Soviet Salvage

Soviet Salvage PDF Author: Catherine Walworth
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108040X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected “elitist” media and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer” and “bricoleur”—illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and artists on the movement’s margins who deployed a wide range of clever make-do tactics. Walworth explores the relationships of Nadezhda Lamanova, Esfir Shub, and others with Constructivists such as Aleksei Gan, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Together, the work of these artists reflected the chaotic and often contradictory zeitgeist of the decade from 1918 to 1929 and redefined the concept of mass production. Reappropriated fragments of a former enemy era provided a wide range of play and possibility for these artists, and the resulting propaganda porcelain, film, fashion, and architecture tell a broader story of the unique political and economic pressures felt by their makers. An engaging multidisciplinary study of objects and their makers during the Soviet Union’s early years, this volume highlights a group of artists who hover like free radicals at the border of existing art-historical discussions of Constructivism and deepens our knowledge of Soviet art and material culture.

Soviet Salvage

Soviet Salvage PDF Author: Catherine Walworth
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108040X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 646

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected “elitist” media and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer” and “bricoleur”—illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and artists on the movement’s margins who deployed a wide range of clever make-do tactics. Walworth explores the relationships of Nadezhda Lamanova, Esfir Shub, and others with Constructivists such as Aleksei Gan, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Together, the work of these artists reflected the chaotic and often contradictory zeitgeist of the decade from 1918 to 1929 and redefined the concept of mass production. Reappropriated fragments of a former enemy era provided a wide range of play and possibility for these artists, and the resulting propaganda porcelain, film, fashion, and architecture tell a broader story of the unique political and economic pressures felt by their makers. An engaging multidisciplinary study of objects and their makers during the Soviet Union’s early years, this volume highlights a group of artists who hover like free radicals at the border of existing art-historical discussions of Constructivism and deepens our knowledge of Soviet art and material culture.

The Artist as Producer

The Artist as Producer PDF Author: Maria Gough
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520226186
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"The Artist as Producer confronts the problem of making a politics with art. Gough's balanced rigor in mining obscure archives on the one hand, while performing brilliant readings of recalcitrant artworks on the other gives her account of Constructivism's utopian promise and less-than-utopian outcome great texture. She has produced something very rare: an art-historical study that not only adds to our knowledge but captures the intense poignancy of modern art's serious ambition to undertake a revolution of—and with—form."—David Joselit, Professor, History of Art, Yale University "To see a sculptor plunging into the politics and the cultural politics of the factory floor is a rare sight indeed in art history. It takes immense historical discipline to do it justice. Maria Gough takes the 'author as producer' question dear to Marxist aesthetics (think of Walter Benjamin, but think also of Trotsky, of Gramsci) and raises it into new relevance. The question always was and is a motor. This book shows us, beautifully, how and why."—Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art, Vassar College "The Artist as Producer is a remarkable and impressive piece of scholarship, which challenges existing assumptions about Soviet Constructivism and demands that we rethink the movement in its entirety."—Christina Lodder, author of Russian Constructivism

Constructivism

Constructivism PDF Author: Alekseĭ Gan
Publisher: Tenov Books
ISBN: 9788493923129
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Aleksei Gan's "Constructivism" was the first theoretical treatise of post-revolutionary Russia's emergent Constructivist movement. Published in 1922, this iconoclastic blast of revolutionary zeal was a declaration of war on traditional Bourgeois art. By defining its three core principles: tectonics, faktura & construction, Gan recasts artist and architect as Constructors, no longer fretting about aesthetic or speculative problems in art but focusing instead on the fusion of art with everyday life to create a system of design where "everything will be conceived in a technical and functional way" - a fitting contribution to the great task of building the new communist society ... Gan, the "Mass Constructor", was a key figure among Russia's post-revolutionary avant-garde, working across theatre, architecture, graphics and cinema. Agitator, publisher, activist and promoter, he was a close friend of Rodchenko and Stepanova and was the foremost theoretician of Moscow's Working Group of Constructivists"--Page [4] of cover.

Gan's Constructivism

Gan's Constructivism PDF Author: Kristin Romberg
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298535
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
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.

Anywhere or Not at All

Anywhere or Not at All PDF Author: Peter Osborne
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781680949
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of The Politics of Time Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism. Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA)

Rodchenko and Popova

Rodchenko and Popova PDF Author: Margarita Tupitsyn
Publisher: Tate
ISBN: 9781854377968
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popovaq were leading figures in the Russian avant-garde during its most exciting period, from the 1917 Revolution to Popova's tragically early death in 1924 at the age of thirty-five. Together they believed that new forms of art could play a key role in transforming society and reorganizing everyday life. As leading lights in the Constructivist movement they were responsible for an array of iconic works, from painting to magazine covers and fabric designs. Featuring new scholarship, as well as archival photos and illustrating many previously unpublished works, this book demonstrates the extent of their influence on their circle of friends and collaborators and their wide impact on the course of twentieth-century art." --Book Jacket.

The Conspiracy of Modern Art

The Conspiracy of Modern Art PDF Author: Luiz Renato Martins
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004346082
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In The Conspiracy of Modern Art the Brazilian critic and art-historian Luiz Renato Martins presents a new account of modern art from David to Abstract Expressionism. The once vibrant debate on these touchstones of modernism has gone stale. Viewed from the Sao Paulo megalopolis the art of Paris and New York - embodying Revolution, Thermidor, Bonapartistm and Bourgeois ‘Triumph' - once more pulsates in tragic key. Equally attentive to form and politics, Martins invites us to look again at familiar pictures. In the process, modern art appears in a new light. These essays, largely unknown to an English-speaking audience, may be the most important contribution to the account of modern painting since the important debates of the 1980s.

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution PDF Author: Maria Chehonadskih
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031402391
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.

Utopia

Utopia PDF Author: David Ayers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110433001
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?

A Journey Through Other Spaces

A Journey Through Other Spaces PDF Author: Tadeusz Kantor
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520914391
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, who died in 1990 at the age of 75, is widely recognized as one of the most important theatre artists of this century. Critics have ranked him with such influential directors as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Grotowski. Known in the United States primarily for his visually stunning productions, he is also highly regarded throughout Europe for his theoretically adventurous writings. Michal Kobialka, whom Kantor authorized to translate his work, provides us with the first collection of Kantor's essays in English, together with his analysis of the corpus of Kantor's work, both written and staged.