“Third Factory: Avant-Garde,
Social Construction, and Ideology in the Soviet 20s”
European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM)
Universität Münster, 5–7 September 2018
For this year’s EAM, centered the theme of “Realisms of the Avant-Garde and Modernism,” I propose to organize a panel or multi-session series of panels that would revisit the relation of the avant-garde to social construction. Such a project would necessarily be revisionist, in deepening but questioning the role of the avant-garde in the project of social construction, particularly after new archival materials and critical perspectives have become available. But it would also try to refocus interest on the Soviet 20s as scene of a coordinated Gesamtkunstwerk beyond individual artists, works, groupings, or genres that has continued relevance for a global, mediated, ideologically distorted world. The session would explore the coordinated and mutually informed efforts of Soviet writers, critics, artists, directors, photographers, psychologists, ideology critics, and party/state actors and tendencies to construct a cross-genre methodology as a comprehensive “project of modernity” in the 20s, up to and beyond the purported end of the avant-garde with the consolidation of Stalinism, seeking direct connections between avant-garde methods, social construction, and social/socialist realism. The individual work of art or artistic movement will be read in relation to how such a cross-genre effort can be considered unified across a social totality imagined to be in the process of construction. Evidence of such a coordinated activity may be found in the journals Lef and Novii Lef, but its total scope and projected impact have yet to be understood. What was imagined by this network of artists and theorists was made possible by the historical transformation of social revolution seen in relation not to utopian aims but as material practice. Such a “project of modernity,” however incomplete, entailed at its basis an account of language, after formalism and Moscow Circle linguistics; psychology, after Pavlov and Vygotsky; new forms of art and literature, after constructivism and the literature of fact; cinematic montage, after Eisenstein, Vertov, and others; and visual art, encompassing constructivist, productivist, activist, and realist tendencies. The imagined Gesamtkunstwerk is modernity itself, increasingly seen as a project of “positive ideology” which this group of Soviet artists and theorists had well within its grasp. Recovering the Soviet 20s for its coordinated contribution to an art of the social imaginary as large as modernity itself is an urgent task in both political and disciplinary terms. The session(s) hope to present work that will directly address the avant-garde and social construction in the Soviet 20s but that also introduce new artistic, historical, and theoretical considerations that deepen our knowledge of the period.
Paper presentations have been accepted and the proposal is submitted. Stay tuned for more!
