Ada Raev: Russische Künstlerinnen der Moderne (1870-1930). Historische Studien, Kunstkonzepte, Weiblichkeitsentwürfe (2002) [German]

“Mit ihren Werken, ihren theoretischen Positionen und ihren Aktivitäten im zeitgenössischen Kunstleben haben russische Künstlerinnen die Geschichte der russischen und europäischen Kunst zwischen 1880 und 1930 wesentlich mitgeprägt.

Das Buch spürt den mentalitätsgeschichtlichen, politischen und institutionellen Voraussetzungen des Phänomens “Russische Künstlerinnen der Moderne” nach und stellt ihr Wirken im zeitgenössischen Kanon der Künste (Kunsthandwerk, Graphik und Buchkunst, Malerei, Plastik, Szenographie) vor.”

Publisher Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 2002
Open access
ISBN 3770536991, 9783770536993
451 pages

Reviews: Renate Berger (kritische berichte 2004), Karoline Hille (Frauen Kunst Wissenschaft 2004), Alexandra Oberländer (Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 2005).

Publisher
WorldCat

JPGs, PDF

Susanne Knaller (ed.): Realität und Wirklichkeit in der Moderne. Texte zu Literatur, Kunst, Fotografie und Film (2013) [German]

An online anthology of 78 theoretical and philosophical texts from the last two centuries presenting a range of conceptions of the reality, in particular exploring the ambiguity of the German notions of Realität and Wirklichkeit. The website also allows reading of the texts through occurrences of 40 selected concepts.

Maintained by Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
Open Access

Concept
Texts (HTML)
Themes
Categories

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)