Lecture: A Social History of the Avant-Garde

On July 4 at the AfterMAF festival in Roanoke, VA, I delivered a lecture on the 19th Century Avant-Garde, focusing on the social history, rather than the aesthetic – an anthropological and micro-historical rather than "art/literary history" approach. Here's the video of the presentation. I only got through the Symbolists in the lecture that day, but I'm posting here the lecture notes carrying the story all the way up to the present, and the corresponding slides for the notes, which contain much more detailed information.

I've not had time to assemble a bibliography specific to this lecture, but to trace a bit of information or do follow-up research on your own, email me at olindsann@gmail.com (messages sent via the blog have a tendency not to reach me for months) and I can point you toward relevant sources and/or my bibliographies of related projects. This may eventually become a book, but that would be several years down the road.

Here's the video of the lecture up to the end of the 19th Century (Romanticism through Symbolism & Decadence):

Here are the LECTURE NOTES for the entire history.

Here the accompanying SLIDES including images, charts, and more detailed information referred to in the lecture.

Resurrecting the Bouzingo: Lecture: A Social History of the Avant-Garde

Resurrecting the Bouzingo: Lecture: A Social History of the Avant-Garde: On July 4 at the AfterMAF festival in Roanoke, VA, I delivered a lecture on the 19th Century Avant-Garde, focusing on the social history, ...

Starting the long process of preparing an edition of my Collected Essays, 2005–20 (hoping to publish next year or 2021). It'll leave out a few stray and early pieces but also includes a lot of short, scattered writings, some unpublished work, and I plan to ask a few people to include their essays that directly prompted or responded to my own. A prospective table of contents (which will doubtless grow as I keep writing over the next year):

 

 

COLLECTED ESSAYS

 

Introduction

 

PART 1: EARLY POLEMICS

1. Three Evils of Modernism: Explained! (2004)
2. Seek and Destroy: Modernist Strategies for the Suppression of Anti-Art (2005)
3. Toward a Breathing Text: The Art of Madness (2005)

 

PART 2: ON COUNTERCULTURE, MICROCULTURE, & PRAXIS

1. Read This Shit: Some Obvious Remarks on the Necessity of the Book (2006?)
2. Make it Home, Not Art [w/New Jersey PNA] (2007)
3. Against Complicity: On the Hydra-Headed Collective (2007)
4. Dartington, A Eulogy: An Open Letter on Community, Pedagogy, History, and the Life & Death of Utopian Institutions (2010)
5. WORD FOR/WORD INTERVIEW??? (2010)
6. On Performance and Documentation (from blog) (c.2010/11?)
7. On Fun (2011)
8. Notes on Organising Communal Events (2014)
9. Introduction to The Outer Circle: Ideas and Forms of the Contemporary Russian Avant-Garde (2014)
10. Extract from King Jaundice on invisibility of unskilled labour to power (2015)
11. Slova extract from Open Letter to the Avant-Garde (2016)
12. On Pedagogy and Disciplinarity (c. 2017)
13. How Do We Know? A Few Notes on Reclaiming Knowledge for Life (2017)
14. Post-NeoAbsurdist Conversation Notes (2018)
15. Learning Behaviors: Violence and the American Schools (2018)
16. S.tandards O.f L.earning (2018)
17. Speaking of Difference: A Loosely Related Collocation of Axioms (2018)
18. On the Community of Activated Obsessions (2018)
19. Section 1 of Avantopia with Dummies (2019)

 

PART 3: ON TRADITION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

1. Cheating Art History (2005)
2. On Anachronism as Dissent (2006 /09)
3. Toward a Radical Historiography: Creative Sociality and the Traditions of Dissent (2011 /)
4. Manifesto on Archiving FROM BOOKMARK (2012 /15?)
5. Practical notes on Micro-Archiving
6. Notes on the Emergence of the Yellow Sign (c.2014)
7. On Feminism in Utopian & Marxist Socialism (2014)
8. Post-script to King Jaundice (2015)
9. Letter to Emily Wampler on Krysinski on the Avant-Garde (c.2016?)
10. Forward (and Back), Editorial Statement of Révenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories (2016)
11. pRe-face to Some Potential Histories (2017)
12. Preface to Theatres of War in the Assault on Culture (2019)

 

PART 4: ON WRITING & MYSTICISM

1. Carmen Pro Pleroma: A Brief Treatise Concerning the Invocation of Yog Sothoth (2006 /14)
2. Toward (and away from) a (potential) Nagean Pataphysics (2006 /14)
3. Supplemental Open Letter regarding ‘Toward a Nagean Pataphysics’ (2006 /2014)
4. + EXCERPTS FROM ECSTATIC NERVE
5. Preface to Post-Neo Anti-Prophesies (2011)
6. Useless Preface to a Romantasemic Writing [w/Leftwich & Gautier] (2014)
7. On Intellectual Culture and the Experience of Time (c.2016)
8. On Reading as Necromancy (c.2017)
9. A Rant and Object Lesson in Translation, Respect, & Romanticist Poetics (2018)
10. Notes on New Criticism, Post-Structuralism, & Post-Modernism (c.2018)
11. Galatea Resurrects Post on the Profanities Poems (2018)
12. On the Real and its Other (c.2018)
13. On the Kabbala (c. 2018)
14. Two Cities: On Carcosa and Golgonooza (2018)

 

PART 5: CRITICISM

1. A Moment of Bennett (2009)
2. Introduction to Revised Edition of Jim Leftwich’s Doubt (2009)
3. Micro-Essay on Peter Ganick’s Remove a Concept (2009)
4. Micro-Essay on Peter Ganick’s It’s Only Po-Et-Ry and I like It (2010)
5. Introduction to John M. Bennett’s Textis Globbolalicus, Vol. 3 (2011)
6. Eulogy for Jeff Hanneman (2013)
7. Introduction to Petrus Borel’s Lycanthropy: Shreds Torn from ‘Rhapsodies’ (2014)
8. Preface to Denis Beznesov’s Glasseyed Pipe (2014)
9. Micro-Essay on Agrüelles’ Fiat Lux (2014)
10. Preface to Joseph Bouchardy’s The Garrick Remedy (2015)
11. Review of Jules Verne’s Paris in the 20th Century (2015)
12. Introduction to Imogene Engine’s I, Engine: Collected & New Works (2016)
13. Introduction to Leftwich’s Rascible & Kempt, Vol. 2 (2016)
14. Micro-Essay on Vol. 2 (2016)
15. Review of Fiddler’s Green Magazine (2017)
16. Critical Afterward to Argüelles’ Fragments of a Gone World: Joe & I & Others: Poems (2017)
17. Two Death Metal Shows: A Micro- Anti- Review (2017)
18. Mini-Review of Claire Goldberg Moses & Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (2018)
19. Publisher’s Forward to Vol. 4 of Nellson’s translation of Wordsworth’s Prelude (2018)
20. 3 Zine Micro-Reviews (2018)
21. Micro-Essay on Jim Leftwich & Billy Bob Beamer’s Sound Rituals (2018)
22. Review of mIEKEL aND, Hreadlines du jour (2019)
23. Review of Georges Bataille et. al., The Sacred Conspiracy (2019)
24. Review of Stéphane Mallarmé, The Book (2019)

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Going on Mini-Tour!

It's taken over 15 years, but holy crap I'm doing a (short) tour:

July 23: Baltimore, MD @ the true vine record shop

July 24: Easton, PA @ the Book & Puppet Co.

July 25: West Haven, CT @ Crunch House

July 26: Kingston, NY @ Kingston Artists Collective + Cafe

July 27: Willimantic, CT @ Willimantic Records

July 28: Philadelphia, PA @ Vox Populi

Olchar Lindsann & Jack Wright

 
Crashing Around

Samples of Olchar here and Jack here

Olchar Lindsann would be called a sound poet, but that's just a cover for creative howling --“vocal contortions & frothing at the mouth." Trigger warning for slobbering, but draws the line at spitting. Yes he does write, but he will only be scribbling on this tour behind the scenes. He's been called "A rootless cosmopolitan and cultural radical who finds scraps of solace and inspiration down by the Roanoke River"--a wanderer from the Midwest, then the UK, and back to New Jersey, but now frimly rooted in Roanoke, where he lives a relatively normal life, like the rest of us (ahem, speak for yourself...)
 

Jack Wright responds to the word "musician" and "saxophonist" (among others) and he too is mild-mannered in most social situations, doesn't kill most animals, and obeys most road signs. He improvises, sometimes astutely, sometimes foolishly, but never with the intent to make "music." Whatever it is, he makes more sounds on the saxophone than you are likely to have heard.
 

The two will be on tour end of July--Baltimore the 23rd at the True Vine; Easton the 24th at the Book and Puppet; New Haven the 25th at Crunch House; Kingston at the Art Cafe the 26th; Willimantic CT at the Record Store; and finishing up the 27th in Philly . They'll perform together vocally as a duo, and separately as well, doing whatever they please.