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- Volume 30, Issue 2, 2011
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 30, Issue 2, 2011
Volume 30, Issue 2, 2011
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RE/Search in context
More LessThis article examines the growth and decline of RE/Search as a commercial enterprise dedicated to documenting and, in effect, marketing selected countercultural trends. Particular attention is given to the publishers’ attempts to negotiate the traditional bohemian disdain for commerce (as delineated in Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return) in order to maintain credibility with both early adopters of trends, who provide essential information to RE/Search, and the intended consumers of RE/Search’s publications. The question is posed whether the Internet has provided a more efficient means of transmitting subcultural memes, rendering RE/Search commercially and otherwise unviable as a promoter and popularizer of subcultural trends and tendencies.
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The myths of modern primitivism
By Matt LodderRE/Search Publications’ Modern Primitives (Vale and Juno 1989) changed countless lives, bringing what had been a localized and niche set of body modification practices, aesthetics and philosophies out of San Francisco to a global audience, dominating scholarly and popular discourse around body modification subculture for more than a decade afterwards. The voice of Fakir Musafar dominates the book. This article argues that modern primitives as Musafar defines them never really existed (and never could have existed) in the terms he suggests, and goes on to address an important sub-strand within Modern Primitives almost entirely ignored by critics and commentators, who have read the book as generally representative of the body modification culture as a whole. With specific reference to contributors such as infamous tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy who do not frame their practice in ‘primitive’ terms, the article concludes with a study of an alternative account presented by Vale and Juno’s book: body modification as artistic practice.
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RE/Searching Angry Women
More LessRE/Search’s issue on Angry Women brought together a range of critics, theorists, performance artists and lesbian activists including Kathy Acker, Valie Export, bell hooks, Lydia Lunch, Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle. Published in 1991, the issue proposed a ‘revolutionary feminism’, finding its forms and manifestations in ‘wild sex, humor, beauty, spirituality plus radical politics’. Despite the radical content of this issue and the significance of its contributors for feminism, the publication has received little academic attention. Analyses that address this publication treat it in isolation from the wider context of RE/Search and its theoretical perspectives. This article focuses on Angry Women by setting it into these contexts. It argues that RE/Search’s theoretical positions can be understood through Bataillean notions of base materialism. The article explores a range of influences and relations, including that of Bataille on RE/Search and the significance of the relation of Angry Women to the wider RE/Search project once read through the lens of Bataillean theories. It will also demonstrate that the deliberate selection of contributors by Juno and Vale reveals a distinct Bataillean strain within feminist projects in the 1990s.
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‘Incredibly strange’: Unlimiting RE/Search
By John SearsThis article explores the construction by RE/Search of the category of the ‘incredibly strange’. Focusing mainly on the discussion and definitions in The RE/Search Guide to Incredibly Strange Music Volume 1 (Juno and Vale 1993), it outlines and scrutinizes the category and the processes of definition employed. Comparing this to uses of similar concepts in avant-garde aesthetic practice (specifically that of surrealism) and in recent American art theory (notably Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real [1996]), the article seeks to situate the RE/Search conception of the ‘incredibly strange’, and explore the resonances of the term (and particularly the notion of the ‘strange’), in relation to those elements of contemporary cultural practice – the collecting and ‘rediscovery’ of obscure popular musical recordings – on which this issue of RE/Search focuses. It argues that RE/Search deploys the category of the ‘incredibly strange’ in ways that can be understood, when read in relation to avant-garde histories, as conventional, thus rendering the category itself both problematic and productively dynamic.
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William S. Burroughs and engaged damage
By Allen FisherDamage can be identified as a strident signifier of twentieth-century art, exemplified by the use of damage in the processes of artistic facture. The processes of this facture have long been recognized in the methods of collage and post-collage transformations. This article addresses the work of William S. Burroughs, an artist who factured exemplary work from 1955 into the late 1960s for a major series of novels. The work for these novels may be characterized as raw and involved in engaged damage. It was work factured fifteen or more years before most of the work published in 1982 in RE/SEARCH, where the rawness is cleaned up. In contrast to RE/Search’s presentation, this article discusses Burroughs’ use of damage to engender new texts from existing texts, using visual as well as literary facture and practices, such as the use of multiple columns of text and image, which carries the intention that the writer and reader perceiving one column of text or image picks up another or more than one text or image from parallel columns as a kind of peripheral vision that has the potential to overlap or interfere with the primary column being read; this proposal develops into a theory of a consciousness. The prose is representation of transformed perception, memories and inventions. The general outlook is post-realistic with hints of menace and the future, a science fiction with a retrospective eye on the other watching the individual. Cleaned-up versions of Burroughs’ work from his period, using book publishers’ typesetting norms, can be seen in work for Burroughs’ first trilogy of novels. In addition, Burroughs’ use of accident in these texts may conceal a conventional worry about truth or veracity; as the text shifts from column to column, it is then regularized into a chopped and selected syntax in a parody, rather than a simulation, of a damaged filmstrip. These recurrences bring with them contrasted chreods, one from the concept of ‘a stream of consciousness’, the other from mechanical collage: the proprioceptive demands of empathy undermined by assemblage. A collection of the texts titled White Subway becomes a mimesis of consciousness and a demonstration of the context as it replays the tapes of a historical record. This is done overtly, with deliberate reference and allusion to the process of recording events and the damage in the process. Rather than knowing the outcome, Burroughs’ texts provide positive engagement with this damage.
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RE/Search, J.G. Ballard and New Brutalist aftermath aesthetics
More LessThis article explores the relationship between RE/Search Publications and J.G. Ballard. It demonstrates how RE/Search have negotiated a series of presentations of Ballard’s work that not only elucidate many of the subtle nuances of Ballard’s fiction but also serve to encourage new understandings of the oeuvre. Focusing on three main areas, this article first explores some reasons why the countercultural context provided by RE/Search became a perfect place to find Ballard’s work from the late 1970s onwards. Second, I consider how the form of RE/Search’s publications both serve to nuance Ballard’s original avant-garde Atrocity Exhibition experiment, but also how it encourages new understandings of the text and Ballard’s wider project as a whole. Here I focus in particular on not only Ballard’s authorial notes added to The Atrocity Exhibition in RE/Search’s 1990 edition, but also how the layout and design of the publication encourages new ways to interpret the text. Finally, I demonstrate how the visual elements of RE/Search’s Ballard publications elicit a greater understanding of Ballard’s project, and here I begin to point to the ways in which Phoebe Gloeckner’s illustrations in particular have informed and fed into my own understandings of Ballard’s oeuvre, which recalibrates Ballard’s fiction through a visual lens, particularly that of New Brutalism.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)