PODCAST
Postcritical Psychogeographies
From Weak Resistance to Weak Avant-Garde


EPISODE 1
Introducing the concept of weak avant-garde
Ewa Partum versus the neo-avant-garde practice
Ewa Majewska

10.06.25
36:15




In this episode we discuss the concept of weak avant-garde in relation to the artwork of Ewa Partum, her three performances from the early 1980. In these artworks the artist challenged her own position as recognized artist, and invited stupidity, idioticism, naivete as her allies. Theories of Boris Groys and Jack Halberstam are referenced, and the discussion goes direction neo-avant-garde - showing that Partum's artwork, just as many post-1960 art project by women, people of ethnic and sexual minorities, as well as groups, do not fit in the ‘neo-avant-garde’, as defined by Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloch, but nevertheless can be seen as avant-garde practices.

Host: Ewa Majewska

Download Audio File:

postcritical_psychogeographies_Ep_01.mp3 (32.5 MB)

About:

Ewa Majewska

Associate professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland. I am a feminist critical theorist of culture, working in the fields of cultural, feminist and critical studies, and researching the vast fields of social, political and artistic agency to discuss resistance and avant-garde, in their non-heroic, ordinary and weak formats. As a feminist scholar, I am sure that another resistance - one that had not been shaped accordingly to the masculine privilege and socialization, is possible, and I have conceptualized it as weak resistance. The notion of weak avant-garde quickly followed, as an offspring of my research into feminist, queer and other minoritarian strategies of negotiating and resisting the canon.

References:

Read more from Ewa Majewska:

“Feminist Art of Failure, Ewa Partum and the Avant-garde of the Weak.” Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej, no. 16 (2016).
https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.16.761

“Słaba estetyka – w stronę feministycznej teorii awangardy.” Estetyka / Inestetyka: Współczesne Teorie Działań Artystycznych, edited by Piotr Graczyk, Cezary Woźniak, and Mateusz Falkowski. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2020.
https://wuj.pl/ksiazka/estetyka-inestetyka-1

“Towards a Weak Avant-Garde, Re-Shaping the Canon.” Arts 12, no. 2 (April 3, 2023): 70.
https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020070

References for the topic of weak avant-garde and neo-avant-garde:

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, transl. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Benjamin Buchloch, Neo-avant-garde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2000.

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis and Manchester: University of Minneassotta Press, 1984.

Hal Foster, “What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” October, 70 (1)1994: 5-32.

Boris Groys, The Weak Universalism, in: e-flux 04 (15)/2010

Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” transl. Paul Wilson, International Journal of Politics, Vol. 15, No. 3-4, “The Power of the Powerless” (1985-86): 23-96.

Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Maria Morzuch (ed), Nic nie zatrzyma idei sztuki (Nothing stops the idea of art). Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2016.

Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court 1996).

Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012).

Jacques Rancière, Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

Andrzej Turowski, The Greatness of Desire: On the Feminist Conceptualism of Ewa Partum in the 1970s, in: Aneta Szylak et al (eds.), Ewa Partum (Gdansk: Fundacja Sztuki Wyspa, 2013).

Gianni Vattimo, Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought, in: Idem (ed.), Weak Thought (New York: SUNY, 2012).

Cite this work:

Majewska, Ewa. “Introducing the concept of weak avant-garde. Ewa Partum versus the neo-avant-garde practice.” Postcritical Psychogeographies. From Weak Resistance to Weak Avant-Garde. June, 10, 2025. Podcast, episode 1, 36:15.
https://ewa-majewska.com/podcast/episode_1/

License:

This work is licensed under the CC BY-SA Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (BY: credit must be given to the creator & SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms).