Preservation, Radicalism, and the Avant-Garde Canon ed. by Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Fiona Noble, and Tara Plunkett (review)

Preservation, Radicalism, and the Avant-Garde Canon aims to investigate radical art in order to further critical thinking about the avant-garde. The editors position their book as being in dialogue with Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism by Mike Sell and The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) by James Harding, so much so that the second chapter is a discussion between Sell and Harding. The anthology offers an interdisciplinary exchange among artists, curators, and scholars, whose essays focus on a broad range of avant-garde practices in fields including performance, sculpture, painting, curation, poetry, cinema, photography, and theatre. The six sections of the book categorize its concerns in their entirety: "Staging the Avant-Gardes," "Curating the Avant-Gardes," "On the Margins of the Avant-Gardes," "Rereading the Avant-Garde," "Categorizing the Avant-Gardes," and "Closing the Curtain on the Avant-Gardes." For the sake of coherence and brevity, I will engage the subject matter of the book as a whole.

Ideally, anthologies take account of a portion of a field and point in at least one direction for its future. Such is the case here. Preservation, Radicalism, and the Avant-Garde Canon engages the tensions between radicalism and preservation—or to put it another way, the paradox of an avant-garde canon. Much of the writing takes into account the settings and institutionalization of the avant-garde, its history and artists, authors, and curators. The way we write history and theory, who writes it, and its settings and subjects receive careful consideration (15). Canon in the title of the book signals visiting history; preservation signs the problems and consequences of archival assembly; and radicalism, the domain of inquiry. The editors assert that paying attention to radical cultural production is especially urgent when considering artists such as Ai Weiwei and Pussy Riot.

Because the book considers its subject across media, continents, discourses, and time periods, the editors present the problematics of the avantgarde as plural. Identifying the ways in which that knowledge constructs structures of power and/or resists commodifying and institutionalizing art is a through line that places many of the essays in conversation with one another. In one essay, curators contribute fascinating and reflexive observations on challenging existing frameworks for creating and presenting art from different vantage points, and these observations are taken up in another essay about the clash between mythic and mystical viewpoints on Remedios Varo's narrative painting. The synergy among disciplines in evidence here is particularly intriguing.

Other areas of inquiry are how to curate the work of artists who resist categorization (36), and how the outcomes of curation might move away from presenting objects as purely artifacts of their time (55). Curating Tamás St. Turba's Czechoslovakia Radio 1968—presented at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, in 2012 and subsequently at An Active Encounter in Belfast in 2012—is one instance of the shift in contemporary contexts for exhibiting avant-garde work with an eye toward provoking different kinds of reception. Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 is a brick on a plinth accompanied by a text describing the Warsaw Pact army's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, during which listening to the radio was forbidden. To resist censorship Czechs produced many "brick radios"—literally bricks whose shape suggested radios (52). Almost comically, the authorities' suspicions were aroused by the proliferation of these brick radios, and even though the bricks were not real radios, they were confiscated as objects of resistance (53). Flash forward to Belfast forty-three years later when curator Ciara Hickey was curious about how the political environment of the original work might play out in Belfast, especially given that Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 was conceptualized as an object that resisted authority (55). It was not a far stretch to present Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 both as a historical "object" and as one that could, when carefully curated, provoke fluid responses...