Avantgarde Books

This book offers a reassessment of how "matter" – in the context of art history, criticism, and architecture – pursued a radical definition of "multiplicity", against the dominant and hierarchical...

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948–1951). Although the name stood for the organizers’ home cities, the Cobra artists...

This book offers a reassessment of how "matter" – in the context of art history, criticism, and architecture – pursued a radical definition of "multiplicity", against the dominant and hierarchical...

In A Spy in the House of Love, Anais Nin's vision of feminine sexuality is expressed with a ferocious dramatic force. Sabrina is a firebird blazing through 1950s New York: she is a woman daring to...

An extraordinary novel of passion and discovery from Anais Nin, the master of erotic fiction Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for brief...

American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century...

Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation...

John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933--1950 explores the early part of John Cage’s life and career, concentrating on the "pre-chance" period from roughly 1933 to 1950. These essays...

John Cage seeks to explore the early part of the composer's life and career, concentrating on the pre-chance period between 1933 and 1950 that is crucial to understanding his later work. The essays...

'In one short and sly book after another, Levy writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both' Atlantic Who was...

‘Winner of the 2023 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, The American Society for Aesthetics.’This book traces the history of engagements between dance and the visual arts in the...

Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture, Sixth Edition, presents an extensive history of electronic music—from its historical beginnings in the late nineteenth century to...

`It is a pleasure to read. Well-written, free of cant, impressively wide-ranging. The book is really an introduction to the avant-garde.' - John Lahr

Performing Paradise offers a groundbreaking reassessment of one of the most influential yet misunderstood theatrical experiments of the twentieth century.This illuminating study delves deep into the...

This book is an analytic and historical portrait of the volatile decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Engaging with avant-garde art and thought, and concentrating on two of the most...

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social...

This book explores the Situationist International’s paradoxical relationship with cinema from 1957 to 1972. The SI was a postwar avant-garde that condemned representation’s erosion of social life...

Originally published in 1998, Easels of Utopia presents a discussion of art's duration and contingency within the avant garde's aesthetic parameters, which throughout this century have constructed,...

Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects presents institutions, individuals and networks who have ensured experimental films and Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s are not consigned...

From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies: Language Poetry and its American Avant-Garde Aesthetics offers a comprehensive account of Language Poetry, tracing its origins, evolution, and enduring...

Avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison has been making films that combine archival footage and contemporary music for decades, and he has recently begun to receive substantial recognition: he was the...

This experimental book on translation borrows its title and methodology from the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. As they theorize it, an assemblage (French agencement)...

Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre is a collection of Michal Kobialka’s essays, written between 1986 and 2025, that provide a comprehensive understanding of Kantor’s theatre practice...

Intimate Commentaries on Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre is a collection of Michal Kobialka’s essays, written between 1986 and 2025, that provide a comprehensive understanding of Kantor’s theatre practice...

Performer and researcher Peter O’Hagan studies the musical style of Pierre Boulez during his final creative period, by means of a detailed consideration of the ensemble work sur Incises, which stands...

Performer and researcher Peter O’Hagan studies the musical style of Pierre Boulez during his final creative period, by means of a detailed consideration of the ensemble work sur Incises, which stands...

Mauricio Kagel was undoubtedly one of the major figures in the new music of the last fifty years. Growing up in the rich cultural atmosphere of Buenos Aires in the 1940s and '50s, where the writer...

Robert Wilson is an American–European director who is also a performer, installation artist, writer, designer of light and much more besides – a crossover polymath who dissolves both generic and...

This book is the first study of John Zorn’s ‘file card’ works, with special focus made on the pieces Godard (1985), Spillane (1986), Interzone (2010), and Liber Novus (2010). It explains the unique...

This book examines how China’s new generation of avant-garde writers and artists are pushing the boundaries of vernacular culture, creatively appropriating artistic and literary languages from global...

Zeitmaße is one of a group of four acknowledged masterpieces composed between 1955 and 1957 that together established Karlheinz Stockhausen as the leading figure in the European avant-garde. Of the...

This book focuses on the role of La MaMa Experimental Theatre within Avant-garde theater during the 1960s and 1970s.This study investigates the involvement of the Off-Off Broadway circuit in the...

This book explores the relationship of the life and work of the remarkable Parisian-Jewish writer Georges Perec (1936–1983) to dance."Dancing" addresses art-making parallels and their personal and...

Anarchic street performances in late-1950s Japan; inauguration of the first Happenings in Antwerp and charging of the "magic circle" in Amsterdam; Bauhaus Situationiste and anti-national art...

Jaquet offers a detailed analysis of time, duration, and eternity in Spinoza’s works, as well as how these themes relate to each other through the entirety of his corpus. With Spinoza, she asks how...