Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde
Edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

The avant-garde is dead… long live the avant-garde

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde offers a new way of analysing and theorizing the question of the avant-garde today. It is customary within art history and cultural history to argue that the avant-garde disappeared as an (anti)artistic gesture during the 1960s. The dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972 is often presented as the endpoint in the history of the avant-garde. The implosion of the ’68 revolt – quickly in France, after a long process of revolt and counter-revolt in countries like Italy – effectively ended the attempt to use art as a vehicle for a transformation of capitalist society. This book contributes to the discussion of the avant-garde today by discussing whether it is still relevant for a contemporary anti-systemic critique and analysing different instances where the avant-garde has creeped into protests and social experiments outside art and art institutions.

Includes essays from Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Esther Leslie, Abigail Susik, Natasha Gasparian, Marina Vishmidt, Yves Citton, and Gene Ray

Bio: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is Professor in Political Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Playmates and Playboys at a Higher Level: J.V. Martin and the Situationist International (2014), Crisis to Insurrection (2015), After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties (2018), Trump’s Counter-Revolution (2018), Hegel after Occupy (2018) and Late Capitalist Fascism (2022).

Aesthetic Protest Cultures: After the Avant-Garde by Minor Compositions on Scribd

Ordering Information
For Ordering in the UK Only

Available direct from Minor Compositions (in the UK) now for the special price of £10.

For ordering in the US or Canada it can be purchased from AK Press or Autonomedia.

You can also download it here: Aesthetic Protest Cultures

224 pages, 5.5 x 8.5, paperback
UK: £18/ US: $23
ISBN 978-1-57027-452-7
Release to the book trade 30 November 2024