Kristin Romberg: Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism, 1917-1928 (2010)

“This is the first monograph about the Russian constructivist Aleksei Gan (1887-1942) and an experiment in the formal analysis of a materialist practice.

Best known as co-founder of the First Working Group of Constructivists and author of the group’s agitational and theoretical texts, Gan’s own oeuvre was comprised of amateur performances and mass-media objects (texts, books, journals, and films). This dissertation shows that the same qualities of ephemerality and dependency that make Gan’s work resistant to art-historical analysis were also what made it representative of constructivism’s ambitions for a materialist approach to art. In exploring these forms, Gan redefined the ‘work of art’ as a labor process through which the material world, human beings, and normative (common or social) frameworks simultaneously produced one another. The result was an alternative modernism, what I call an aesthetics of embeddedness, whose objects were extensive and responsive structures designed to permeate and shape their environment. Through close readings, the dissertation redefines art-historical concepts such as style and medium in ways specific to Gan’s historical moment, also examining them as manifestations of tensions in the early Soviet imagination. Most crucially these involve the cult of labor, the politics of group formation, and the power of the mass media to mold the normative frameworks governing social reality.

Chapter 1 reevaluates the origins of Russian constructivism by examining Gan’s early career in cultural and political enlightenment organizations, particularly his work in amateur theater and as a ‘constructor of mass action’. Chapter 2 focuses on the crystallization of constructivism as a movement and aesthetic theory in 1921. Chapter 3 looks closely at Gan’s book Constructivism (1922), developing an understanding of constructivism based on a typographic rather than sculptural model of material making. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Gan’s journal projects in terms of architecture and cinema, defining a set of constructive paradigms that run throughout Gan’s work. Finally, chapter 6 treats Gan’s work as a filmmaker in relation to contemporary efforts to rationalize artistic labor.” (Abstract)

Ph.D. Dissertation
Columbia University, New York, 2010
576 pages

Publisher

PDF (24 MB, illustrations missing, updated on 2017-3-21)

Iakov Chernikhov: Postroyenie shriftov (1958) [Russian]

A book on the history of Russian and Latin typography from the avant-garde architect Iakov Chernikhov.

Построение шрифтов [Constructing Fonts]
With N.A. Sobolev (Н.А. Соболев)
Published in Moscow, 1958
Reprinted by Architektura-S, Moscow, 2007
ISBN 5964700330
116 pages
via Arch-grafika.ru

PDF (68 MB, updated on 2015-11-10)

Harun Farocki: Nachdruck / Imprint – Texte / Writings (2001) [DE/EN]

“This book brings together a selection of writings produced by Harun Farocki between 1977 and 1999. They provide an insight into Farocki’s filmic work and its underlying querying of the status, production, and perception of images conveyed technically and through media. As a critical observer of political and cultural events, Farocki reveals the images’ hidden content in his films and writings, freeing them from the detritus of the encoding with which they have been covered in the course of their development, their use in various media and subsequent reception. Farocki’s deconstructive reflections establish new standards not only for the aesthetics of film but for visual art as well.”

Published on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition of Harun Farocki at the Westfälischer Kunstverein and Filmclub Münster, June-August 2001.

Edited by Susanne Gänsheimer and Nicolaus Schafhausen
Introduction by Volker Pantenburg
English translation by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim
Publisher Vorwerk 8, Berlin, and Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2001
ISBN 393091641X, 9783930916412
323 pages
via niccadena

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (45 MB)