Bidspirit auction | The Beautiful Language of My

The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 by Tom Mcdonough (Author) - USA: MIT Press, 2007. 274 pp., il., 23.3 by 18.5 cm Ex-Library book, but otherwise in very good condition with some wear to the dust jacket. ” The Beautiful Language of My Century ” describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today. McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of detournement and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War (”La France dechiree”), Godard's early film Le Petit Soldat, and Christo's Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums. He discusses the French left's adoption in the mid-sixties of the ”end of art” as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the fete as a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low. About the Author Tom Mcdonough is a writer and critic based in upstate New York and Toronto whose work addresses the intersections of art and political struggle in the postwar era, with a special emphasis on France. He is widely known for his books on the Situationist International, which include “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (2007); Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (2002); and The Situationists and the City (2009). McDonough’s essays on contemporary art and photography have appeared in journals such as Afterall, Artforum, and OSMOS, where he is a contributing editor. He is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, teaching the history of the European avant-gardes and modern art and architecture. English Edition. Rare to find.