SMArt Talks: How to Design Your Networks? Networking Strategies and Diagrams in European Avant-Garde Magazines during the 1920s

Taking both a literary and metaphorical notion of design into account, this talk focuses on networking strategies and network visualisations of European avant-garde magazines during the first half of the 1920s. During the First World War, most avant-garde movements, despite their international outlook, defined themselves principally in terms of their own national framework. Political and cultural changes during the early 1920s, however, forced the avant-garde movements to reassess their role in the new socio-cultural situation. Avant-garde artists made use of their magazines to communicate in a transnational space, which in fact was also a virtual space, because the editors and authors rarely met in person. This dynamic, constantly changing pattern of relationships was represented in the magazines by a distinctive feature that can be called network diagrams. For each magazine, they projected an image of an "imagined community", and thus constructed or designed the representation of their networks. Network diagrams also adopted avant-garde design techniques and thus featured key stylistic and typographical solutions of Dada and Constructivism, among others. In this talk, I trace the origins of avant-garde network diagrams and show different editorial and artistic strategies employed by Western and Central European magazines throughout the 1920s.

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Merse Pál Szeredi is an art historian, director of the Kassák Museum, Budapest, and curator at the Kassák Foundation (ProletGard ERC-project). His research focuses on interwar Hungarian modernist and avant-garde literature and visual arts, with an emphasis on international networks. His papers are published in Hungarian and international periodicals, edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. He curated and co-curated several exhibitions at the Kassák Museum, the Petőfi Literary Museum, and the Virág Judit Gallery. Currently, he is working on a digital critical edition of Kassák and Jolán Simon's correspondence between 1908 and 1928 at the Kassák Museum (with Sára Bagdi and Gábor Dobó). Most recently, he co-edited the volume Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe (with Oliver A. I. Botar, Irina Denischenko and Gábor Dobó, Brill, 2024).