Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under "Post-" Conditions

by Louis Armand (Editor), Johanna Drucker (Contributor), Keston Sutherland (Contributor)

"The question at the heart of these sixteen essays--alternately theoretically demanding, impishly elusive, stylistically impacted, and wholly absorbing--is this: what, in the context of contemporary politico-aesthetic practices, is the avant-garde, and how, if at all, can some version of it continue to exist in an historical moment when ... everything is permitted, hence nothing is any longer possible?" --American Book Review

Avant-Post engages the question of whether or not avant-garde practice remains viable under the prevailing conditions of a whole series of "post-" ideologies, from Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism, to Post-Historicism, Post-Humanism and Post-Ideology itself.

Contributors include a range of artists and theorists, such as Johanna Drucker, Michael S. Begnal, Lisa Jarnot, Ann Vickery, Christian Bök, Robert Archambeau, Mairead Byrne, R.M. Berry, Trey Strecker, Keston Sutherland, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Sheppard, Bonita Rhoads, Vadim Erent, Laurent Milesi, Esther Milne ...

300 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).