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Gan's Constructivism
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This compelling new account of Russian constructivism repositions the agitator Aleksei Gan as the movement’s chief protagonist and theorist. Primarily a political organizer during the revolution an...
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22 January 2019

This compelling new account of Russian constructivism repositions the agitator Aleksei Gan as the movement’s chief protagonist and theorist. Primarily a political organizer during the revolution and early Soviet period, Gan brought to the constructivist project an intimate acquaintance with the nuts and bolts of “making revolution.” Writing slogans, organizing amateur performances, and producing mass-media objects define an alternative conception of “the work of art”—no longer an autonomous object but a labor process through which solidarities are built. In an expansive analysis touching on aesthetic and architectural theory, the history of science and design, sociology, and feminist and political theory, Kristin Romberg invites us to consider a version of modernism organized around the radical flattening of hierarchies, a broad distribution of authorship, and the negotiation of constraints and dependencies. Moving beyond Cold War abstractions, Gan’s Constructivism offers a fine-grained understanding of what it means for an aesthetics to be political.
Price: $65.00
Pages: 312
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
22 January 2019
Trim Size: 10.00 X 7.00 in
ISBN: 9780520298538
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
"Kristin Romberg delivers an earth-shattering reevaluation of the Russian constructivist discipline of tectonics in her new biography of the art movement’s leading agit-man, Aleksei Gan. . . she has written such a tectonically textured testament to Gan—a book that attempts to synthetically respond to the demands of other fields external to history or Slavic studies—as might have made its protagonist proud."
Kristin Romberg is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Embedded Aesthetics and
Situated History
1. Critical Masses: Mass Action and the Prehistory of
Russian Constructivism
GAN’S CONSTRUCTIVISM
2. Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an
Embedded Modernism
3. Constructivist Tectonics and the Wegenerian
Revolution
4. The Typographic and Tectonic Conditions of Gan’s
Constructivism
GAN’S PRODUCTIVISM
5. The Communist City: The Total Work of the
Constructivist Object
6. The Communist City, Side B: Montage and the Concrete
Human Character
7. Art in the Battle for Time: Cinematic Realism and the
Rationalization of Labor
Abbreviations for Archival Sources
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index
Introduction. Embedded Aesthetics and
Situated History
1. Critical Masses: Mass Action and the Prehistory of
Russian Constructivism
GAN’S CONSTRUCTIVISM
2. Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an
Embedded Modernism
3. Constructivist Tectonics and the Wegenerian
Revolution
4. The Typographic and Tectonic Conditions of Gan’s
Constructivism
GAN’S PRODUCTIVISM
5. The Communist City: The Total Work of the
Constructivist Object
6. The Communist City, Side B: Montage and the Concrete
Human Character
7. Art in the Battle for Time: Cinematic Realism and the
Rationalization of Labor
Abbreviations for Archival Sources
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index