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Gan's Constructivism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 310

Gan's Constructivism

  • Categories: Art

This compelling new account of Russian constructivism repositions the agitator Aleksei Gan as the movement’s chief protagonist and theorist. Primarily a political organizer during the revolution and early Soviet period, Gan brought to the constructivist project an intimate acquaintance with the nuts and bolts of “making revolution.” Writing slogans, organizing amateur performances, and producing mass-media objects define an alternative conception of “the work of art”—no longer an autonomous object but a labor process through which solidarities are built. In an expansive analysis touching on aesthetic and architectural theory, the history of science and design, sociology, and feminist and political theory, Kristin Romberg invites us to consider a version of modernism organized around the radical flattening of hierarchies, a broad distribution of authorship, and the negotiation of constraints and dependencies. Moving beyond Cold War abstractions, Gan’s Constructivism offers a fine-grained understanding of what it means for an aesthetics to be political.

Architecture in Print
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 78

Architecture in Print

In the early 20th century, the Soviet architectural press became a forum for an extraordinary group of artists, designers, architects, and theorists to converge in debate over the shape of their present and future built environment. The visually stunning and rhetorically innovative publications include major contributions by many the most brilliant artists and graphic designers of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde: Aleksei Gan, Gustav Klutsis, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, the Stenberg brothers, Varvara Stepanova, and Solomon Telingater. Moreover, magazines such as Sovremennaia arkhitekura (Contemporary Architecture) and Stroitel'stvo Moskvy (Construction of Moscow) were the primary si...

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 282

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution

In this book, Maria Chehonadskih unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, she explores how this tendency, overshadowed by official historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism across philosophy, science, politics, art and literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that the main proponent of Empirio-Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary socialist legacies. Chehonadskih draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism and Constructivism, filling a gap in the literature that will be particularly significant for Marxism, continental philosophy, art theory and Slavic studies specialists.

Russian Realisms
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 283

Russian Realisms

One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century—from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of...

Art as Demonstration
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 360

Art as Demonstration

  • Categories: Art
  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2024-02-06
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

How artists wield demonstration to question the status quo both aesthetically and politically, marshaling art and education as powerful agents of change. Demonstration, in short, says: See here. It is the practice of pointing to something in order to explain or contest it. As such, Sven Spieker argues that demonstration has helped reshape art from the height of the Cold War to the late twentieth century, reformatting our understanding of how art and political engagement relate to each other. Focusing on Western Europe (especially Germany), Eastern Europe, and the United States, Art as Demonstration expands on contemporary discussions of art-as-protest, activism, and resistance. Spieker shows...

Aleksandr Rodchenko
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 256

Aleksandr Rodchenko

Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko's photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin's Soviet Union Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova revises the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) was a highly versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism's founders. His photographic work between 1928, when Stalin rose to power, and the late 1930s reveals a wide-ranging search for a different pictorial language in the context of the extreme tran...

Collective Body
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 360

Collective Body

  • Categories: Art

"Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka's haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration not as the enemy of revolutionary art, but as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Tracing Deineka's path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the Revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Great Terror and beyond, Collective Body demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood ...

Between Truth and Time
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 360

Between Truth and Time

In the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings, Evans challenges the idea that Soviet mass culture in the Brezhnev era was dull and formulaic. Tracing the emergence of play, conflict, and competition on Soviet news programs, serial films, and variety and game shows, Evans shows that Soviet Central Television’s most popular shows were experimental and creative, laying the groundwork for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and the post-Soviet media system.

MoMA Highlights
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 381

MoMA Highlights

  • Categories: Art

This new edition of MoMA Highlights is a fresh consideration of the Museum’s superlative collection of modern and contemporary art. It presents a rich chronological overview of the most significant artworks from each of MoMA's curatorial departments—painting and sculpture, drawings, prints and illustrated books, photography, architecture and design, film, and media and performance art—with each work represented by a vibrant image and a short informative text. This redesigned volume features 115 new works since the previous edition, many of them recent acquisitions, ranging from typefaces to sculptures to conceptual performances that reflect the Museum’s ongoing dedication to the art of our time. MoMA Highlights is an indispensable resource for exploring one of the premier art collections in the world.

The Voice of Technology
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 295

The Voice of Technology

1. This book presents the untold story of the role the emergence of cinematic sound had on Soviet politics and culture. The author contextualizes media technologies in the midst of the political and cultural environment of the early Soviet era. 2. The author is a returning IUP author who is extremely active in both Slavic studies and film and media studies. 3. This book with have a market among both film and Russian/East European studies scholars and is a strong contribution to IUPs growing international film history lists.