thresholds, 41: Revolution! (2013)

“What actions are prompted by revolution in the space of the city? Which publics take part in this struggle, and who are the agents that mobilize it? And after a revolution has subsided, how is it remembered, represented and memorialized? thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! turns to the history, design, and cultural production of the public realm as a site of dissensus. Rather than focusing on a specific revolutionary time and place, we have strived to include different periods and regions, organizing contributions in terms of the relations they establish between sites, actors, and contexts. In the essays and designs featured in these pages, political struggle often shifts established roles—agitators create new types of public space, designers become activists and fundraisers, individual figures fade in favor of collectives or groups, and actions are best remembered through misrepresentation. How do we write revolution, who writes it and for whom? And, in turn, how does urban conflict inform writing, design, and cultural production at large? Our authors, designers, and artists open up revolution as subject, as event, and as historiographical problem—a problem complicated by discrete actions, multiple publics, critical practices, and the politics of display and remembrance.”

Contributors: David Gissen, Robin Adèle Greeley, Britt Eversole, Arindam Dutta, Diane E. Davis and Prassana Raman, Mark Jarzombek, Thérèse F. Tierney, Kenneth Ip, Nasser Rabbat, Reinhold Martin, Tunney Lee and Lawrence Vale, Andrés Jaque Architects + Office for Political Innovation, Santiago Cirugeda + Recetas Urbanas, Nomeda Urbonas and Gediminas Urbonas, The Yes Men, Ateya Khorakiwala, Simone Brott, Andrés Estefane, Kelly Presutti, Mechtild Widrich, Montenegro Airways

Edited by Ana María León
Publisher SA+P Press / MIT Department of Architecture, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2013
Open Access
ISSN 1091-711X
ISBN 9780983508267
212 pages

Journal website

PDF (13 MB)

Maria Gough: The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (2005)

“The Artist as Producer reshapes our understanding of the fundamental contribution of the Russian avant-garde to the development of modernism. Focusing on the single most important hotbed of Constructivist activity in the early 1920s—the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow—Maria Gough offers a powerful reinterpretation of the work of the first group of artists to call themselves Constructivists. Her lively narrative ranges from famous figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko to others who are much less well known, such as Karl Ioganson, a key member of the state-funded INKhUK whose work paved the way for an eventual dematerialization of the integral art object.

Through the mining of untapped archives and collections in Russia and Latvia and a close reading of key Constructivist works, Gough highlights fundamental differences among the Moscow group in their handling of the experimental new sculptural form—the spatial construction—and of their subsequent shift to industrial production. The Artist as Producer upends the standard view that the Moscow group’s formalism and abstraction were incompatible with the sociopolitical imperatives of the new Communist state. It challenges the common equation of Constructivism with functionalism and utilitarianism by delineating a contrary tendency toward non-determinism and an alternate orientation to process rather than product. Finally, the book counters the popular perception that Constructivism failed in its ambition to enter production by presenting the first-ever case study of how a Constructivist could, and in fact did, operate within an industrial environment. The Artist as Producer offers provocative new perspectives on three critical issues—formalism, functionalism, and failure—that are of central importance to our understanding not only of the Soviet phenomenon but also of the European vanguards more generally.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2005
ISBN 9780520226180
xi+257 pages

Reviews: Paul Wood (Art Journal, 2006), Charlotte Douglas (Modernism/modernity, 2006), Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (Russian Review, 2006), Patricia Railing (Slavic Review, 2007), Douglas Greenfield (Slavic and East European Journal, 2007), Roann Barris (SECAC Review, 2007).

Publisher

PDF (21 MB, no OCR)

Peter Gay: Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (1968–) [EN, CR]

First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay’s career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany’s tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century.

First published by Harper & Row, New York, 1968.
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2001
ISBN 0393322394, 9780393322392
205 pages
via chef

Review (Walter Laquer, The New York Times Books, 1968)
Review (Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Spectator, 1969)
Review (Sterling Fishman, History of Education Quarterly, 1970)

Publisher

Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider (English, 1968/2001, EPUB)
Weimarksa kultura: Isključenik kao uključenik (Croatian, trans. Danja Šilović-Karić, 1999, added on 2014-8-3)