The Working Group of Constructivists' aesthetic program of 1921 was famously structured by three “disciplines”—tectonics, faktura, and construction. Whereas the latter two quickly became essential to the literature on constructivism, tectonics has proven more difficult to absorb. This paper presents one attempt to reckon with the constructivist usage of the term by situating it within a broader contest of meaning in the first decades of the twentieth century whose participants included Aleksandr Bogdanov’s proto-systems theory, Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, and Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstwissenschaft. Constructivism emerges as a version of aesthetic modernism organized around embeddedness and contingency—one that cultivated an uncannily global outlook by working from a position deeply embedded in local specificity.

Speakers -

Kristin Romberg is an assistant professor of art history at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism, was published by University of California Press in 2018. She co-curated the exhibition Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union, 1919-1934, in 2005 at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, also co-editing the accompanying catalogue. Recently, she was involved in two more exhibition projects, consulting and writing for the catalogue of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) and curating an exhibition of contemporary art at Krannert Art Museum entitled Propositions on Revolution (Slogans for a Future) (2017). She is currently working on a new book project entitled This Glass House: The Modern Art of Living with Oneself.