Raiding the Icebox

Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture

Peter Wollen

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781844672509
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789604115
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Raiding the Icebox is a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how the most powerful artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art.
Beginning with an analysis of the role of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, Wollen argues that modernism has always had a hidden, suppressed side which cannot easily be absorbed into the master-narrative of modernity.
Wollen reviews the hopes, fears and expectations of artists and critics such as the Bauhaus movement, as fascinated by Henry Ford's assembly line as they were by the Hollywood dream factory, concluding with Guy Debord's caustic dystopian vision of an all-consuming "Society of the Spectacle."
Finally, Wollen chronicles the emergence of a subversive sensibility as he explores some of the unexpected new cultural forms which non-Western artists are taking as modernism enters into crisis at the beginning of a new century: reversing the rules of the game and raiding the icebox of the West.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Out of the Past: Fashion / Orientalism / The Body
• Chapter Two: Modern Times: Cinema/ Americanism / The Robot
• Chapter Three: The Triumph of American Painting: ‘A Rotten Rebel from Russia’
• Chapter Four: The Situationist International: On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Period of Time
• Chapter Five: Notes from the Underground: Andy Warhol
• Chapter Six: Morbid Symptoms: Komar & Melamid
• Chapter Seven: Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art
• Notes
• Index