Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde

One of the most important avant-garde movements of postwar Paris was Lettrism, which crucially built an interest in the relationship between writing and image into projects in poetry, painting, and especially cinema. Highly influential, the Lettrists served as a bridge of sorts between the earlier works of the Dadaists and Surrealists and the later Conceptual artists. Off-Screen Cinema is the first monograph in English of the Lettrists. Offering a full portrait of the avant-garde scene of 1950s Paris, it focuses on the film works of key Lettrist figures like Gil J Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, and especially the movement's founder, Isidore Isou, a Romanian immigrant whose “discrepant editing” deliberately uncoupled image and sound. Through Cabañas's history, we see not only the full scope of the Lettrist project, but also its clear influence on Situationism, the French New Wave, the New Realists, as well as American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage.

Arts & Photography

Cabañas, Kaira M.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished within the modernist movements there. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the direction and creation of art by the mentally ill was actively encouraged by prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism, which led to a much wider appreciation among the curators of major institutions of modern art in Brazil, where pieces are included in important exhibitions and collections. Kaira M. Cabañas shows that at the center of this advocacy stood such significant proponents as psychiatrists Osório César and Nise da Silveira, who championed treatments that included painting and drawing studios; and the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who penned Gestaltist theses on aesthetic response. Cabañas examines the lasting influence of this unique era of Brazilian modernism, and how the afterlife of this “outsider art” continues to raise important questions. How do we respect the experiences of the mad as their work is viewed through the lens of global art? Why is this art reappearing now that definitions of global contemporary art are being contested? Learning from Madness offers an invigorating series of case studies that track the parallels between psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by influential artists there, to an analogous but altogether distinct situation in Brazil.

Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art

On October 27, 1960, art critic Pierre Restany named a group of Paris-based artists the “Nouveaux Réalistes” (New Realists) in a founding declaration that stated, “The New Realists recognize their collective singularity. New Realism = new perceptual approaches of the real.” Besides Restany, this group included Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques Villeglé. Their work incorporated consumer objects and new media in response to the postwar period’s painterly modes and its burgeoning consumer and industrial society. However, they did not share a common avant-garde strategy. The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme is a critical reassessment of this important neo-avant-garde movement. Kaira M. Cabañas offers an interdisciplinary account of their work and challenges the ideas of Restany, who mandated a “direct appropriation of the real.” Cabañas posits that, for the Nouveaux Réalistes, realism engaged performative practices to produce alternative social meanings.

The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France

Yale University Press

A new reality for the art object has emerged in the world of contemporary art: it is now experienced less as an autonomous, inanimate form and more as an active material agent. In this book, Kaira M. Cabañas describes how such a shift in conceptions of art's materiality came to occur, exploring key artistic practices in Venezuela, Brazil, and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Immanent Vitalities expands the discourse of new materialisms by charting how artists, ranging from Gego to Laura Lima, distance themselves from dualisms such as mind-matter, culture-nature, human-nonhuman, and even Western-non-Western in order to impact our understanding of what is animate. Tracing migrations of people, objects, and ideas between South America and Europe, Cabañas historicizes changing perceptions about art's agency while prompting readers to remain attentive to the ethical dimensions of materiality and of social difference and lived experience.

Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art (Volume 4) (Studies on Latin American Art and Latinx Art)

University of California Press

The essays in Common Love, Aesthetics of Becoming take up the question of "love" in various ways. The point of departure is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's discussion of love in Commonwealth, excerpts of which were published in the October 2009 issue of Artforum. Hardt and Negri argue for a love that moves beyond identification (e.g, with the nation state) and beyond an idea of unification (e.g., as with romantic love). More related to art practice per se, art critic George Baker alludes to "love" when describing the sharing of forms: how film becomes sculptural, for example, or how painting moves toward a sculptural condition.

Common Love

Amenoff, Gregory

Benenson, A.E.

Johnson-Montenegro, Donald

Chappa, Kristen

Jr., Robert E. Harrist

Kanamitsu, Tomoko

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The Wallach Art Gallery

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Books by Cabañas, Kaira M.