Resonating at the heart of Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 is the question whether art has present, past, and future functions. The modernist assertion of the autonomy of art was intended to render superfluous art's social and religious functions. But what if the functionlessness of art comes under suspicion of being instrumentalized by bourgeois capitalism? This was an accusation that informed the anti-modernist critique of the avant-garde, and particularly of Surrealism. The objective throughout the crisis-ridden present of the 1920s to the 1940s was to reaffirm a once ubiquitous, but long-lost functionality--not only of art. The publication accompanying the exhibition examines the strategies deployed in this reaffirmation. These include the surrealist Primitivism of an "Ethnology of the White Man" together with the excavation of the deep time of humanity--into the "Neolithic Childhood" mapped out by the notoriously anti-modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) as a hallucinatory retro-utopia. The volume brings together essays by the curators and academics involved in the project, primary texts by Carl Einstein and a comprehensive documentation of the exhibition including lists of works, texts on as well as images of numerous exhibits and finally installation views. At the center of the volume, a glossary discusses Carl Einstein's own theoretical vocabulary as well as further associated terms, such as Autonomy, Formalism, Function, Gesture, Hallucination, Art, Metamorphosis, Primitivisms, Totality. With contributions by: Irene Albers, Philipp Albers, Joyce S. Cheng, Rosa Eidelpes, Carl Einstein, Anselm Franke, Charles W. Haxthausen, Tom Holert, Sven Lutticken, Ulrike Muller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schuttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian Zeidler With reproductions of artworks by: Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassai, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Hoech, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, Andre Masson, Alexandra Povorina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidibe, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindrich Styrsky, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vezelay and others.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition that has traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw from Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, this volume takes as its starting point the realignment of global ties after 1945-Europe's "year zero"-and focuses on the worldwide phenomenon of decolonization. Investigating magazines, journals, and newspapers, the diverse essays in After Year Zero shine a spotlight on collaboration, not confrontation, in the many publications launched at various times and in different places within the African continent or the African diaspora. As the volume contributors show, the format of these periodicals provided a means for temporary intervention against hegemonic voices and made possible the necessary task of creating a new language to talk about art, life, and politics. In addition to text-based essays, After Year Zero also includes visual essays designed like collages of documents, quotes, and images. With its unique international and interdisciplinary approach, After Year Zero is an innovative study of postwar narrative possibilities and a powerful reflection on the processes by which the "universal" can be generated.