Deepa Bhasthi Reviews Sophie Seita's Provisional Avant-Gardes

Deepa Bhasthi introduces readers of Hyperallergic to Sophie Seita's new book Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities From Dada to Digital. "Focusing on both well-known and obscure little magazines, Seita challenges the notion that there exists a formula for what can be called avant-garde," Bhasthi writes. Picking up there: 

Instead, she presents the category as fluid, broad-minded, and sometimes contradictory. Positioning little magazines as forums for creative expression and means of engendering provisional and heterogenous communities, she organizes the book into periods: proto-Dada (~1914–29), proto-conceptual (~1965–75), proto-language and queer New Narrative (~1971–89), feminist (~1983–2009), and contemporary digital magazine communities (~2008–17). This concept of “proto-forms,” she explains, “conceives of avant-gardes as provisional networks of affiliation rather than rigidly demarcated groups, where proto- suggests provisionality and heterogeneity, while form stresses media, genres, and groups.”

Within these periods, Seita examines the materiality of the magazines, as well as the social contexts from which they grew, the groups’ defining statements, and who was included or excluded. In addition to expected titles like Others, 0 to 9, some/thing, Contact, The Little Review, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, she pays important attention to post-1980s queer and feminist avant-garde magazines like Raddle Moon, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, HOW(ever), HOW2, and Chain, thus filling a huge lacuna that exists in the understanding of the category. Digital magazines are also given their due in the book, neatly rounding off the history Seita charts.

Continue reading at Hyperallergic.