1. Utopian Visions: The Soviet Experience through the Arts
Jan Plamper, Simon Huxtable

2. Week 6 Outline

3. Week 6
Avant-gardes in visual culture: Definitions

4. Week 6 Avant-gardes in visual culture: Definitions Examples:
- Cubo-futurism
- Suprematism
- Constructivism etc.

5. Week 6
Avant-gardes in visual culture: Definitions
Examples
Utopia

6. Week 6 Avant-gardes in visual culture: Definitions Examples Utopia
Promise

7. Definitions

8. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Definitions
A group of individuals?

9. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Definitions
A group of individuals?
A set of institutions?

10. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Definitions
A group of individuals?
A set of institutions?
A style?

11. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Definitions
A group of individuals?
A set of institutions?
A style?
A doctrine?

12. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Definitions
A group of individuals?
A set of institutions?
A style?
A doctrine?
A historical conjuncture?

13. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Definitions
Answer: All of the above

14. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Negative Definitions
What were the avant-gardes against?

15. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Negative Definitions
What were the avant-gardes against?
Mimetic representation

16. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Negative Definitions
What were the avant-gardes against?
Mimetic representation
Bourgeois art for art’s sake, aestheticism, non-engagé art

17. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Negative Definitions
What were the avant-gardes against?
Mimetic representation
Bourgeois art for art’s sake, aestheticism, non-engagé art
Divisions of high vs. low art, everyday vs. non-everyday art etc.

18. Avant-gardes in Visual Culture: Negative Definitions
What were the avant-gardes against?
Mimetic representation
Bourgeois art for art’s sake, aestheticism, non-engagé art
Divisions of high vs. low art, everyday vs. non-everyday art etc.
Explicit metaphysics, emotional psychologism

19. Examples

20. Cubo-Futurism
Reduce reality to geometrical shapes and primary colours

21. Cubo-Futurism
Reduce reality to geometrical shapes and primary colours
Radical abstraction? Not yet

22. Cubo-Futurism
Reduce reality to geometrical shapes and primary colours
Radical abstraction? Not yet
French cubism (main interest: reduced forms), Italian futurism (main interest: movement)

23. Cubo-Futurism
Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist, 1913

24. Cubo-Futurism
Kazimir Malevich, Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement,

25. Cubo-Futurism
Liubov Popova, Portrait of a Woman (relief), 1915

26. Cubism in France
Georges Braque, Violin and Candlestick, 1910

27. Futurism in Italy
Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912

28. Futurism in Italy
Gerardo Dottori, Benito Mussolini ‘Il Duce’, 1933

29. Suprematism
Basic geometric forms

30. Suprematism
Basic geometric forms
Basic colours

31. Suprematism Basic geometric forms Basic colours
Surface texture (e.g. paint on canvas)

32. Suprematism Basic geometric forms Basic colours
Surface texture (e.g. paint on canvas)
Art serves neither state nor religion, nor does it represent objects  opposed to constructivism‘s emphasis on (industrial) usefulness

33. Suprematism Basic geometric forms Basic colours
Surface texture (e.g. paint on canvas)
Art serves neither state nor religion, nor does it represent objects  opposed to constructivism‘s emphasis on (industrial) usefulness
Non-objective reality, ‘supremacy of pure artistic feeling’  find ‘zero degree’ of painting ? ‘fourth dimension’  esoteric geometry of Petr Uspensky and Georgii Giurdzhiev

34. Suprematism
Also absurdity, as represented by other media, e.g. poetry, written in ‘transrational language’ Zaum
Дыр бул щыл
убещур
скум
вы со бу
р л эз
Dyr bul shchyl
ubeshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez
Aleksei Kruchenykh, 1913

35. Suprematism
0.10 exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

36. Malevich Quotations 1
Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

37. Malevich Quotations 2
Only with the disappearance of a habit of mind which sees in pictures little corners of nature, madonnas and shameless Venuses, shall we witness a work of pure, living art.

38. Malevich Quotations 3
I say to all: reject love, reject aestheticism, reject the trunks of wisdom, for in the new culture your wisdom is laughable and insignificant. I have untied the knot of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour! Remove from yourselves quickly the hardened skin of centuries, so that you can catch up with us more easily. I have overcome the impossible and formed gulfs with my breathing. You are in the nets of the horizon, like fish! We, the Suprematists, throw open the way to you. Hurry! For tomorrow you will not recognize us.

39. El Lissitzy Quotation
Suprematism has advanced the ultimate tip of the visual pyramid of perspective into infinity.... We see that Suprematism has swept away from the plane the illusions of two-dimensional planimetric space, the illusions of three-dimensional perspective space, and has created the ultimate illusion of irrational space, with its infinite extensibility into the background and foreground.

40. Symbolist Critic and Artist Alexandre Benois
Suprematism = ‘Sermon of nothingness and destruction’ (1915)

41. Polychrome Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915

42. Monochrome Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition – White on White, 1918

43. Constructivism
Usefulness of art for new (Soviet) society

44. Constructivism
Usefulness of art for new (Soviet) society
Move away from painting to more applied arts and materials, e.g. textile design

45. Constructivism
Usefulness of art for new (Soviet) society
Move away from painting to more applied arts and materials, e.g. textile design
Faktura = material properties of art

46. Constructivism: Faktura
David Burliuk, Revolution, 1917

47. Constructivist textiles
Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothes, 1923

48. Constructivist ads
Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Advertising poster for Red October cookies, 1923

49. Constructivism
Varvara Stepanova, Figure no. 29, 1921

50. Constructivism
Vladimir Tatlin, Letatlin, 1930

51. Constructivism
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919

52. Photomontage of Tatlin monument in Leningrad

53. …but…

54. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

55. …and…

56. Sotsart: Aleksandr Kosolapov, Malevich – Black Square, 1987

57. …and finally…

58. Commercialization: Vogue Oct. 2014; Victoria Beckham at S/S 2014 show

59. Utopia

61. …great again?

62. Whipped slave, 1863

65. Retrospective Utopia