10th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.

Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English

Speaker: Honorata Sroka (CEFRES / National Science Centre, Poland)
Chair: Hélène Martinelli (CEFRES / École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)

Text to be read: Peter Bürger (1974). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translation Michael Shaw. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Abstract:

The presentation will take the form of very preliminary remarks related to my post-doctoral research, which I have been conducting for 7 months at the French Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences. My project develops the same line of research as my doctoral thesis, however, approaches the issue in a broader way. Specifically, using selected examples of neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe, I hope to show how and why artists decided to create subversive forms of historiography and what kind of experimental strategies can be found in archives. Employing the methodology so-called “cultural history of the avant-gardes”, I will reflect on vanguard institutions and practices oriented towards a self-historiography. What I dare to claim one can essentially call a discussion on Peter Bürger’s pivotal book Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). He was the one who argued that the avant-gardes stood against institutions. In contrast to his assumption, my research aims to display how neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe developed rather than destroyed art institutions, as well as subversive forms of historiography, and why these two were intertwined.

Please find the complete program of 2024–2025 seminar here.