ProletGard · The Cultural Vanguard of Workers’ Movements: A Social History of East Central European Avant-Garde between the Two Wars

This project investigates the interaction between workers’ movements and the transnational scene of modern art. The avant-garde forever transformed the relationship between art and everyday life. This project argues that this shift not only dynamized the art world but also extended well beyond the confines of the cultural sphere, transforming the working-class communities in the successor states of the Austro–Hungarian Empire as well, where avant-garde art played a pivotal role in creating a workers’ movement counterculture. The project postulates that the transnational avant-garde scene, and especially the related network of periodicals, enabled reciprocal interactions. The amalgamation of pre-existing working-class practices in the region with avant-garde techniques also had an impact on global modernisms. To explore these interactions, the project assembles an interdisciplinary team of seven researchers to analyze how working-class and avant-garde publications were circulated, received, and produced in this region between the two wars. The project comprises three thematic components, examining: 1) how related periodicals transcended administrative and linguistic boundaries of newly established nation-states; 2) novel reading and performative practices; 3) the extent to which these publications served as arenas of conflict and negotiation among various cultural trends within the heterogeneous milieu of workers’ movements. By examining avant-garde journal production and their everyday use in East Central Europe, the project not only seeks to readjust the Western-centric viewpoint on modern art networks but also establishes the basis for a comprehensive exploration of the cultural history of working-class groups in the region and beyond. By rewriting the history of interwar avant-garde press from below, the project analyzes East Central European modernisms on two scales, as inextricably linked both to local workers’ movements and the transnational avant-garde press.