NORDLIT Journal of culture and literature Faculty of Humanities, University of Tromsø <http://www.hum.uit.no/nordlit/index.html> Centre–Periphery The Avant-Garde and the Other Issue 21, Spring 2007 EUROPA! EUROPA? E European network réseau européen Europäisches Netzwerk First bi-annual conference of the A for Avant-garde and European Network for Avant-Garde and de recherche sur Modernism Studies (EAM) für Forschung zu M Modernism studies 29-31 May 2008 – Ghent University, Belgium l’avant-garde et le modernisme www.eam-europe.ugent.be Avantgarde und Moderne EAM Call for Submissions With initiatives in the cross-disciplinary fields of avant-garde and modernism studies booming throughout European academia, time has come to provide a more permanent platform in Europe for scholars to meet and discuss their research. The European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) will devote itself to the study of the avant-garde and modernism in Europe within a global setting, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. EAM will promote interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics, and aims to encourage an interest in the cultural dimensions and contexts of the avant-garde and modernism. The network aspires to embrace the wide variety within avant-garde and modernism studies, and welcomes all scholars engaged in these areas of research to participate in its founding conference. EAM’s first conference will focus on the Confirmed key-note speakers include: Charles relation between the avant-garde, modernism Altieri (University of Berkeley, California), and Europe. Conference proposals and papers Astradur Eysteinsson (University of Iceland, can be composed in English, French or Reykjavik), Paul Michael Lützeler (University German. For more information about potential of Washington, St. Louis), William Marx topics for panel, roundtable and paper (University of Orléans and University Institute proposals, visit: www.eam-europe.ugent.be. of France) and Piotr Piotrowski (Mickiewicz University, Poznan - Poland). Deadline for panel proposals: 1 September 2007 Deadline for roundtable proposals: 1 September 2007 Deadline for paper proposals: 1 October 2007 Contact: [email protected] ___________________________________________________________________________ The conference is sponsored by the Nordic Network of Avant-Garde Studies, the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex, the research group 'Textual Culture: Modernism and Memory' of the University of Utrecht, the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics at the University of Liège, the L.P. Boon Centre of Antwerp University, OLITH (Research community in literary theory, Flanders), and the department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory as well as the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University. NORDLIT Issue 21, Spring 2007 Main editor Per Bäckström ([email protected]) Editors Helène Whittaker von Hofsten ([email protected]) Tanja Kudrjavtseva ([email protected]) Michael Schmidt ([email protected]) Editorial committee Hubert van den Berg, University of Groningen Bodil Børset, NTNU Trondheim Benedikt Hjartarson, Háskóli Íslands (University of Iceland) Marianne Ping Huang, University of Copenhagen Jonas Ingvarsson, University of Karlstad Jesper Olsson, Stockholm University Tania Ørum, University of Copenhagen Faculty of Humanities, University of Tromsø, NO–9037 Telephone +47–77 64 42 40 Fax +47–77 64 42 39 ISBN 978-82-90423-76-1 ISSN 0809-1668 Cover photo: Gösta Adrian Nilsson “Indianstrid” 1917 © Halmstad museum Introduction The following issue of Nordlit has as its theme “Centre-Periphery. Avant-Garde and the Other” and is the outcome of a conference of the same name that took place in Tromsø on 23–24 November 2006. The peripheral location of this conference was evident to the many participants in the midwinter darkness of the Arctic. The theme of the Other is also deeply embedded in Tromsø, symbolized by prolific Sami Studies at the university, but it was and is thematized as well by a painting by one of the foremost Swedish avant-gardists, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN): “Indianstrid” (Indian Combat), reproduced on the conference posters and on the cover of this issue. As a homosexual from Scania in the south of Sweden, GAN was doubly excluded by the Centre, Stockholm, but he also often painted the Other: sailors, Indians and exotic creatures such as panthers. In this respect, he seemed the perfect theme for such a conference. The conference was organized by the undersigned for the Nordic Network for Avant-Garde Studies, in co-operation with the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Tromsø. The Nordic Network of Avant-Garde Studies is financed by NordForsk as a continuance of the Danish avant-garde research network “The Return and Actuality of the Avant-Gardes” 2002–2003. The Nordic network has played a pivotal role in the establishment of a European Association of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), which has its inaugural conference in Ghent, Belgium in 2008. Three keynote speakers were on the programme: Professor Arild Linneberg (Bergen) opened the conference with “The Aesthetic Avant-garde and the Sami tradition: A Speech on the inter-artistic Verbal Art of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (Áillohaš)”; Professor Eva Forgacs (Budapest/Pasadena) spoke about “Romantic Peripheries”; and Professor Amelia Jones (Manchester) gave a presentation on “Performing the Wounded Body: A New Theory of Political Agency in the Visual Arts”. The conference was a success, judging by the feedback from participants after the conference. It is therefore all the more pleasurable to be able to present a first collection of contributions to the conference, expanded with some additional essays and reviews, in this issue of Nordlit only half a year after the conference. A second collection, which focuses on the relation between avant- garde and periphery, will follow. I hope that the rich variety of articles on the themes of the conference will be of interest for scholars in all aesthetic fields. The articles are divided into three main categories. Firstly, there is a section 3 Introduction containing theoretical investigations; this is followed by a section discussing the relation between different avant-gardes; finally, there is a section presenting avant-garde artists from different peripheries. Per Bäckström The authors possess sole copyright of their contributions. They have warranted to the editors of Nordlit that permission has been obtained for the inclusion of any materials copyrighted by others. All questions concerning copyright should be addressed to the respective authors. Amendment of English is also the responsibility of each individual author. 4 The Marginalisation of Art The Avant-Garde, De-Realisation, and the Art Attack Richard Murphy In January 2006 at the Dada exhibition in the Beaubourg museum in Paris an incident took place involving one of the foremost icons of the avant-garde, namely Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain, the urinal which he signed “R. Mutt, 1917”. A French conceptual artist, Pierre Pinoncelli, attacked the celebrated object with a small hammer causing slight damage, for which he was subsequently fined €150,000. According to reports this was in fact the second time that he had attacked Duchamp’s piece. On the previous occasion he had given way to an urge of a slightly different kind and had attempted simply to urinate in it.1 Similarly, when the pop musician Brian Eno visited Duchamp’s Fountain in the Museum of Modern Art in New York he had carefully hidden in his trousers a system of tubing which allowed him to open his fly and aim several drops of his own, previously collected bodily fluids into the porcelain. In comparable fashion, at a 1999 exhibition for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain two Chinese conceptual artists took advantage of the availability of Tracey Emin’s My Bed and stripped off for a quick romp in the sheets. One of them was apprehended before he had a chance to take off his own underwear and replace it with the rather grubby pair that Tracey Emin had thoughtfully included as part of her exhibit of this typical scene from her own boudoir. The artists described their action as a “performance” (with the title Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey’s Bed) and as an artistic intervention, claiming that they were “improving” Emin’s work, which in their opinion had “not gone far enough”.2 Obviously this is not the first time that an exhibit in an art museum has been attacked. But it seems significant that rather than involving a mindless attack with a sharp instrument on a recognised masterpiece simply to inflict damage the assaults on these avant-garde pieces are of a rather different order, and have a method to their own particular madness. Avant-garde works appear to be especially prone to 1 See John Lichfield. “‘Performance artist’ stages second attack on Duchamp’s urinal,” The Independent (London, 7/1/2006). 2 On the incidents with Eno and My Bed, see the article “Art attacks” by Mark Blacklock, The Daily Telegraph 26/06/2003.. Although Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi were arrested for their action no charges were pressed. Chai had written the words “ANTI STUCKISM” on his bare back. They said they opposed the Stuckists, who are anti-performance art. 5 The Marginalisation of Art such onslaughts, and art attacks such as these—clearly not isolated cases—appear to imply the critique that an earlier “tradition” of the avant-garde is dead or, as in the case of Tracey Emin’s bed, that it may need help in producing any shock. At the most basic level it could be argued that such art attacks are indeed also interventions, that is, a form of continuation of the original joke or even an elaboration of the original artistic conception. For in a sense the attack actually renews the avant-garde impetus by asking certain questions about the piece, for example regarding its museum setting, its canonisation as art, and in the case of the “real” or “found” object, about its relationship to the world beyond.