Francisco Javier San Martín

The seminar was organized on the occasion of the exhibition Toys of the Avant-garde.

The acceptance of the avant-garde throughout the second half of the 20th century widely helped to underline the values of rejecting and destroying the modern legacy that these early 20th-century art movements had made their own, and which they used to oppose bourgeois aesthetics and ideology.

They had to rediscover the component elements of designing and constructing a new world in order to achieve a human ideal. The seminar examined the specific profile of these avant-garde utopias, by discussing their written manifestoes and analysing their most significant works.

17 and 18 November. Topics covered: Machines and Techno-futurist Promises. The Utopias and Counter-utopias of Progress and Speed. By Francisco Javier San Martín. Universidad del País Vasco

The seminar was coordinated by Luis Puelles, Lecturer of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of Malaga. With the collaboration of the University of Malaga.