Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection (1981)

“Documenting the first exhibition of Russian collector George Costakis’s holdings of early 20th-century Russian artists in the United States, the catalogue Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection is an invaluable resource for scholars of art of the avant-garde in Russia. Art historian Angelica Zander Rudenstine’s introduction describes the Costakis Collection’s formation and details from George Costakis’s biography. Margit Rowell reexamines certain premises about Russian and Soviet avant-garde art in the essay, ‘New Insights into Soviet Constructivism: Painting, Constructivists, Production Art.’ The publication also includes color and black-and-white reproductions of selected works with entries and biographies of the 39 artists in the exhibition.”

Edited by Margit Rowell and Angelica Zander Rudenstine
Publisher The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1981
ISBN 089207293
320 pages

Publisher

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-18)
Internet Archive (multiple formats)
Guggenheim flipping book (Flash)

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews (1999)

“Krzysztof Wodiczko, one of the most original avant-garde artists of our time, is perhaps best known for the politically charged images he has projected onto buildings and monuments from New York to Warsaw—images of rockets projected onto triumphal arches, the image of handcuffed wrists projected onto a courthouse facade, images of homeless people in bandages and wheelchairs projected onto statues in a park from which they had been evicted. In projects such as the “Homeless Vehicle,” which he designed through discussions with homeless people, Wodiczko has helped to make public space a place where marginalized people can speak, establish their presence, and assert their rights.

Critical Vehicles is the first book in English to collect Wodiczko’s own writings on his projects. Wodiczko has stated that his principal artistic concern is the displacement of traditional notions of community and identity in the face of rapidly expanding technologies and cultural miscommunication. In these writings he addresses such issues as urbanism, homelessness, immigration, alienation, and the plight of refugees. Fusing wit and sophisticated political insight, he offers the artistic means to help heal the damages of uprootedness and other contemporary troubles.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
Writing Art series
ISBN 0262731223, 9780262731225
227 pages

Review: Ben Highmore (Art History, 2001).

publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-11-19)

Boris Groys: The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (1988–) [EN, IT]

“As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single “artistic” whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an “art for the masses.” Groys argues instead that the “total art” proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin’s death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing “sots art,” a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.”

Originally published in German as Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, Carl Hanser, Munich and Vienna, 1988.

English edition
Translated by Charles Rougle
Publisher Princeton University Press, 1992
ISBN 0691055963, 9780691055961
126 pages

Reviews: Alla Efimova (Art Bulletin, 1992), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Slavic Review, 1993), Mary A. Nicholas (Slavic and East European Journal, 1993), Ross Wolfe (Situations, c2011), Giuliano Vivaldi (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2013).

Publisher (EN)

The Total Art of Stalinism (English, trans. Charles Rougle, 1992, updated on 2012-7-18)
Lo stalinismo ovvero l’opera d’arte totale (Italian, trans. Emanuela Guercetti, 1992, added on 2019-12-14)