Knight's Moves: Peter Wollen Selected Writings 1966-2003

Knight's Moves gathers texts that exemplify Wollen’s deliberate disregard for received hierarchies between high art and mass culture, popular forms and the avant-garde. Taking up Victor Shklovsky’s notion of the ‘knight’s move’ on the chess board – the simultaneous step forward and to the side characteristic of art and history – Wollen advanced unexpected connections and repressed affinities between areas of art, culture and politics habitually kept far apart. By bringing together sections that include texts on the histories of dance and fashion with analyses of the form of music video and proposals for films and television programmes, Knight's Moves highlights Wollen’s preoccupation with the promises and the problems of cultures of crossover, interzone, intersection and independence under twentieth-century Euro-American capitalism.