Une avant-garde sans avant-garde

The avant-garde of the 1990s

Conceived in collaboration with Donation Grau, this book is a collection of Olivier Zahm’s most significant texts written during the last 30 years. It is above all a radical reading of art from the 1990s to the present. The anthology tries to decipher this chaotic, contradictory, oppressive, and ultra-creative period. The introductions that precede each chapter contextualize the selected texts, and develop the idea that the 1990s invented an avant-garde without an avant-garde, the issues of which are increasing and intensifying.

Co-founder and director of Purple magazine, Olivier Zahm has organized and taken part in more than 50 exhibitions around the world, in particular “L’Hiver de L’Amour” at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), which became “Winter of Love,” at MoMA PS1, New York (1991), and “Elysian Fields” at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000).

A former student from the Ecole Normal Supérieure, Paris, Donatien Grau is a literary graduate from the Political Studies Institute, Paris, and an art critic and writer. He teaches Literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris, writes for several magazines, and is contributing editor of Flash Art magazine. He is interested in the communication of classical culture and the connections between art and literature.

The book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writing.