Readings and Writings

The films of Hitchcock Welles and Godard; the aesthetics of photography and the technology of cinema; art and revolution in Russia and in Mexico; the avant-gardes in film and in painting—these are among the many topics of Peter Wollen’s essays. Interwoven with fictional treatments of such themes as memory dream sexuality and writing they compose a remarkable perhaps unique volume.. These “readings and writings” are informed by Marxism semiotics psychoanalysis and the history of art itself. Their concern is with signification: with the ways in which meanings are produced in dominant art forms and with the counter-strategies by which these meanings may be questioned or dislodged in the practice of politically and aesthetically radical alternatives. A concluding retrospect reviews the political intellectual and aesthetic avant-garde currents of the fifteen years over which these texts were written outlining some perspectives for oppositional art today.