The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on radical art theory and partisan practices. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis.

The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

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