Disa Persson // The Subversive Life of Documents: An Avant-Garde Journal in Interwar France
As a Juliane and Franz Roh Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art, I will complete my first monograph, The Subversive Life of Documents: An Avant-Garde Journal in Interwar France, currently under contract with Manchester University Press.
Proposing a ground-breaking reinterpretation of the criticality of one of the European avant-gardes’ most notorious experimentations, the book foregrounds the radical cross-disciplinarity of the Parisian magazine Documents (1929-1931, ed. Georges Bataille et al.) and brings to the fore previously unexamined socio-historical dimensions of its activities. Shining new light on the journal’s critical intervention into discursive areas where French fears were particularly acute between the wars, the book explores Documents’ subversive participation in ongoing national discussions concerning: national hygiene and the body politic; the influx of Hollywood films and rapid ascendancy of America on the world stage; architectural debates around the possibility of Parisian skyscrapers; and struggles to rationalise the lived environment of the French capital. Indeed, recirculated troubling signs that discursively denoted irrecuperable excess – be they contagious tuberculosis microbes, ‘monstrous’ children, talkies, skyscrapers, Parisian slums or defunct sewage systems – Documents decomposed an inflated national self-image by agitating topical Third Republican tensions concerning nothing less than the power, strength, and future of France. As such, my monograph proposes that the journal’s critical endeavours amount to a situated heterogeneity, played out within and against the visual culture of interwar France and systems of meaning-making.