In recent years, avant-garde studies has given rise to several models, such as geopolitical and aesthetic networks, in order to describe the exchanges of influences and innovations that have taken place on a transnational level during the interwar period and the postwar years. However, so far no comprehensive study has examined these networks from an ethnic and cultural perspective, nor has any study focused on the "other transnationalism" that developed alongside French transnational modernism. This "other transnationalism" operates according to a dual dynamic of dispersion and cohesion, since the artists who contributed to it form a cohesive community but were simultaneously affected by geographical dispersion. In practice, this transnationalism assumed various forms that went beyond the canonical forms of the historical French avant-gardes: for instance, Jewish artists had the opportunity to exchange ideas derived from the Jewish tradition, such as the Kabbalah, regardless of which avant-garde movement they were affiliated with. The Jewishness of these artists thus functioned as a lingua franca, but their avant-gardism was likely to exclude them from their religious and cultural community. This liminal position, which stems from the occasional overlap of francophone and Jewish transnationalisms, has allowed francophone Jewish artists to question the autonomy and canon of the French avant-garde. This article analyzes the work of Jewish artists who were born and spent their early, tentative years in Romania, and who contributed to the French avant-gardes abroad as some of their leading voices.
The British modernist little magazine Ray: Art Miscellany (1926–1927) pioneered the combination of text and image in the vein of the Continental avant-gardes. Amid the surge of interest in periodicals within modernist studies, Ray has managed to escape broader attention. Its editor, Sidney Hunt, was an enigmatic figure and the magazine itself also eludes categorization, as it did not conform to the standards of English modernism, which were in the process of crystallising at the time of its publication and then dominated the scholarly consensus on artistic innovation during the interwar period. Focusing on the specificities of the magazine form and on Ray's explicitly interartistic and transnational ethos, this article locates Ray within the spectrum of British ‘modernisms’, while interpreting its manifest effort to introduce various European avant-garde movements to a British audience as part of a strategy to establish an alternative modernist project grounded in the ideals of the moribund Arts and Crafts tradition.
The essay examines the epistemological possibilities of artistic imaginary languages and their ontological effects in the avant-garde movement “lettrism.” The movement employed imaginary language, which illustrates an anti-rational theory of language. The problematics of such quasi-language are manifested most radically in relation to quietist-linguistic philosophy ( Sprachkritik ): the identification of the limits of thinking and language in philosophy confronts the utopian belief in the possibility of “private” communication in the avant-garde. Lettrism subverts the normative order of systematic language by means of invented signs, which are not arbitrary but unorthodox. These signs supposedly express that which philosophy designates as epistemic privacy — what can be known to one person only. The paradoxical claim that an imaginary language can express the epistemically private gives rise to what I term the mysticism of immanence . Neither distinctively religious nor atheistic, the mysticism of immanence is based on the idealistic assertion that one is able to express not only the existence but also the contents of epistemic privacy. Moreover, the renunciation of conventional language suggests that immanence is in this case alinguistic. In brief, for lettrists, thinking did not necessitate language. Lettrist imaginary language points out the necessity for convention as a stabilizing framework for meaning production. By advocating the idea of an “immediate message,” which remains between mediation and immediacy, imaginary language exceeds the limits of immanence. Since an imaginary language cannot be shared or self-contained, it is an opening of immanence towards other than immanence. This other is not represented as any absolute transcendence, any version of the beyond, but rather as a collapse of the limits of immanence, limits that are subject to negotiation because the immediate message gives rise to a new and expanded sense of the immanent.
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