by Jon Lackman | 13 December 2007 | Books, Modern
In the Summer 2007 issue of the Slavic and East European Journal, Douglas Greenfield reviews Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, while Vlad Strukov reviews Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Greenfield writes:
In her closely argued, challenging study, Maria Gough proposes to read Moscow Constructivism “against the grain,” complicating standard accounts, which, she shows, insufficiently contextualize the movement within the complexity of the Soviet 1920s, or miss important theoretical differences among its members. Gough tells a compelling new story … In particular, Gough revises the narrative of the shift from studio investigations into industrial interventions — the artists’ various attempts to enter production, to shape and organize the stuff of everyday life … Gough argues that [some] sought to instantiate productivism not in the design of everyday objects … but rather in the design of the production process itself, its machines and methods.
Strukov writes:
Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions is a much celebrated … study of the Russian Constructivism of the early 1920s … The evoked anti-religious, anti-nationalistic and anti-conventional intent of the song [referenced by the book's title] perfectly conveys the utopian and nihilistic spirit of Russian Constructivists … The overarching radiance of the book is in its brilliant display of the the artistic practices and the cultural and ideological imperatives of the era … The cornerstones of Kiaer’s scholarly edifice are Marxist philosophy and Soviet ideology, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and the pivotal locations of byt and bytie in Russian culture … In its essence, Kiaer’s scholarship belongs to media archaeology. Kiaer’s work is, therefore, of great significance due to its engagement with issues related to medium, production, and art. She masterfully shows how a mass-produced object of everyday life is transformed by the process of production … she provides us with a study of great relevance in contemporary debates on digital means of production and the dissemination of art and commodities. In fact, she writes in opposition to the current international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicity with the globalized, mediated image … another hit from the MIT Press.
