Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra, which directly affected Bley's career. The Jazz Composers Guild was a member-run musicians' cooperative. Composers involved in the guild acknowledged their music as a branch of noncommercial, avant-garde art music in desperate need of subsidy and aimed to find support through foundation grants. Later in 1964, the Jazz Composers Guild produced a series of events featuring music by Bley and by some of the leading avant-garde jazz composers of the time, all of whom were founding members of the guild. Bley then created the Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra because having a band was a requirement of being in the guild.

In his writing on the Surrealist Magritte, Foucault explored the impact of avant-garde “word and image paintings” in the history of twentieth century painting. He proposed that the circulating similitudes initiated by and proposed in The Treachery of Images (1928) were fulfilled in contemporary series painting, such as the Campbell’s soup cans by the Pop artist Andy Warhol.