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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 Lütticken, Ulrike Müller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schüttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian Zeidler.

With reproductions of artworks by:

Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassa‹, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Höch, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, André Masson, Alexandra Povòrina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidibé, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindrich Styrskì, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vézelay and many others.

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Franke, Anselm
Anselm Franke leitet seit 2013 den Bereich Bildende Kunst und Film am Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Er arbeitete als Kurator an den KW Berlin und leitete die Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerpen. Franke promovierte am Goldsmiths College, London.

Holert, Tom
Tom Holert lebt in Berlin und ist Kunsthistoriker, Kulturwissenschaftler und Künstler. Er war in den 1990er-Jahren Redakteur von Texte zur Kunst, Mitherausgeber von Spex. 1997-1999 war er Professor an der Merz Akademie Stuttgart und 2006-2011 an Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, an der er weiterhin als Honorarprofessor tätig ist.

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