This article argues that a focus on Ukraine challenges the general understanding of culture in the revolutionary period, which either focuses on artists working in Moscow making Soviet art, or on non-Russian (Ukrainian, Jewish or Polish) artists in the regions making “national” art. Neither paradigm captures the radical shift in infrastructure during the imperial collapse and civil war. Placing the regions at the center of analysis highlights how Kyiv was an important cultural center during the period for later artistic developments in Europe and in the USSR. It shows that revolutionary culture is fundamentally wartime culture. Finally, the article argues that peripheral visions are central to a full geography of culture in order to trace how cultural infrastructures collapse and are re-constituted.
This paper was to have been Wu Hung’s contribution to the conference “Contemporaneity in the History of Art” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Mass., October 8 and 9, 2009. However, he was unable to attend. The paper is presented here in the form in which it would have been presented. See also, in this issue of Contemporaneity, notes from this conference by its convener, Terry Smith.
From “Modern” to “Contemporary”: A Case in Post-Cultural Revolutionary Art
