The most influential avant-garde group in interwar Czechoslovakia called for a revolution enacted via print. Devetsil, founded in 1920 & comprised of leftist artists, architects, actors & poets, undertook an ambitious publishing effort, aiming to reach urban individuals on the street and in their homes in the years following the First World War. It was a revolution that explicitly condemned any call to arms; instead, it proposed taking up new technologies that expanded possibilities for the photomechanical reproduction and dissemination of text and image in print. This utopic vision was embodied in thousands of physical revolutions made by the machine of the printing press. Technologies for the Revolution offers a cultural history of print that engages questions of labor and capital embedded in material culture and in the history of the book. This new publication offers a nuanced portrait of leftist art practices in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period and charts networks of exchange across Europe by exploring the ways in which Devetsil used its printed matter. The Czech -ism of Poetism is articulated as a sustained working through of Devetsil’s position as the group aimed to accommodate both new technology and the role of poets and artists in a postwar society, all while striving for a socialist utopia.
