scholarly journals The ‘First Exhibition of Russian Art’ in Berlin: The Transnational Origins of Bolshevik Cultural Diplomacy, 1921–1922

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Ewa Berard
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
The Way

The emergence of a Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s was hardly predictable. Bolsheviks’ propaganda for ‘world revolution’ reduced the image of Soviet Russia to one of Leninist-proletarian victory, while the rejection of diplomatic tradition and a distrust of artists and intellectuals precluded any commitment to cultural action abroad. This article explores how, when and why a Soviet cultural diplomacy developed. It focuses on two episodes related to the famine of 1921, including, based on new archival evidence, the First Exhibition of Russian Art in Berlin in October 1922. The exhibition's spectacular success paved the way for Soviet cultural diplomacy that moved away from overtly communist propaganda in order to address Western avant-garde literary and artistic milieus.

Between East and West

Experiment ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-79
Author(s):  
Maria Taroutina
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Way

Abstract Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov’s seminal publications on the Stil Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel’s œuvre “between East and West” by demonstrating that the artist moved beyond the narrowly circumscribed nationalist agenda typically attributed to the work he produced at the Abramtsevo and Talashkino artistic colonies. In addition to indigenous sources, Vrubel also assimilated a number of external artistic influences such as Jugendstil, medieval Gothic and Renaissance ceramics, Japanese and Chinese porcelain, and Egyptian and Assyrian art. Through a close analysis of Vrubel’s orientalist paintings, as well as his cycle of folkloric works such as Mikula Selyaninovich and the Volga (1896), I demonstrate that his aesthetic program crossed multiple boundaries: geographical, temporal, material, and institutional. Through a complex renegotiation of the global and the local, the past and the present, and the traditional and contemporary, Vrubel arrived at a strikingly modernist visual syntax, which paved the way for an entire generation of avant-garde artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Naum Gabo, among others. Using Vrubel as a case study, this article thus proposes to rethink the opposing binary categories of avant-gardism and revivalism, historicism and innovation, Orientalism and Occidentalism, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, as they have been applied to the trajectory of modern Russian art—a set of ostensibly fixed dichotomies that Dmitry Sarabyanov had repeatedly and successfully challenged in his own work.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

scholarly journals B.S. Johnson’s Liberatic Cityscape in Albert Angelo

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Sensitivity ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

For Bryan Stanley Johnson, a British post-war avant-garde author, space was a crucial aspect of a literary work. Inspired by architects and film makers, he was convinced that “form follows function” (“Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs) and exercised the book as a material object, thus anticipating liberature – a literary genre defined in 1999 by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, which encompasses works whose authors purposefully fuse the content with the form. The goal of this paper is to analyse the cityscape theme in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (1964), in which London is presented as space that accompanies the character in his everyday life and becomes a witness of the formation of his identity. The protagonist is an architect by profession, so special attention is paid to his visual sensitivity and the way the cityscape is reflected in his memories. Furthermore, Johnson’s formal exploitation of the book as an object and its correspondence to the content is analysed with reference to the metaphor of “[t]he book as an architectural structure” discussed by Bazarnik in Liberature. A Book-bound Genre.

The Avant-Garde of System-Cybernetic Governmentality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Market Economy ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Free Market Economy ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Complex Question

This epilogue addresses the complex question of the link between system-cybernetic governmentality and the neoliberal transformation of post-Soviet Russia. Although the system-cybernetic governmentality and economic neoliberalism did not share institutional origins, they were linked during the post-Soviet transformation as a result of historical momentum: the members of the Soviet systems approach community were best positioned to conduct the transfer of the models of the market economy from the West at a time when neoliberal ideas on the free market economy were gaining popularity. However, this should not mean that the pre-1980 history of system-cybernetic governmentality should be tainted as neoliberal; rather, this reveals the extent to which scientific governance can be appropriated by different economic and political regimes. If anything, the pre-1980 history of system-cybernetic governmentality is a history of a rather liberal governmental technology, underscoring the conditions of autonomy, self-regulation, and government at a distance.

Scelsi, Giacinto (1905–1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Musical Training ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Piano Lessons ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian avant-garde composer best known for the single-note style he developed during the 1950s and 1960s, which minimizes harmonic and melodic activity in order to allow microtonal fluctuations and subtle transformations in timbre, intonation, dynamics, and articulation to come to the fore. Although his works were little known and infrequently performed during his lifetime, they gained considerable acclaim in the 1980s. Scelsi’s œuvre has proven extremely influential, and is generally regarded as a precursor to the spectral movement. Many of the elements of Scelsi’s biography remain uncertain, due in part to the composer’s penchant for self-mythologization. His family belonged to the southern Italian nobility, and it was in their ancestral chateau in Irpinie that Scelsi’s interest in music first manifested itself. He had little in the way of formal musical training, apart from receiving private piano lessons in his youth. Scelsi spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad, principally in France and Switzerland. It was during this period that he composed his first pieces, most notably Rotativa for pianos, strings, brass and percussion (1930). His early music was stylistically eclectic, embracing post-impressionist, neo-classical and twelve-tone idioms at various points in his life.

scholarly journals (Re)framing Movement in Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation N°1

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Emőke Simon
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Short Films ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
The Way

Abstract Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial

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