Blast Counterblast

Blast Counterblast is a multifaceted, fascinating examination of the way intellectuals interact—through influence, through argumentation, and through criticism. Looking at both Wyndham Lewis’s modernist publication BLAST and Marshall McLuhan’s 1969 response to it, COUNTERBLAST, the contributors to this volume—a selection of writers, visual artists, performers, and filmmakers—skewer relational aesthetics and identity politics in order to restate what the role of identity formation is today. Taking McLuhan and Lewis as starting points, the essays in this volume develop and push the ideas presented in both BLAST and COUNTERBLAST while the book design pays homage to both thinkers’ experiments in typography. Blast Counterblast includes the writings of Maria Fusco, Michael Hoolboom, My Barbarian, Lane Relyea, and Ryan Trecartin.

Steve Reinke is associate professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. His video art has been exhibited in many venues including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Anthony Elms is the Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and an editor of WhiteWalls.