Can Dada Hold Up A Bridge?
Peter Zusi's book The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition was published earlier this summer, and we're proud to say that it's now an Open Access book — so anybody can download and read it for free.
Barbara Burns talks to Peter Zusi, whose book The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition appeared recently in Legenda’s Visual Culture series.
BB. The subject of your book is Karel Teige (1900-1951), a Czech artist and critic who became a leading figure in the avant-garde movement of the interwar period. How did Teige’s vision of the future achieve the prominence it did, and why is his cultural influence still important today?
PZ. Teige channelled cultural and intellectual currents from an enormous range of sources and combined them in original ways. But he himself was not particularly interested in being ‘original’; rather, he wanted to take the various avant-garde currents he regarded as most significant (most prominently Constructivism, Surrealism, and a credo that was in fact original to him and the Czech avant-garde, which he called ‘Poetism’) and synthesize them in a coherent fashion. In doing so he confronted head-on certain paradoxes that are too often overlooked: to take a conspicuous example, how should one reconcile the emphasis on strict rationality in modernist architecture with the exuberant exploration of the irrational in avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism?
This drive to synthesize extremely varied, and often contradictory, dynamics within the interwar European avant-garde is what the word ‘integrity’ in the title of my book describes. And Teige’s drive to synthesize – even where it fails – is also why his work remains significant today. I know of no other thinker who attempted a comparably ambitious ‘unified field theory’ for avant-garde culture.
BB. Can you tell us about Teige’s work as a graphic designer, particularly of book covers, and also say something about the cover you’ve chosen for your volume?
PZ. As a teenager Teige aspired to become a painter and graphic artist, and had some impressive early successes (he published artwork in the leading German Expressionist journal Die Aktion, for example). Ultimately, he felt his artistic talent wasn’t equal to his ambitions and he turned to theory and propagation of avant-garde culture. Yet his artistic interests continued in the form of intensive activity in typography and graphic design, in particular of book covers, which he simultaneously theorized as the ‘poster’ for the book and the harbinger of a new, more direct and powerful relation between ‘cultural production’ (the term he often used so as to avoid the loathed idea of ‘art’) and the wider public. His book designs are now regarded as central achievements of the interwar Czechoslovak avant-garde.
Regarding the cover of my own volume, early on I informed the editors at Legenda that the standard format for the series, based on a strict separation between text and accompanying image, would have been rejected outright by Teige, for whom the integration of text and image was a fundamental premise. Legenda was very receptive to this observation, and ultimately produced a design that I think is an excellent compromise, both recognizable as holding to the format of the series while also having a distinctly ‘Teige-esque’ feel. Certain visual elements from Teige’s own work –in particular the red circle, one of his favoured graphic elements, which I discuss in the book – have been combined in montage form to create a cover that (if I may say so myself!) is very striking.
BB. Rather than offering a systematic analysis of Teige’s life and work, your monograph places Teige within the broader context of Czech modernist culture. How did this approach influence the way you structured your study and the developments, debates and people you chose to include?
PZ. The book has a double personality: on the one hand it is of course a monograph on Teige, and in particular the long first chapter presents a quite detailed overview of his career. But I treat Teige as a lens through which to observe and reflect on the interwar European avant-garde in broader, theoretical terms. So I did think of this is a contribution to modernist studies more generally, not just to the history of Czechoslovak or even central European modernism. Teige had such wide-ranging networks across avant-garde circles stretching from Paris to Moscow – André Breton, Paul Éluard, F. T. Marinetti, Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Mosei Ginzburg are just a few of the figures with whom he had extensive interaction – and he was so focused on articulating the underlying premises shared by this international avant-garde, that he is an excellent figure through whom to analyse general questions about interwar modernism.
In particular I was interested in the astonishing way that Teige amplified a term he drew from modernist architectural discourse, ‘Historicism’, into a comprehensive critical term that he applied at times even to works of modernist visual or literary art. I see this as revealing surprising complexities in what is too often presented as a straightforward ‘rejection of history’ by the avant-garde. Teige’s emphasis on ‘historicism’ as a critical aesthetic category also offered productive avenues for comparison with the later thought of Walter Benjamin, and indeed the final section of the book becomes to a large degree a pas de deux between these two figures. Along the way I use a series of episodes and debates from Teige’s intellectual career – the best known of these is his extraordinary 1929 polemic where he accused Le Corbusier of (surprise!) historicism, a polemic widely regarded as a touchstone in the history of modernist architecture – to bring Teige into dialogue with other major thinkers of and about the interwar avant-garde, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Georg Lukács, Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský.
BB. How did you first become interested in Czech interwar culture, and Teige in particular?
PZ. True story: in my first months of graduate school, I was wandering through the bookstacks in the wonderful Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago when the spine of a slim volume somehow caught my eye; the design intrigued me so much that I checked the book out from the library and admired it for several weeks. It was Teige’s 1927 volume Stavba a báseň (Construction and Poem).
I had only the flimsiest knowledge of Czech at that time, did not know Teige’s name and could hardly make any sense of it. I intuited that this was interesting but didn’t investigate further. Two or three years later, after having spent a couple of summers in Prague and with much improved Czech, I started to realize that this fellow whose name I kept encountering, Karel Teige, sounded awfully interesting, and wanted to see what the library held of his work, and to my astonishment was led back to that very same volume from years before (which had faded into only the vaguest of memories). So perhaps a touch of fate here?!
I studied in two departments at Chicago that both encouraged wide interdisciplinary creativity, Comparative Literature and Social Thought, and I was primarily focussed on modern German literature and culture at the time. The more I learned about Teige, however, the more he revealed relevance to my other interests, and eventually I wrote a chapter of my PhD dissertation on him. Things snowballed from there! I like to think that the deep commitment to interdisciplinarity of my graduate studies, which my PhD advisors supported wholeheartedly, has had a beneficial effect on this book.
BB. What was the thinking behind Teige’s famous picture-poems, an art form combining poetry with collage and photomontage?
PZ. As I mentioned earlier, for Teige the integration of text and image was a fundamental ideal. The so-called ‘picture-poem’ (obrazová-báseň), developed by Teige and others from 1923, was the most direct expression of this and is widely regarded as an original Czech contribution to the corpus of genres of the interwar avant-garde. It did not develop in a vacuum, naturally, and has clear affinities with Dadaist collage and photomontage, but is uniquely characterized by the attempt to unite in seamlessly integrated fashion visual and textual modes of reading. Teige understood this as more direct, more immediate, more fundamental, than traditional forms of visual or literary experience. The ‘picture-poem’ was to be perceived more than read or interpreted, yet it still laid claim to being a mode of narrative communication.
Picture-poems found their greatest application as book covers and to an extent even as postcards: practical functions entirely in line with the claim that these were not ‘artworks’, but forms of creative production that could enter the everyday life of the masses. Most picture-poems were designed with their suitability for technological reproduction explicitly in mind; indeed, Teige’s theoretical claims from the early and mid-1920s for technological reproducibility in avant-garde production anticipate in many respects Benjamin’s famous claims from a decade later. The book goes into a fair amount of detail on this.
BB. The title of one of your chapters is ‘Functions of the Aesthetic’. What, in a nutshell, is Teige’s philosophy of the purpose or meaning of art?
PZ. Articulating a purpose or function for aesthetic activity is perhaps the central drama of Teige’s intellectual career. I have mentioned a few times that Teige hated the idea of ‘art’, which he felt was outdated, self-indulgent, and disconnected from the lives of the vast majority of people. The traditional understanding of ‘art’ served no function in the modern world. A committed Marxist, Teige regarded ‘art’ as a category belonging to a vanishing stage of bourgeois society, and the challenge was to find new practices and forms (such as cinema) appropriate for the socio-political transformations he felt were underway. At the same time, however, Teige wanted to preserve a positive space for aesthetic experience: he strongly resisted the utilitarian tendencies among many Marxists thinkers of the time to reject any and all aesthetic endeavours as superfluous luxuries, to be jettisoned to make room for the ‘real’ work of political agitation.
The attempt to unite aesthetic experience with clear functionality is in many respects equivalent to squaring a circle, and Teige never landed on one final formulation. This might be regarded as a failure; but he is one of few thinkers who understood the scale of the challenge, and I would argue that his attempts were uniquely productive and creative. Tracing the developing iterations of Teige’s understanding of the ‘function of the aesthetic’ and, in a similar though not identical formulation, of the ‘aesthetic function’, is one of the central concerns of the book.
BB. What was the most challenging aspect of this research project?
PZ. A challenge when one works on Czech culture (or any ‘smaller’ cultural tradition) is that one often finds oneself put in a box: readers may find the Czech avantgarde, say, to be more or less interesting, but it is always an exotic beast, very much in the shadow of and with little to say about our understanding of the ‘big’ traditions such as French, German, Italian, and so on. With this book I wanted to push against this. I wanted to show that a figure writing from a tradition now regarded as ‘peripheral’ was, first of all, hardly peripheral at the time, as he was embedded in major European networks that are much more familiar to people; and second, that his work and legacy are not just of interest to understanding Czech modernism but can tell us important things about the underlying ambitions of the European avantgarde more generally. I will be happy if the book draws some readers who have had no particular previous interest in Czech culture.
BB. Teige was ultimately denounced and silenced by the Communist government, and his work was banned for decades. To what extent has interest in his achievement been revived since 1989?
PZ. A complicated question. For the better part of his most active years Teige was a committed Marxist and was enthusiastically supportive of the Soviet project. His 1925 visit to Moscow and Leningrad had an importance for his thought comparable only to his 1922 visit to Paris. During the first half of the 1930s Teige regarded himself as a conveyer to the Czechoslovak public of the ‘truth’ about Soviet culture and society, fighting against what he deemed the hostile and distorting account holding sway in the media of the time. Some of his statements from this period can be very jarring in their support for positions and institutions that have long since revealed themselves to have been extremely insidious, and I have made an effort not to whitewash this side of Teige’s thought – he was swept up by much that was ideological and disturbing. But to his credit he also found his way out of this: in particular following the Zinoviev-Kamenev show trial in 1936 his doubts began to grow rapidly, and by the later 1930s he was comparing Soviet cultural and social policies with those in Nazi Germany.
After the Communist regime came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, they did not forgive Teige for his critical stance before the war. He was stigmatized as the embodiment of ‘decadent Western “formalist” modernism’ and, given the atmosphere in the early 1950s, had every reason to fear he would soon be targeted for judicial persecution. It was at this moment, in 1951, when the political ideals of his earlier years had completely turned against him, that he died of a heart attack. For much of the following few decades his works were banned, and public and academic discussion of his legacy was stifled.
This complicated background means that after 1989, while most commentators have regarded him as a brave voice for freedom of cultural expression and as a figure who stood up to oppressive Communist cultural policies, some have had difficulty looking past his earlier support for the Soviet Union. Personally, I think it is important that we accept that he was not perfect (who of us is?), that he was caught up in certain beliefs we now see as delusions, but that this does not diminish the moral integrity of his life trajectory as a whole. Luckily, I think that today his legacy is widely regarded as overwhelmingly positive, and he is viewed as one of the most significant figures of interwar Czechoslovak – and European – culture.
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