The Idea of the Avant Garde

Marc James Léger is an artist and writer living in Montreal. His essay on the aesthetic theories of Henri Lefebvre was published in Andrew Hemingway’s edited volume Marxism and the History of Art (2006). He is author of Brave New Avant Garde (2012), The Neoliberal Undead (2013), Drive in Cinema (2015), Don't Network (2018) and Vanguardia: Socially Engaged Art and Theory (2019). He is editor of Culture and Contestation in the New Century (2011) and of the two volumes of The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today (2014, 2019) as well as co-editor with David Tomas of Zapantera Negra: An Artistic Encounter Between Black Panthers and Zapatistas (2017).

'More than a hundred years after the eruption of Dada, and fifty years after its loudly proclaimed death, the spectre of the avant garde returns in renewed and vibrant forms. This excellent collection gives an overview of just how and why a renewed experimental artistic politics is important.'

• Marc James Léger The Idea of the Avant Garde Martha Rosler Take the Money and Run: Can Political and Socio-Critical Art ‘Survive’? Sven Lütticken Permanent Cultural Revolution David Cunningham Elementary David Thomas We Know What We’re Doing Massimo Ricci Just Another Establishment Ultra-red Ways of Listening: Socially-Practiced Art and Solidarity Pauline Oliveros Quantum Avant Garde John Tilbury 18 Questions Richard Barbrook Ludic Training for the Situationist Revolution Gabriel Rockhill The Theoretical Destiny of the Avant Garde Machete Group What Does the Avant Garde Mean Today? Mark Hutchinson For the Avant Garde: Notes on Art, Capitalism and Revolution Chika Okeke-Agulu The Spectral Avant Garde Gavin Grindon Disobedient Objects Marcelo Expósito Festive Disorder, Subjective Mutation and Revolutionary Becoming McKenzie Wark #Marx21c Sylvère Lotringer After the Avant Garde Patricia Ybarra ‘The Whole Thing Is Over by Nine O’Clock’: The Rude Mechs’s Adaptation of Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces Kelly Copper On the Perverse Pleasures of Indifference Morgan von Prelle Pecelli Seeing What’s Really There: A Talk with Richard Foreman Robert Wilson Construction in Time and Space Carrie Noland Experimental Living: Westbeth Artists Housing, Merce Cunningham, and Me Lucien Kroll Revolutionary Homeopathic Engineering and Empathetic Architecture Hans Ulrich Obrist A Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem V. Mitch McEwen and Dawn Lundy Martin On the House Opera | Opera House in Detroit Lina Stergiou Praxis: The Everyday NOT as Usual Eda Čufer Feelings and Territories: Makrolab’s Avant-Garde Inquiries MAP Office (Gutierrez + Portefaix) Urban Spectacle in Post (Socialist) China and Other Illuminations Oliver Ressler Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next? Condé + Beveridge Cultural Relations Edith Brunette (with François Lemieux) The Imaginary Exit of Disengagement Freee The New Freee Manifesto Zoe Beloff The Advanced Guard and the Rearview Mirror Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping The Teachable Life-or-Death of Ferguson Dread Scott Revolutionary Archive Marc James Léger Austerity and Impunity, and a Few Words with Theodore A. Harris Matthew Shipp Language Out of the Abyss Carla Harryman DISK Niall McDevitt Contra Avant-Garde or Why Poets Should Reclaim the Avant Garde from the Academics Joshua Clover The Genealogical Avant Garde Marijeta Bozovic Poetry on the Front Line: Kirill Medvedev and a New Russian Poetic Avant Garde Jessica Zychowicz FE/M/EN and the Avant Garde: Locating the Text Marc James Léger A Punk Prayer to the Lack of Reality Benjamin Noys Epic Fails: Scale, Commodity, Totality Fabio Vighi Capture and Symptom in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors Philippe Theophanidis Godard Avant-Gaze Jean-Marie Straub The Bach Film Alfredo Jaar The Marx Lounge David Walsh To Create a Genuine Artistic ‘Avant Garde’ Means Confronting Critical Historical Issues Bruno Bosteels Three Paradoxes of Communist Art