[spectre] Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu, Maska, Ljubljana, 2006

[Inke Arns]

Dear friends,

I am very happy to announce the publication of my 
book “Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu" (The 
Avant-Garde in the Rear-View Mirror). The Slovene 
edition - which is an updated version of my 2004 
PhD thesis - will be published at the end of 
November by Maska, Ljubljana.

There will be a book presentation on November 27, 
2006, in Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana - separate 
announcement to follow!

Many greetings,
Inke Arns


* * *

Inke Arns
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they 
appear! Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu (The 
Avant-Garde in the Rear-View Mirror), Ljubljana: 
Maska, 2006

The book researches a paradigmatic shift in the 
way artists reflect the historical avant-garde in 
visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 
1990s in (ex-) Yugoslavia and Russia. The reasons 
for this paradigm shift can be found in the 
changing relationship to the notion of utopia, 
both in its political and its artistic 
connotation. In the 1980s, the reception both in 
so-called Soviet postutopianism (Il'ja Kabakov, 
Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vasil'ev, Komar & Melamid, 
Collective Actions) and in the Yugoslav 
retro-avant-garde (NSK, Mladen Stilinovic, 
Malevic from Belgrade etc.) is characterized by a 
'discourse archeological' interest in the 
potentially totalitarian elements of the 
avant-garde. Yet this point of view changes 
fundamentally during the 1990s within a younger 
generation of artists (neoutopianism and 
retroutopianism). Retroutopianism (Marko Peljhan, 
Vadim Fishkin) no longer primarily equates the 
utopianism of the avant-garde with totalitarian 
tendencies, but this utopianism is reexamined 
with regard to its media technological 
projections and designs, which were not only 
developed by individual avant-garde artists, 
writers and theoreticians (Velimir Khlebnikov, 
Bertolt Brecht) but also by scientists and 
engineers during the early 20th century (Nikola 
Tesla, Herman Potocnik Noordung). Contemporary 
artistic projects reveal an increasing 
'media-archeological' fascination for the 
avant-garde's early utopian fantasies of 
technology. This fascination, in turn, is 
symptomatic for a significant change in the 
relationship to utopia and utopian thinking on 
the whole: utopian thinking per se separates from 
its unambiguously negative, 
political-totalitarian aftertaste (understood as 
'utopianism') and takes on a new positive 
political connotation. It is now understood as an 
emancipatory or visionary-spectral potentiality 
('utopicity').


Inke Arns
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they 
appear! Avantgarda v vzvratnem ogledalu, 
Ljubljana: Maska, 2006
Approx. 320 pages
Illustrations in b/w
Format 170 X 240 mm
Slovene language
Price: 4.900 SIT (20.48 EUR)
25 % discount for Maska magazine subscribers: 3.675 SIT (15.34 EUR)

www.maska.si



-- 

Dr. Inke Arns
Künstlerische Leiterin / Artistic Director
Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Güntherstrasse 65 * D-44143 Dortmund
T ++49 (0) 231 - 823 106
F ++49 (0) 231 - 882 02 40
inke.arns at hmkv.de
www.inkearns.de

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