LEF was a journal and an association of avant-garde writers, artists, and critics in the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1923 and was renamed Novy LEF from 1927 to 1929. The journal’s objective was to reexamine the ideology and practices of leftist art, abandon individualism, and increase art’s contribution to developing a socialist commons. Among the journal’s well-known contributors were Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Arvatov, Sergey Tretyakov, and Nikolay Chuzhak.
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: Dematerialization of the Art Object (University of California Press, 1997).
The post-conceptual desertion of modernist and avant-garde principles was examined in Timotheous Vermeulen and Robin van der Aken, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2, no 1 (2010).
See Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism.”
Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review, no. 92 (March–April 2015); Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford University Press, 2005).
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Polity Press, 2009).
Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020).
Diedrich Diederichsen, On Surplus Value in Art (Sternberg Press, 2008).
Jameson, “Aesthetics of Singularity.”
Boris Groys, “Under the Gaze of Theory,” e-flux journal, no. 35, May 2012 →.
As Groys writes in “Under the Gaze of Theory”: “Critical theory—from its beginnings in the work of Marx and Nietzsche—sees the human being as a finite, material body, devoid of ontological access to the eternal or metaphysical. The end of the world does not have to necessarily be apocalyptic and reveal the truth of human existence. Rather, we know life as non-teleological, as having no unifying divine or historical plan that we could contemplate and upon which we could rely.”
Boris Groys, Art Power (MIT Press, 2008).
On the theme of loss and emptiness in modernism, see Boris Groys, “Weak Universalism,” e-flux journal, no. 15, April 2010 →.
Vermeulen and van der Aken, “Notes on Metamodernism.”
Lettrism was a French avant-garde movement established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. Lettrists applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, such as poetry, film, painting, and political theory. The movement had its theoretical roots in Dada and surrealism.
Boris Groys, Communist Postscript, trans. T. Ford (Verso, 2010).
Groys, “Changing Topologies of the Class Struggle,” Crisis & Critique 10, no. 1 (2023): 149–50.
Groys, “Changing Topologies,” 153.
Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care (Verso, 2022).
