MetaFilter posts tagged with avant-garde

it ain't the middle of life but I'm still / lost in the woods

aught — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:06:04 -0800

Anselm Hollo, Finnish-born poet, translator, and teacher, has died. A major figure in the poetry avant garde for decades, Hollo was a professor at the Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Robert Archambeau writes: "Hollo's grasp of the gulf between the sublimity of which poetry is capable, and the absurdities into which poets fall in pursuit of that chimera, a 'career in poetry,' made him the ideal person to hold the title of United States Anti-Laureate, to which he was elected by the Buffalo POETICS list back at the turn of the century."

Czech out this L'Enfant Terrible

adamvasco — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:33:04 -0800

Karel Teige was a major figure in the Czech avant-garde; a writer, designer, typographer and collagist.
He was a member of Devětsil and later joined the Prague Surrealist group with Toyen and Jindrich Styrsky.
Here are some of his Book Covers of the 1920- and 1930's and 1926 he made ABECEDA with each letter posed by the dancer Milca Mayerová. Here is a video reconstruction of the dance moves.
Teige died in 1951 of a heart attack, said to be a result of a ferocious Soviet press campaign against him as a 'Trotskyite degenerate,' his papers were destroyed by the secret police, and his published work was suppressed for decades. The Central European Review has some articles on his work.

The Avant-Garde Project, an online lossless music LP archive

carsonb — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:31:27 -0800

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Until now, of course. Via UbuWeb, which is also archiving the AGP in installments. See also their recently created Electronic Music Resources, which is a collection of articles, books, interviews, patents, and more, devoted to technical resources concerning the practice of electronic and experimental sound.

Paper shadows

Ambrosia Voyeur — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:37:03 -0800

Please enjoy one of collage artist Lewis Klahr's haptic, romantic meditations on materiality and mortality, False Aging, and a look at his process.

Shūji Terayama

vronsky — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:08:11 -0800

Three short films from avant-garde director Shūji Terayama -- The Cage ll Emperor Tomato Ketchup (NSFW) ll Labyrinth Tale + this 6 min. clip from Pastoral: To Die in the Country

MOMA's Collection of Illustrated Books

Kattullus — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:03:21 -0800

MOMA has around 400 images from its collection of illustrated books available online. It's heavy on the works of the early 20th Century European avant-garde, especially the Russian Futurists, though it extends into the present day. Here are a few of the images that I liked: Aleksei Krucenykh and Kirill Zdanevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Olga Rozanova, Ekaterina Turova, El Lissitzky, Max Ernst, Raymond Pettibon, Vasily Kandinsky and Natalia Goncharova. As a bonus here's El Lissitzky's lovely children's book, About 2 Squares.

A video tour of the history of Found Footage Filmmaking

Ambrosia Voyeur — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:06:21 -0800

80 years of Found Footage Filmmaking...
1927-1967:
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 1927.
Rose Hobart, 1936.
Night and Fog 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1956.
1968-2007 inside...

"I felt that the world was like one big vault with sounds inside."

sveskemus — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:59:31 -0800

Else Marie Pade (b. 1924) is a phenomenon in the history of Danish music. As a child she was often ill and bedridden. She would listen to the sounds around her... on the stairs, from the yard and the room next to hers. This is where her audio universe began. During the Second World War, she was arrested by the Gestapo and placed in solitary confinement. Rather than despair, she began composing music on the bare prison walls, where she scratched the notes with the fasteners on her garters. After the war and her discovery of the concrete music of Pierre Schaeffer and the French avant-garde, she realized that the sounds resembled those she had heard in childhood, and that this was the music she really wanted to compose. Read a long interview with Else Marie Pade here and listen to her collected works here. (Last link in Danish. Left column is production year, middle column is title. Click the bit rates on the right to listen to each work.)

The Queen of Montmartre

Skeptic — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:19:38 -0800

Kiki de Montparnasse aka Alice Ernestine Prin was a French country girl down on her luck in early 20th century Paris. She would however become a great muse of the avant-garde art scene of the Années Folles, posing for and befriending the likes of Chaim Soutine, Moise Kisling, Amedeo Modigliani, Utrillo, Foujita, Calder, Per Krogh, Pascin, and, most famously, Man Ray, with whom he entertained a steady (if not particularly monogamous) relationship before Lee Miller. During their tumultuous eight-year romance, Kiki was the model for several of his most famous works (with some Surrealist art films thrown in for good measure). She also competed with Jean Cocteau for the affections of sailors in Southern France, was a good friend of Tristan Tzara and received letters of support of Aragon and Desnos when she was jailed for public disorder. A life of excess that ultimately led to her early death in destitution in 1953 also provided stuff for several biographies (the latest one, appropriately enough, a graphic novel), as well as a Hemingway-prefaced autobiography which was banned for obscenity in the US until the '70s, and the odd art exhibition...

365 Days II: 365 MORE Days, The Bloodening

Rev. Syung Myung Me — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 10:54:34 -0800

It's BACK! Otis F. Odder (of The Bran Flakes and Comfort Stand Recordings is reviving his 365 Days project on the WFMU Beware Of The Blog! Hot damn! He opens it with the complete recordings of the Michael Mills Satanic Messages Radio Show and the complete Beatles Forever recordings (previously excerpted in the first incarnation). (Previously on Me Fi)

No, I'm not sure how they get it to not devolve into a wall of feedback... though that'd be pretty rad too.

Rev. Syung Myung Me — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 09:05:19 -0800

A Piano In A Gallery. David Cunningham (the guy behind The Flying Lizards! Wikipedia because the main at-least-quasi-official site's down, but while you wait 16 days for that, why not read this interview with Deborah Lizard for your FL Fix) and his new project... A Piano In A Gallery. No, he's not actually PLAYING the piano -- the visitors are. It's a sort of similar thing to both Brian Eno's gallery work with ambient tape loops on different time cycles, creating an ever-shifting collage of sound and David Byrne's recent Playing The Building. The room is mic'd, and the sound is run through a piano, and amplified, both bringing background noises to the foreground AND creating feedback-style loops, as those sounds are also run into the mics and so forth. So... if you happen to be in London.... [via WFMU]

Choosing Your Own Adventures is FUN!

Rev. Syung Myung Me — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 15:49:52 -0800

Toshio Matsumoto's (J) first film (E), Ginrin (or "Silver Ring"), once believed lost has been found! Ginrin was an English Language, "relatively avant garde" PR film that had perhaps the first use of Musique Concrete in a Japanese film -- in this case, the first score by Toru Takemitsu. The film was discovered to be lost (as a result of the firm it was made for going under) in the 1980s when it was desired for a retrospective on the 1950's Japanese Avant-Garde at the Pompidou Center. [More Inside]

And the "Recedents", who are not the Residents.

kenko — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 11:11:19 -0800

Short movies of live performances by some avant-garde musicians, including Derek Bailey, Skeleton Crew, and The ROVA Sax Quartet. Last three links WMV

We need to restore the spirit of irreverence in music.

kenko — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 09:01:01 -0800

The Pierre Boulez Project. (via Alex Ross)

China Avant-Garde

taz — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 05:22:15 -0800

China Avant-Garde is a wonderful site for exploring Chinese post Cultural Revolution art, with excellent accompanying texts. Browse the featured artists and see an Exhibition from a Private Collection. Also, Inside Out: New Chinese Art is a beautiful site focusing on this recent "explosion of diverse work that is simultaneously exhilarating and bewildering", and you will find more great examples at Chinese Contemporary (click on the artist's name for information and all thumbnails for that artist), plus marvelous Chinese avant-garde posters at Rene Wanner's poster pages and Who's Who in Chinese Posters, and at the Hochschule der Kuenste, Berlin (view works here).