HAA 274k

The Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes
Maria Gough
Thursday, 1-3pm
On the centenary of the 1917 Revolutions, this seminar offers a major test case for assessing the relationship between aesthetics and politics by returning to the pioneering example of Russian and Soviet avant-garde artists, photographers, designers, and architects who participated in, or otherwise responded to, the building of the first socialist society. The key issue on the table is the avant-garde’s problematization and ultimate rejection of the modernist principle of the autonomy of the work of art. The significant role of women in this major shift within the history of modernism, as well as the work of non-architects in the field of architecture, is discussed.
We begin with the pre-revolutionary embrace of the autonomy principle in the differentiation of poetic vs. everyday language, Suprematist nonobjectivity, and the understanding of faktura (facture, texture) as materiological determination. We then turn to the troubling of that principle in the wake of 1917, in both Lissitzky’s art of the proun, which ranged across media from painting to architecture, and also laboratory Constructivism, which, following Picasso’s example, advanced constructed sculpture as a major new procedure. The rejection of autonomy altogether is found in the Productivists’ subsequent call for artists to enter into industrial production and the design of every day life. Major examples for discussion include: the reinvention of textile and clothing design; the advent of new typologies for interior and urban space; the recourse to experimental and factographic modes of photographic practice; and the radicalization of graphic design and exhibition design.
The seminar is supported by a dedicated exhibition in the Harvard Art Museums, “What about Revolution? Aesthetic Practices after 1917,” and a weekend study trip to the centennial exhibition, “Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test,” at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Requirements: seminar attendance and participation, weekly readings, and the preparation of a research paper based on original works of art. Open to graduate students. Limit: 12.