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This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, namely to attempt an overview of the theory and history of the total work in European art since the French Revolution. This is perhaps the first book in English to treat the total work of art as a key concept in aesthetic modernism. It argues for twin lineages of the total work—a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic—which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s on. This critical period from the turn of the century to the 1930s forms the central focus of the present study. These key years of the European avant-garde are explored from two closely related perspectives: the meta-aesthetic and the metapolitical. The remainder of the chapter sketches the framework of the present inquiry; provides the definition of the total work that underpins this study; followed by an outline of the subsequent chapters.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Chinese avant-garde. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Chinese avant-garde fought hard against the dominant power of Mao Zedong’s socialist ideology and, in particular, Socialist Realism. As a style and aesthetic method, Socialist Realism perfectly exemplifies “art as an institution,” and this “institution” had oppressed Chinese artists for decades. It is in this context that art curator Gao Minglu defines the avant-garde ’85 Movement as an “anti-traditional and anti-authoritative” movement, in which the artwork was never considered for its commercial or artistic value but was a “spiritual vehicle” to engage the public and society.

This chapter examines the evocation of Pearl White's star persona by avant-garde theorists and filmmakers ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to surrealist Robert Desnos. The avant-garde's reactions to White fall largely along movement lines. At once the embodiment of a low-culture narrative mode and a spectacular star object who transcended any particular plot line, White's pejorative status as “the most assassinated woman in the world” may have been more revealing than Jean Epstein originally intended. Whereas Epstein decried White's constant near-death experiences and numerous last-minute escapes as unrealistic pulp fiction, surrealists celebrated her as a “marvelous” apparition. This chapter compares the reactions of adherents of surrealism and impressionism to White and considers how Desnos and the surrealists attempted to transpose the “love and poetry” of her films into their own filmmaking practice. It suggests that White's legacy aside from international stardom exerted an influence upon the avant-garde movement, and that her influence had revolutionary potential for challenging the status quo.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of a new poetry avant-garde movement: Flarf. Originally, “Flarf” was the nonsensical name of a low-traffic email listserv that a small number of poets used to share jokes—“inside jokes”, about the poetry world, mostly. What initially brought Flarf to the attention of a wider public was the poets' habitual recourse to the Internet search engine Google to provide raw material for their verse. The procedure starts by searching for disparate terms like “anarchy plus tuna melt”; afterwards words, phrases, clauses, sentences are stitched together to create poems. By incorporating digital technology into their compositional process, the Flarfists were able to put a contemporary spin on the century-old avant-garde practice of recycling found texts.

This chapter investigates the Alt Right and how it has developed as a response to the perceived inadequacies of the authorized conservative movement. It focuses primarily on its psychological and cultural aspects. As the Alt Right comprises a number of different groups, each serving its own strategic purpose and distinct audience, it might be useful to unpack some of the different roles that individuals and groups are playing within the movement; one might then better understand the strategies and tactics of those individuals and subgroups. The chapter then cites examples of these tactics—for example, provocations leading to moral outrage from the Left and Republican establishment—and situates them within a broader cultural war. It stresses the efforts of a marginalized group to attract attention through outrageous gestures while at the same time aiming to join the political conversation. The chapter draws on relevant psychological and sociological literature and integrates historical scholarship dealing with earlier artistic-political avant-garde movements and their revolts against mainstream culture.

This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.

According to the historian Pierre Couperie, comics had been influenced by the evolution of other art forms. Jean-Christophe Menu, for his part, sees comics as having its own avant-garde movement that is embodied by works produced in the decades since 1990. This chapter examines the relationship between comics and contemporary art and argues that they differ in their essence. It explores how comics became a major source of inspiration for certain artistic movements such as Pop Art in the United States and New Figuration in France. In particular, it looks at the debate on whether Roy Lichtenstein magnified comics panels and reinvigorated comic art. It also discusses comics’ adoption of the language of contemporary art, focusing on the work of comics artist and painter Jerry Moriarty. Finally, it considers how exhibitions, particularly in France, have brought comics and fine arts together.

As the driving force behind the original deep image school, Jerome Rothenberg was an indispensable figure in American Lorquismo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but in subsequent decades Lorca makes only sporadic appearances in his work. As Rothenberg left the deep image behind him, he also stopped following developments in Spanish poetry after Lorca. Rothenberg's major accomplishment of the late 1960s and 1970s was to found the discipline of ethnopoetics, which can be defined as the study of archaic and tribal poetry and poetics with a sensibility informed by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Rothenberg's 1993 book The Lorca Variations represents a return to a major influence after a long hiatus. After translating the Suites for Christopher Maurer's authoritative 1991 edition of Lorca's collected poetry in English, Rothenberg went on to create a kind of Lorquian pastiche by recombining images taken from this book.