Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)

A “SYNTHETIC” AVANT-GARDE JOURNAL

Dokumentum belonged to a distinct group of European avant-garde journals of the 1920s known by the term “synthetic”. The synthetic approach to avant- garde journals stemmed from an intellectual praxis that became widespread after the war, usually referred to by the expressive slogan “rappel â I’ordre", or “back to order”.1 In the late 1910s and the 1920s, several modernist movements1 2 turned away from unorthodox, provocative and subversive forms of expression and returned to tradition, attempting to create a new European culture.3 Avant-garde artists chose a somewhat different strategy for building the future. Rather than taking up the dropped threads of the past, they wanted to create new constructions out of the phenomena of science, technology and the social sciences. The synthetic avant-garde journals looked on the First World War as the closing episode of an epoch that had lasted several centuries, the epoch of European civilization, and looked to a future built from a clean sheet, using modern and, in their view, future-looking elements. The journals that espoused synthetic thinking, including Dokumentum, were designed to manifest all of these aims in their structure and image. They embraced a great diversity of subject matter and used many different media, all under the umbrella of avant-garde visuality, which meant innovatively-designed covers and headings carrying the message that the “new art” is capable of interpreting and giving new meaning to the apparently chaotic world people were then living in. [Figs. 2-3]

In his 1929 book, Karl Mannheim put forward the idea of “socially unattached intellectuals"4 - dynamic, constantly-renewing individuals with the abili1 The expression was first used in Jean Cocteau, Le rappel d I'ordre [The return to order], Librai- re Stock, Paris, 1926. See also: Jean Laude, Le Retour ă I'ordre dans Ies arts plastiques et l’archi- tecture, 1919-1925 [The return to order in the plastic arts and architecture, 1919-1925], Université de Saint-Étienne, Saint-Étienne, 1986. Jennifer Ruth Bethke, From Futurism To Neoclassicism: Temporality In Italian Modernism, 1916-1925, California UP, Berkeley, 2005.

2 I use the term modernism for the early 20th-century cultural movements reflecting the age of modernity. By avant-garde, I mean the artistic schools that radically revised modernity and modernisms and were critical towards them. There was no sharp boundary between modernisms and the avant-garde, only transitions. Peter Brooker-Andrzej C^siorek-Deborah Longworth-Andrew Thacker, Introduction, in Idem (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, Oxford UP, Oxford, 2010, 3-4.

3 Anne-Rachel Hermetet, Pour sortir du chaos, Trois revues européennes des années vingt [To get out of the chaos, Three European journals of the twenties], Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2009.

4 Taking up from Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim, in his book on the sociology of knowledge, uses this term to refer to a section of society that is “constantly experimenting and developing social sensitivity within itself”, and “is not clearly fixed and relatively classless", and included the editors of Dokumentum. Karl Mannheim, Why there is no Science of Politics, in Idem, Ideology and Utopia, Harcourt-Routledge, London-New York, 1954,97-104.

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