Abstract
This fascinating and wide-ranging book makes an eloquent argument for reconsidering the German avant-garde in around 1900–40. The avant-garde under discussion here comprises artists, writers and thinkers from Kokoschka to Benjamin who cut across conventional categorizations such as Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism or ‘theory’. Rumold’s ‘archaeological’ aim is to uncover the German avant-garde’s turns towards the visual, its desire for a pure imagery free from literary representation, the burden of history and Western conceptualizations of the self. According to Rumold, the avant-garde’s visual turns subvert the culture of metaphor perpetuated and institutionalized by literature, displacing symbolic representations of the Western subject into a range of pre-logical and progressive forms, figures, and ‘unsymbolizable, singular images’ (p. 18). Rumold maps a rich repertoire of avant-garde ‘image zones’ (the term is Walter Benjamin’s, from his 1929 essay on Surrealism), paying close attention to their historical and theoretical contexts as well as their shared modality which, he suggests, amounts to an interplay of materiality and mental creativity to give us ‘the sight, touch, feel, not of utopia, but of a ground unspoiled by hypertrophic conceptuality and metaphors’ (p. 278). The book thus bears out the author’s claim to the productivity of thinking about the avant-garde’s visual turns, where previous accounts have emphasized its artistic and/or political failure (pp. 15–18).
The book consists of 11 chapters arranged in three parts. They are preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion. Individually and collectively, the chapters explore the radical shift from the classical idealist tradition of literary forms of Bildung (the education of self) to more disruptive and heterogeneous visual forms (or Bild). Part 1 focuses on corporeal forms and figures produced by the visual turn against literature. Oskar Kokoschka’s writings for the stage and some of his visual work are read as radical theatrical images that challenge the regimes of language and human psychology. Hans/Jean Arp’s playful experimentation with poetic language, with its iconic man/animal hybrids, and Franz Kafka’s well-known, but still enigmatic, human/non-human constructs, evident also in drawings and scribbles in his manuscripts and letters, are plausibly presented as undercutting conventional ‘images’ of the human self using novel modes of representation. That such experimentation should have occurred in linguistic and political borderlands suggests a geography of the avant-garde, which merits further exploration.
Part 2, headed ‘The I-less eye: primitivist archeologies and images of modernity’ features three chapters on Carl Einstein, underlining the key role Rumold ascribes to this writer, art critic and theorist of the avant-garde. This part is concerned with Einstein’s lifelong exploration of non-European image cultures and their significance for avant-garde thinking and writing, including his pioneering Negerplastik (1915), his theories of Cubism and Surrealism, and his collaborations with Eugene Jolas’s great little magazine transition and with Georges Bataille’s Documents. Focusing on Einstein’s theoretical and creative writings, Rumold reconstructs in illuminating ways the author’s physiology and phenomenology of seeing and demonstrates convincingly how it constituted a challenge to subject-centric thought through its emphasis on fluid zones of simultaneity, transgression and metamorphosis.
Moving on from artistic and epistemological aspects of avant-garde visuality, the final part of the book turns to politics. It brings together essays on Kurt Schwitters and Walter Benjamin, examining the former’s major architectural experiment, the Merzbau undertaken in his home in Hanover as an extended form of corporeal and cultural politics, and the latter’s writings, especially his ‘Städtebilder’ and the drug protocols of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as radical texts in the surrealist vein, open to the new aesthetics and politics of Bildung (or formation) of the self as much as the real. Previous readings of Benjamin in the light of Surrealism have tended to isolate the German contexts. Rumold’s astute discussion of Benjamin, including a bravura chapter on Benjamin and Einstein, is not only one of the highlights of the book, it also provides a fitting finale to a compelling argument about the continued relevance of the avant-garde’s visual turn.