Remains of Utopia: Neo-Marxist Affinities of the East European Neo-avant-garde (original) (raw)
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This project analyzes the relationship between Czech avant-garde intellectuals and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS) from the early 1920s through the 1950s. The goal is to demonstrate how the avant-garde, associated with international artistic movements such as Constructivism and Surrealism, played a central role articulating the values and goals of communism. Beginning with the interwar era of the Czechoslovak democratic republic and continuing through the establishment of Stalinist rule after 1948, my research demonstrates how the avant-garde fostered a sustained bond with communist functionaries through political cooperation and intellectual cross-fertilization. From a broader perspective this allows us to understand communism in Czechoslovakia as an organic phenomenon with roots in the interwar First Republic, as opposed to an alien ideology imposed from outside. The boundaries between Party functionaries and their intellectual “fellow travelers” were fluid and porous. The Czech avant-garde—including a range of influential writers, actors and artists—helped build communism much as a later generation of intellectuals tore it down in 1989. Through its analysis of intellectuals and their contributions to the development of communism, my work focuses on the various ideas and organizations that shaped avant-garde understanding of socialist aesthetics and role of art in politics. Such a focus, heretofore lacking in political studies of the CPCS, allow us to understand the popularity of the communist movement, and how intellectuals helped legitimize the communist regime after 1948. Although Czechoslovakia offered a vibrant climate for leftist politics, thanks to strong traditions of democratic rule, advanced industrial development, and influential workers’ movements, the popularity of the CPCS and its seizure of power did not rely on such factors alone. Intellectuals performed a crucial task by promulgating the ideological discourses of the communist worldview. By focusing on these intellectual contributions my work offers a major reinterpretation of avant-garde, positing an analytical framework that elucidates its many contributions to communist aesthetics and after 1948 to socialist realism. In other words the distinction between “good” avant-garde art and “bad” socialist realist art is both anachronistic and misleading, occluding how both movements interacted and overlapped.
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The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western art is often interpreted as a superficial repetition of the historic avant-garde, devoid of its original political content. Still, this well-established narrative of the neo-avant-garde only accounts for art in Western liberal-democratic contexts. In socialist Yugoslavia, a distinct strand of neo-constructivism emerged in the 1950s, which sought to recapture not only prewar constructivism’s experimental aesthetics, but also its utopian politics. It was fueled by the revolutionary aspirations of socialist Yugoslavia, which strove to articulate a brand of socialism independent from Moscow, as well as an awareness of prewar constructivism that was unmatched in Western Europe. Represented by figures such as Vjenceslav Richter and the collective EXAT-51, this socialist neo-avant-garde challenged both the traditional historiography of postwar abstraction, and the assumption that experimental aesthetics have not existed under non-democratic conditions since the Soviet 1920s.
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Praxis of the Soviet Avant-Garde
Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College, 2018
I n the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno discuss how the culture industry is backed by a noncommittal vagueness of ideology, which, in turn, influences the production of art. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that, like the culture industry 1 , art is bound to its struggle with tradition and is unable to transcend a new reality-or give way to a new cultural identity. The authors look towards autonomous art, recognized in the presentation of the avant-garde, to transcend the milieu of the culture industry. Yet, as they argue, "the claims of art are always also ideology" 2-this holds especially true for avant-garde art. Even in the midst of society's attempting to sever itself from tradition (in hopes of striving for a new identity), avant-garde art does not transcend reality, for it is nonetheless backed by the instrumentalization of ideology and places the artist's identity into crisis. Art is understood as the presentation of truth claims that reveal the current condition of the social order. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that art is able to transcend reality when it breaks from its tradition or its style; however, style is shaped by tradition,
2017
scholars in the social sciences and humanities have often criticized the notion of post-communism for reproducing discursively the East/West divide, this study argues that it is precisely from within the post-communist threshold that the current hegemonic role of the West can be effectively challenged. I begin by showing how the post-communist condition captures an intense experience of being undone and how, with the abrupt breakdown of a communist order and a gradual return to a capitalist structure, the main pillars of modern subjectivities in Eastern European countries have been fundamentally disturbed. As a consequence ‘post-communist sites’ have turned into places or relations in which ghostly relics of past experiences suddenly crop up with no ideological structure being strong enough to control their haunting. The ghosts returning in this state of collective uncertainty do, however, not only disturb today’s Eastern European site but also, I argue, make the Western subject fee...
TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia
2011
Milovzorova was first a wonderful colleague and then a deeply appreciated friend. Yelena Kalinsky has been a gift in terms of both shared intellectual interests and great personal kindness. And even though I met Josh Saxe towards the end of my work on the dissertation, his unflagging support, interest, patience, and willingness to engage me in intelligent conversation about my work, as well as help edit it, were things that I deeply appreciated and that made the final push less of an ordeal. Finally, I have to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, Olga Vorobieva and Alex Gurshtein, to whom I have also dedicated the dissertation. They have supported me over the years in innumerable practical ways as I pursued the study of art history, doing everything from making it financially possible to take on unpaid museum internships to e-mailing me hundreds of scanned pages while I was living abroad. More importantly, they gave me the capacity for inquisitiveness and persistence, along with their blessing to pursue my dreams and hunches. For this, as much else, I will always be in their debt.
European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies. Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, 2017
The early years of Soviet rule signaled the arrival of a new Utopian era where it seemed as if even the most outlandish avant-garde projects might be realized. Many avant-garde artists contributed to the construction of this brave new world which quickly degenerated into a nightmarish dystopia. Ironically, many avant-garde poets and painters emigrated from the soviet Russia in the early twenties just at a time when the range of possibilities still seemed enticing. Among the artists who turned their backs on such seeming opportunity was Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd), Alexander Guinger, Boris Poplavsky, and Serge Charchoune. Thus was born, mainly in Paris, the Russian avant-garde art in exile, a phenomenon which allows the present day observer a fascinating analytical perspective in which the concept of Utopia may be placed at the very centre of our reflections. For if the avant-garde longed for a radical transformation of life, society and art, did it make sense to continue or even to start (as in the case of Poplavsky) such avant-garde developments so far removed from the country where these transformations were supposedly taking place? For example, the invention of transrational language was purely a utopian project, but why print this new language in the Cyrillic alphabet (as Iliazd did in 1923) rendering it inaccessible to the French Dadaists unless read aloud? Kruchenykh declared that Zaum could provide “a universal poetic language born organically”, but this very language produced in a foreign linguistic environment couldn’t help but loose its utopian aura, leaving it at best a pure artifice. The abrupt end of the “heroic times” of Russian avant-garde poetry in Paris demonstrates that the young émigrés had yet to elaborate their own alternatives, both to the art of their Russian predecessors as well to the new leftist ideology of art.