Singular Examples
Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde

Tyrus Miller (Author), Marjorie Perloff (Series edited by), Rainer Rumold (Series edited by)

9780810125117

Hardback, published 30 January 2009

344 pages, Illustrations
23.3 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.568 kg

This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial 'compositions' - verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematic - of the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book's geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as 'the free world'.The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called neo - avant-garde with its inherent contradiction: an avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical, contextual, and performative characteristic of neo - avant-garde practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in ""Singular Examples"".Miller's key readings of these major artists of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the neo - avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for 'artistic politics'. Underlining the relation between material particulars and their thematic implications, between particular works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics and formalist analysis, ""Singular Examples"" is exemplary in its own right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical modernism.

Example 1: Introduction: Latter-Day Modernists
Part One: Out of the Cage
Example 2: Situation and Event: From The Pronouns to the Destinations of Sense
Example 3: Anarchy by Design: On Jackson Mac Low's Stanzas for Iris Lezak
Example 4: Pound's Cantos Lost and Found: Paragram and Authority in John Cage and Jackson Mac Low
Example 5: Merzing History: Kurt Schwitters, Jackson Mac Low, and the Aesthetics of Data Trash
Example 6: Transduced Objects and Spiritual Automata: Dimensions of Experience in David Tudor's Live Electronics
Part Two: Forays to the Dark Side
Example 7: Brakhage's Occasions: Figure, Subjectivity, and Avant-Garde Politics
Example 8: Fictional Truths: Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things Between Image and Language
Example 9: Beckett's Political Technology: Expression, Confession, and Torture in the Later Drama
Part Three: Coda
Example 10: Didactic Drifts: One or More Conclusions Notes.