Alexei Yurchak: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2005–) [EN, RU]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, anthropology, communism, ideology, russia, socialism, soviet union
“Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of ‘late socialism’ (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.
Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.
The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie–and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.”
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2005
In-Formation series
ISBN 0691121168, 9780691121161
x+331 pages
Reviews: Gleb Tsipursky (Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 2005), Sheila Fitzpatrick (London Review of Books, 2006), John P. Ziker (American Anthropologist, 2006), Luahona Ganguly (Int’l J Communication, 2007), Christian Noack (H-Soz-u-Kult, 2007, DE), Christoph Neidhart (J Cold War Studies, 2010).
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (English, 2005, EPUB)
Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos (Russian, trans. A. Belyaev, 2014, 15 MB)
The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1997 (2006) [Spanish/English]
Filed under book, catalogue | Tags: · 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, art, art history, mexico, zapatistas
“This survey of artistic experimentation in late twentieth-century Mexico assesses fields as diverse as painting, photography, poster design, installation, performance, experimental theater, Super-8 film, video, music, poetry and popular culture. It also attempts–in what may be an experimental work itself–to recreate ephemeral works, insofar as possible, with the support of the artists. The three tumultuous decades between 1968 and 1997 saw the end of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in a violent final phase that began with the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre–which brutally crushed the student movement of 1968–and ended with the crises that followed the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The Age of Discrepancies is the first visual history to cover this exceptional period, and to propose a genealogy for the work that emerged from it.”
With essays by Olivier Debroise, Tatiana Falcón, Pilar García de Germenos, Vania Macías, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Lourdes Morales, Alejandro Navarrete Cortés, Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón.
La era de la discrepancia: arte y cultura visual en Mexico, 1968-1997
Edited by Olivier Debroise
Publisher Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México & Turner, México D.F., 2006
ISBN 9789703238293
469 pages
via Cármen Rossette Ramírez
Commentary: Cuauhtémoc Medina (c2013).
Comment (0)Wu Hung (ed.): Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, art history, avant-garde, china, contemporary art
This sourcebook and anthology is “a collection of selected texts that includes artists’ manifestos, exhibition catalogue texts, essays by critics, and interviews with key artists, many of them available in English translation for the first time. Arranged in chronological order and framed by contextual explanations, these documents guide readers through the developments in the Chinese art scene from the late 1970s to the 2000s.”
Edited with the assistance of Peggy Wang
Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
ISBN 9780822349433, 0822349434
xvi+455 pages
Reviews: Bloomer (China J 2011), Winterton (Taipei Times 2011), Pearlman (Leonardo 2011), Dal Lago (ARTmargins 2014).
PDF (21 MB, updated on 2023-9-19)
Additional texts (PDFs)