![]() In 1953, Lee Krasner began making collages by tearing up and rearranging works executed by her and her husband, Jackson Pollock. Teige’s shift, the article argues, does not represent the trace of cultural belatedness or conceptual confusion so much as it reveals the flexibility of conceptual oppositions too often conceived as static. For Teige, however, these terms quickly shifted from accentuating to critiquing political tendentiousness. Teige exemplifies how the early Czech avant-garde took over terms such as “function” and “popular character” (lidovost) from 19th-century Czech discourse, where they had served to celebrate the tendentious applicability of cultural artifacts to a political movement of emancipation. But was this conceptual divide unbridgeable? The present article explores this question through the case of the Czech theorist of the interwar avant-garde, Karel Teige. While many modernists argued for the compatibility between esthetic and political revolution, they invariably met the skepticism of those demanding a clear, unambiguously expressed political message from art. The category of tendentiousness-with its dogmatic, didactic, and aesthetically conservative inclinations-seems inherently opposed to the logic of modernism, which emphasized the esthetic moment of formal innovation. ![]()
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