Sculptors Against the State: Anarchism and the Anglo-European Avant-Garde by Mark Antliff

Science Avant-Garde

o think that the neoimpressionists are painters who cover canvases with little multicolored spots is a rather widespread mistake, " wrote Paul Signac in his manifesto of their movement. " This mediocre dot method has nothing to do with the aesthetic of the painters we are defending here, nor with the technique of divisionism they use. " Signac was referring to, among others, Georges Seurat, who...

reADing the LAte AvAnt- gArDe

Free Jazz and the Avant-Garde

Free jazz refers to a historical movement that, despite earlier precedents, first significantly flowered in the late 1950s in the US. Its central focus was a liberation from musical conventions – but from a jazz player’s perspective, since no liberation is ever complete. Initially known simply as the New Thing, it became Free Jazz by borrowing the title of a seminal 1960 album by saxophonist/co...

Avant Garde Fatty Acid Synthesis by Trypanosomes

In this issue of Cell, Lee et al. (2006) report that the parasite Trypanosoma brucei synthesizes fatty acids in an unconventional way. T. brucei and two other trypanosomes use enzymes called elongases to synthesize myristate, a fourteen carbon (C14) fatty acid essential for pathogenesis. This is an unexpected finding as these enzymes were thought only to elongate already long (C16 or C18) acyl ...

Schumpeter: Theorist of the avant-garde

This paper argues that Schumpeter’s 1911 edition of ‘Theory of Economic Development’ can be fruitfully read as a theory of the avant-garde, in line with such theories developed by artistic avant-garde around the same time, in particular by the Italian Futurists. In particular it will show that both Schumpeter and other avant-garde theorists sought to break with past (1), identify an avant-garde...