Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Utopian Reality
This collection of essays deals broadly with the visual and cultural manifestation of utopian aspirations in Russia of the 1920s and 1930s, while examining the before- and after-life of such ideas both geographically and chronologically. The studies document the pluralism of Russian and Soviet culture at this time as well as illuminating various cultural strategies adopted by officialdom. The result serves to complicate the excessively simplistic narrative that avant-garde dreams were suddenly and brutally crushed by Soviet repression and to contest the notion of the avant-garde’s complicity in Stalinism. Naturally, some essays document episodes in the defeat and dismantling of utopian projects, but others trace the persistence of avant-garde ideas and the astonishing tenacity of creative individuals who managed to retain their personal integrity while continuing to serve the cause of Soviet power. Contributors include: John E. Bowlt, Natalia Budanova, David Crowley, Evgeny Dobrenko, Maria Kokkori, Christina Lodder, Muireann Maguire, Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita, Maria Mileeva, John Milner, Nicoletta Misler, Maria Starkova-Vindman, Brandon Taylor, and Maria Tsantsanoglou.
Mapping Beyond Measure
Over the last century a growing number of visual artists have been captivated by the entwinements of beauty and power, truth and artifice, and the fantasy and functionality they perceive in geographical mapmaking. This field of "map art" has moved into increasing prominence in recent years yet critical writing on the topic has been largely confined to general overviews of the field. In Mapping Beyond Measure Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the wor...
The Futurist Files
Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success of this mission has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Critics have often characterized Russian Futurism as an expression of utopian daydreaming by young artists who were unrealistic in their visions of Soviet society and naïve in their comprehension of the Bolshevik political agenda. By t...
Monuments for Posterity
Monuments for Posterity challenges the common assumption that Stalinist monuments were constructed with an immediate, propagandistic function, arguing instead that they were designed to memorialize the present for an imagined posterity. In this respect, even while pursuing its monument-building program with a singular ruthlessness and on an unprecedented scale, the Stalinist regime was broadly in step with transnational monument-building trends of the era and their undergirding cultural dynamics. By integrating approaches from cultural history, art criticism, and memory studies, along with previously unexplored archival material, Antony Kalashnikov examines the origin and implementation of t...
Celebrating Suprematism
Celebrating Suprematism throws vital new light on Kazimir Malevich’s abstract style and the philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, and ideological context within which it emerged and developed. The essays in the collection, which have been produced by established specialists as well as new scholars in the field, tackle a wide range of issues and establish a profound and nuanced appreciation of Suprematism’s place in twentieth-century visual and intellectual culture. Complementing detailed analyses of The Black Square (1915), Malevich’s theories and statements, various developments at Unovis, Suprematism’s relationship to ether physics, and the impact that Malevich’s style had on the design of textiles, porcelain and architecture, there are also discussions of Suprematism’s relationship to Russian Constructivism and avant-garde groups in Poland and Hungary.
Re-Framing Identities
From 1970–1990, architecture experienced a revision as part of the post-modern movement. The critical attitude to the functionalistic Moderne style and the influence of semiotics and philosophical trends, such as phenomenology, on architectural theory led to an increased interest in its history, expression, perception, and context. In addition, architectural heritage and the care of architectural monuments gained importance. This development also increasingly challenged the ideologically based division between East and West. Instead of emphasizing the differences, the search was for a joint cultural heritage. The contributions in this volume question terms such as "Moderne" and "post-modern", and show how architecture could again represent local, regional, and national identity.
Speculation
A wide-ranging investigation of what speculation is, and what is at stake for artistic, curatorial, critical, and institutional practices in relating to their own speculative character. Engaging with the question of speculation in ways that encompass the artistic, the economic, and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, this collection approaches the theme as a powerful logic of contemporary life whose key instantiations are art and finance. Both are premised on the power of contingency, temporality, and experimentation in the creation (and capitalization) of possible worlds. Artistic autonomy, and the self-legislation of the space of art, have often been se...
Aleksandr Zhitomirsky
The first comprehensive study in English of the Soviet propaganda artist Aleksandr Zhitomirsky, who conceived and deployed his striking photomontages as a political weapon The leading Russian propaganda artist Aleksandr Zhitomirsky (1907-1993) made photomontages that were airdropped on German troops during World War II. He later worked for Pravda and other leading publications, satirizing American politics and finance from the Truman through the Reagan eras and educating his public about Egypt, South Africa, Vietnam, and Nicaragua as well. Zhitomirsky favored the grotesque and the eye-catching. His villainous menagerie included Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels as a distorted simian and an airb...
Entangled Art Histories in Ukraine
This book explores ideologies, conflicts and ideas that underpinned art historical writing in Ukraine in the 20th century. Disciplinary beginnings testify both to its deep connection to Krakow, Saint Petersburg and especially Vienna with its school of art history and originality of theoretical thought. Art history started as another imperial project in Ukraine, but ultimately transformed into the means of assertion of national identity. The volume looks closely at the continuity and ruptures in scholarship caused by the establishment of Soviet power and challenges a number of existing stereotypes like total isolation under Communist rule and strict adherence to a Marxist-Leninist methodology...
