This chapter wagers that situating Walter Benjamin's early writings on language in conversation with Wassily Kandinsky’s in Der Blaue Reiter and Concerning the Spiritual in Art may elucidate Benjamin's hermetic and fragmentary texts. It therefore constructs a dialogue between Kandinsky's writings, which Benjamin read and admired, and Benjamin's rethinking of the relation between language and perception in the late 1910s and early 1920s. It argues that Benjamin's philosophy of language may draw on procedures Kandinsky proposed for defamiliarizing words – for perceiving them as if they were incomprehensible, divorcing them from what Kandinsky calls their ‘practical-instrumental meaning’. Kandinsky speaks of two methods for this: saying a word repeatedly and viewing the form of a letter as a ‘thing’, an arrangement of lines. However, whereas Kandinsky argues for the expressive power of the visual shape of written language, seeing it as something like a living human body communicating emotion through its gestures, Benjamin sees what he calls the word's ‘skeleton’ as expressionless in the extreme. Benjamin both takes on Kandinsky's ideas and turns them upside down: like Kandinsky, Benjamin too imagines the graphic shapes of letters as anthropomorphic, but does so in order to emphasize their deathly expressionlessness.

This chapter takes as its starting point Die Tunisreise, a 2007 film about Paul Klee’s journey to Tunisia in 1914, by the Swiss filmmaker Bruno Moll and Tunisian filmmaker and artist Nacer Khemir. In the film, Khemir retraces the Tunisian journey and reflects on the significance of the Swiss modernist’s appropriation of Tunisian visual culture for his own wide-ranging artistic practice. Whereas Klee’s Tunisian watercolours and related works have often been understood within the framework of Orientalism, McGavran draws upon post-colonial theory to argue that the primitivism of Der Blaue Reiter underpins Khemir’s appreciation for Klee and to elaborate upon cultural exchange between Europe and its former colonies over time.

This chapter argues for an extension of our historical view of Dada to include the vital influence of Munich and Der Blaue Reiter. It focuses on Hugo Ball, founder of Dada, and on his changing engagement with the theatre, with modern art and with the figure of the artist, first in Munich and then in Zurich. The chapter explores how, for Ball, Kandinsky was both the consummate artist and, eventually, a tangential cause of Ball’s disillusionment with and departure from the artistic avant-garde. The chapter brings to light some key primary sources relating to Ball’s ideas for what would become the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. As a whole, it makes a case for a more nuanced account of the relationship between Expressionism and Dada, and between the avant-gardes of Munich and Zurich, before and during World War I.

This chapter lays out the purpose and contents of the volume. It begins by sketching the origins of Der Blaue Reiter, which was formed in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter after Kandinsky’s Composition V was rejected by the New Artists’ Association of Munich. It then introduces the other chapters, written by a mixture of established and emerging scholars, which examine the legacy of Der Blaue Reiter from a variety of perspectives.

This chapter presents the Japanese lifestyle brand Mujirushi Ryohin (known as Muji), which sells simple, starkly functional objects in natural colours while eschewing decorative values and unnecessary patterns and details. This company's basic, plain, timeless products do not change with the seasons or from year to year. The products stress use value and functionality as an alternative to the logic of changing fashions – one of the pillars of late consumer culture, which renders products inherently obsolescent. Mujirushi Ryohin's products are discussed as a part of the Anti-Branding and No-Logo movements that emerged in Europe and in the United States in the 1980s, in opposition to the ‘the society of the spectacle’ and the ideology and social power of late capitalism and consumer culture.

This chapter presents the rise of the avant-garde milieu of designers in Tokyo, which revolutionised visual and material culture beginning in the 1960s and continues to impact it in the present. This milieu included designers such as Ishioka Eiko and Tanaka Ikk? (graphic design), Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo (fashion design), Kuramata Shir? and Uchida Shigeru (interior and product design), and And? Tadao and Isuzaki Arata (architecture). These designers all made decisions and created artefacts that radically altered and reshaped the course of Japanese design history. The development of their critical design is presented in the context of the aesthetic, economic, social, and political forces operating during this period and is linked to the rise of critical theories. Moreover, this chapter presents the development of social media and the rich working relations and collaborations among these designers and between them and members of the artistic avant-garde active during these years.

To illuminate Der Blaue Reiter’s relevance for artists of the twenty-first century, this chapter aims to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be ‘political’. By exploring the impact of Russian and German communal anarchists such as Piotr Kropotkin, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Gustav Landauer on the work of Wassily Kandinky – specifically, the tract ‘On the Question of Form’, the drama ‘The Yellow Sound’ and the oil Composition V – displayed in Der Blaue Reiter almanac, this chapter relates Kandinsky’s strategy of using multiple contrasting stimuli of colours and abstracted forms (synthesized from vernacular depictions of folk tales and popular biblical stories such as the Apocalypse) to the anarchist belief in natural law and their hatred of capitalism and materialism. It also points to the anarchist praise of the unconventional (as support for Kandinsky’s interest in Wilhelm Worringer’s discourse on medieval and Gothic art, as well as for his inclusion of contemporary composers in the almanac) as Kandinsky sought to address the problems of spectatorship by transforming the conventional Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk into a powerful, monumental work of art that would stir and involve his audience.

This chapter focuses on the furniture and jewellery designs created by the Hironen Studio from 1987 to 1995. The symbolic objects produced in this studio belong to the design-art genre and present the discourse concerning difference and otherness through a decadent visual style focused on extreme individualism, narcissism, and personal identity. This discourse is engaged by means of a transgressive visual strategy based on two aesthetic sources: the camp aesthetic stemming from Queer theory and its formulation of postmodern otherness and the Japanese ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) genre, which emerged in bourgeois popular culture during different periods in Japanese history, and similarly combined unconventional forms of behaviour. The visual combination of these aesthetic genres in contemporary design amounted to a visual protest against hegemonic taste as a representative of class, gender, and power.

This chapter examines theoretical issues of the avant-garde in Der Blaue Reiter and women artists’ strategies in relation to the male hierarchy of the group. It proposes a revision of binary thinking about the nature of masculine and feminine identity through a study of selected works by Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin. In considering critical reception and the correspondence of the writer, poet and artist Else Lasker-Schüler, the chapter argues that Der Blaue Reiter harboured more complex and performative notions of gendered authorship and agency.

In August 1960, the Arts Council of Great Britain, in conjunction with the Edinburgh Festival and the Tate Gallery, launched a major retrospective exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter artists, the first show of its kind in the UK to collectively introduce the group to the British public. According to the contemporary press, however, the exhibition was a failure when it moved to the Tate in late September. Critics and art historians alike derided the show for being too intellectually-minded, arguing that it spoke only to the erudite few who were already familiar with the Munich-based movement. Building upon the critical literature at mid-century, this chapter proposes a re-evaluation of the 1960 Tate exhibition and its curatorial agenda. Instead of suggesting that the show was inherently flawed because of its programme, it argues that the aesthetically non-unified style of Der Blaue Reiter was, in part, responsible for the show’s non-laudatory praise. As such, this chapter advances a rethinking of Der Blaue Reiter as a cosmopolitan movement that vacillates between historical and artistic significance, and considers how a bias for French modernism may have affected the manner in which the Tate exhibition was received in post-war Great Britain.

This chapter focuses on the digital revolution and virtual reality, which overtook material reality in the 1990s. These developments offered new critical possibilities while challenging the organisation of visual perception, the structure of information, and the traditional sociopolitical role of objects and opening up a new range of possibilities between virtual representations and actual artefacts. This new popular culture cast a critical gaze at traditional economic perceptions by producing open design platforms that enabled participation in a collaborative economy as an alternative to capitalistic competition and rivalry. At the same time, it blurred oppositional categories such as human/machine or nature/culture – vestiges of the pre-digital age that had been perceived as unshakeable truths. This chapter centres on contemporary designers such as Wakita Akira and Sputniko! and design studios such as Nosigner and Takram Design Engineering, which are concerned with post-human design, open design, IoT (Internet of Things), and human–machine interfaces. These new technologies and their realisation by means of digital images – and sometimes also in material form – offer their users new insights and perspectives, doing away with traditional categories of thought and constructing a new reality.

The introduction presents avant-garde design in Japan as composed of different elements including postmodern aesthetics, critical theory, and new economic values. It emphasises the role of design and popular culture as a social, economic, and political agent and as a critical practice. Based on the ideas of Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Bruno Latour, it presents material and visual culture not only as a reflection of cultural norms and values but also as an active agent in shaping human behaviour and catalysing social forces. This point of departure leads to an explanation of how avant-garde designers made use of the socio-psychological power of the material objects and visual signs in order to challenge social conventions and formulate a new perception of reality by using everyday popular artefacts in novel ways. The introduction also describes the book's interdisciplinary research methodology, which combines the disparate fields of art, design, sociology, business administration, marketing, and history, giving rise to a reading of aesthetics within its historical context and in relation to the socioeconomic forces of the network of consumption.

By the mid-1960s, many practitioners desired to leave behind the notions of ephemerality, transience and improvisation associated with the Happenings of the late 1950s. This is vividly demonstrated by a 1966 attempt to create a simultaneous Three Country Happening by Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín and Wolf Vostell that establishes the book’s central concerns, revealing how artistic fascination with the politics of communication was spurred by the transnationalism fostered through mass media technologies, together with the ways in which artists drew on sociology and psychology to develop alternative studies of interpersonal relations. Interpersonal communication emerged as a key focal point of sociology and psychology in the postwar period, fuelled by the advent of cybernetics and reactions against psychoanalysis. The introduction situates the Happening’s transnational development in relation to this preoccupation with communication, while proposing that artists working in performance were influenced by the counterculture to create works that resisted determinist, predictive models of interaction.