Revolutionary Time and the Avant Garde

John Roberts

Softcover | 15.32 x 2.41 x 23.44 cm | 320 pp

Verso | 2015 | 9781781689134

Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicised. Yet, few sustained defences of the avant-garde have been put forward. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book of its kind to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of capitalist non-reproduction.

An invigorating revitalisation of the Frankfurt School legacy, John Roberts's book is unique in its penetrating definition and defence of the avant-garde idea, providing a refined conceptual set of tools that critically engages with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.

'Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is without question the most informed, cogent, and intellectually grounded defence of avant-garde praxis today. Roberts provides a vision of art that is disabused of the business models of the neoliberal culture industries, that neither dissolves politics into art nor attempts to insulate art from functioning as an emancipatory revolutionary force'. Marc James Leger, author of Brave New Avant Garde and The Neoliberal Undead

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. His books include The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, and The Necessity of Errors. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, Oxford Art Journal,
Historical Materialism, Third Text, and Cabinet magazine.