Srdečně zveme 21. března 2023 od 15.30 hodin na přednášku Meghan Forbes. Příspěvek nazvaný Revolutions in Print: An Intermedial Approach to Czech Avant-Garde Book and Periodical Production se bude věnovat sbírce Konstantina Biebla S lodí jež dováží čaj a kávu, která vyšla v roce 1928 v typografické úpravě Karla Teigeho.
Přednášku v angličtině můžete vyslechnout v dolním sále Ústavu pro českou literaturu AV ČR (Na Florenci 3, Praha 1).
This talk offers a general overview of the author’s current book project, titled Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print, which looks specifically at the book and magazine publications of Devětsil in the 1920s. Conceived as an exhibition space in print, the manuscript sheds new light on Poetism through an object-based analysis of various media—architecture and typography, poetry, photography and film, as well as performance—to propose a more synthetic and variegated understanding of Devětsil’s unique contribution to the interwar European avant-gardes. On the occasion of this lecture at the Institute for Czech Literature, the focus will be on the book’s final chapter and keystone object: that is, Konstantin Biebl’s S lodí jež dováží čaj a kávu (With the boat that carries tea and coffee), illustrated with typomontages by Karel Teige, which, it will be argued, stages a revolution in form and content. Biebl and Teige’s book makes visible both an engagement with the tools of mechanical reproducibility towards the avant-garde project, as well as the imperial impulse that is pervasive in work of Devětsil. Reading the poetry and illustrations of S lodí jež dováží čaj a kávu alongside Biebl’s photographic documentation from his travels to Java, and in conversation with the dancer Míra Holzbachová’s “Javanese Dance” for the Devětsil stage, this talk interrogates how artists and writers of a nation without imperial holdings nevertheless engaged in art making in the interwar period that reflects a colonial imaginary.
