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Reading Against the Frame: Photomontage and Trans Aesthetics in the Russian Avant-Garde

By Michael M. Weinstein,

Avant-garde art and transgender identification begin from a common crisis of representation: a sense that, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “[t]here is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself material form.” In diverse instances of modernist cultural production and trans gender alike, such a recognition spurs attempts to reconfigure the contours of the sensible in ways that affirm the salience and shareability of this “something.” Yet avant-garde practitioners’ experiments attest to a structuring ambivalence about whether and how the “unpresentable” might be made visible on the surface, whether of a body or a body of work. In the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917, this ambivalence assumes heightened political stakes, and art objects appear correspondingly riven with dialectical tensions; much as they celebrate the destructive potential of their own novelty, they cannot quite relinquish the dream of the artwork as seamless totality. How answerable must the made body be, they ask, to a public? To history? Thus, I suggest that we might understand the art of the early Soviet avant-garde—both in its motivating questions and in the answers its new forms encode—as surprisingly trans.

The Eye and the Hand in Kafka’s Drawings

By Nicholas Sawicki,

In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An extensive illustrated catalog with reproductions of all of Kafka’s known renderings, Franz Kafka: The Drawings, was published later that same year by Andreas Kilcher, and both the images and the book have inspired extensive commentary and reflection.

Virginia Woolf in Circulation: The Hogarth Press Order Books, Modernist Bookselling and Digital Praxis

By Alice Staveley, Stanford University

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse famously opens with six-year old James Ramsay, “sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army & Navy Stores.” With the awkward dexterity of a young child, James carefully guides his scissors around “a picture of a refrigerator,” endowing the image “with heavenly bliss” under the loving but watchful gaze of his mother. The scene has long captured critical attention, but less so the consumerist allusion to a popular shop on the book’s first page. The Army & Navy Stores was a well-known London department store, over a quarter-century old by the time James shreds its marquee catalogue.

Dreaming through Marg

Print ad with illustration of bungalows and magazines

By Rashmi Viswanathan,

In 1946, the arts and culture journal Marg was founded under the editorial leadership of writer, arts patron, and cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004). Dedicated to the promotion and analysis of the arts, Marg featured modernist practices and heritage forms from around the world and from a diverse range of periods in illustrative displays, scholarly essays, and editorial content. Multiple discourses were brought into conversation with each other through a type of visual pedagogy. From architectural modernism to art history to practices in picture framing, it interpreted and taught a new modernist historical arc of arts in a decolonizing India.

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“Leaving hardly a sign—and no memories”: Roger Casement and the Metamodernist Archive

By Alison Garden, University College Dublin

On Friday, 11th May 1923, the New York Evening Post ran an article entitled “Conrad and Casement Hut Mates in Africa.”[1] In it, the journalist John Powell detailed his encounter with Joseph Conrad and Conrad’s thoughts on his one-time friend, the former darling of the British Empire turned Irish nationalist rebel, Roger Casement. Conrad told Powell of “[h]is first impression of Casement”; a tale told “so vividly that it stands out with the clearness and blackness of a silhouette caught unexpectedly in a lonely place, casting a hint of ill omen.”[2] Despite the earlier friendship that had existed between Casement and Conrad, in the profile of Casement drawn from Conrad’s words, Casement is an unknowable, malevolent figure:

Fixing the Interwar Meal: Positive Eugenics and Jewish Assimilation in Betty Miller’s Farewell Leicester Square

By Kate M. Nash, Boston University

Betty Miller opens her 1946 “Notes for an Unwritten Autobiography” provocatively, branding herself a “Fifth Columnist” who had at one time worked to undermine her country from within. Rather than any clandestine operation that she participated in as an adult, however, Miller’s stint as a “Fifth Columnist” occurred when she was just a child. While a young girl in a nursery in Ireland, Miller increasingly became captivated by the image of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Although Miller understood that the Kaiser must be “the most wicked man on earth,” she nevertheless felt a combination of powerful fascination and pity because he was so seemingly friendless and ostracized.

The Optics of Orientation: Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Kaufman in Moscow

By John Hoffmann, Johns Hopkins University

How would a film look if Walter Benjamin had been behind the movie camera? Miriam Hansen entertains this possibility in Cinema and Experience (2012) when she speculates about an “imaginary city film” made according to Benjamin’s aesthetic principles. Such a film, Hansen writes, would include a variety of avant-garde techniques “from French Impressionism to Soviet experimental cinema, in particular montage (that is, discontinuous and rhythmic editing), nonconventional and expressive framing, and camera movement.” Yet Hansen’s version of a Benjaminian film practice is inferred almost entirely from Benjamin’s film theory, while his descriptive essays on European cities—“Naples,” “Marseilles,” and the focus of this article, “Moscow” (1927)—are missing from her authoritative survey of Benjamin’s thought.

Spontaneity, Intimacy, and Friendship in Morton Feldman’s Music of the 1950s

By Ryan Dohoney, Northwestern University

Morton Feldman became a full-time composer at the age of forty. He had worked in the family business—a children’s coat factory near LaGuardia Airport in New York City—since his early twenties and been disparaged by Pierre Boulez as a dilettante because of it. In the spring of 1966, Feldman wrote to John Cage that the business “went kaput, and now I’m blessed with total insecurity.” His insecurity was hardly total. Through a chance meeting that year following a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace

Nude Vibrations: Isadora Duncan’s Creatural Aesthetic

By Carrie Rohman, Lafayette College

It is perhaps only the advent of animal studies in the last decade that allows us to return to the often-cited comment above and link it in a serious intellectual manner with Isadora Duncan’s own understanding of her dancing and of the dancing body as she was helping to shape and articulate it in modernism. While recent work on Duncan emphasizes her interest in the machine, her

Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Warsaw Ghetto?

By Benjamin Paloff, University of Michigan

In the courtyard behind the apartment building at 55 Sienna Street, one can still visit a rare fragment of the wall that, for a brief period between November 1940 and October 1941, marked the southern boundary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Though situated just northwest of the Central Train Station, in the heart of the Polish capital’s downtown, it is remarkably hard to find. To approach its east side, you have to be buzzed through a gate by a guard who, though unseen, is apparently keeping watch for visitors, who are invariably checking a map or guidebook against the addresses on the adjacent buildings, certain that if they were in the right place there would be a sign to direct them to a site of such importance.

The Uncanny Golden Country: Late-Modernist Utopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Kunio Shin, Aoyama Gakuin University

“My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel”—this is how George Orwell characterized Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend on 4 February 1949. As its reception history abundantly documents, it turned out to be an interpretive challenge to read the novel as a utopia.

Images in Crisis: Three Lives’s Vanishing Women

By Alix Beeston, University of Sydney

In 1876, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the founder of eugenics, reported to the Anthropological Institute of London his newest physiognomic method for uncovering and defining human "types." Galton’s composite portraiture was an exercise in re-photography that co-opted the mechanical precision of the photograph for a pseudoscience of predetermined sociological and biological categories.