CONJENTS 11 Foreword James Rondeau 20 BATTLEGROUND Kathleen Tahk 13 Acknowledgments 26 Plates Matthew S. Witkovsky !0-9040 ' 15 Note to the Reader 44 SCHOOL )f Publishing at 1: Yve-Alain Bois 17 Introduction 50 Plates lr of Publishing I, Devin Fore and Matthew S. Witkovsky -auren Makholm, ,I 78 , Levi 11: PRESS Maria Gough 86 Plates I' graphy of ; Craig Stillwell, r oto, with I ,rnell and I 114 of Imaging, THEATER Masha Chlenova ,ion Gothic, 11 122 Plates r Br~oks, ,onsIn iphics, I , ibri, Verona I HOME [emonstration, itepanova, Textile 140 n byVarvara STOREFRONT i aks Penson, Christina Kiaer . 16: Aleksei Gan, stratsiia byta! 150 Plates Everyday Life!), (Victor Slama), I Shows You the I v' Popova , !4(pl. 64). 218 FACTORY right) : pis . 28, 9, Barbara Wurm , 23, 16, 29, 25, 226 Plates Iated on the two and materials p Council , which 250 1ement. I FESTIVAL Kristin Romberg 258 Plates 297 Checklist 280 313 Bibliography EXHIBITION Kathleen Tahk Maria Gough 284 Plates 317 Index 324 Photography Credits 288 DEMONSTRATION Devin Fore Devin Fore and Matthew S. Witkovsky 1. Leon Trotsky, "Proletarian Culture When the Bolshevik Revolution were photographed and filmed, their physical reactions and Proletarian Art," in Literature and correlated to responses that were collected in written Revolution, t rans. Rose Strunsky convulsed Russia in October 2 (University of Michigan Press. 1968), surveys distributed after the performances . These p. 155. 1917, it was not clear whose experiments delivered a picture not of sociocultural homogeneity but of multiple , dynamically intersecting 2. On the analysis of muse um cause it served. visi torship , see the doc uments in interests and identities. The Soviet subject was lu. U, Fokht-Babushkin, ed .. Publika Although Communist Party propaganda was unequiv­ not singular. khudozhestvennykh muzeev i vvstavok v Rossii: Sotsiologicheskie svitedel'stva ocal about the identity of its addressee - the proletar­ Reopening these vexing questions about audience 1920-1930-kh godov (Aleteiia, 2014). iat- this political entity was anything but evident. identity and practices of cultural reception one century On "bibliopsychology," see N, A, First, the industrial working class was scarce in this after October 1917,Revoliutsiiat Demonstrats1iat Soviet Rubakin, Psikhologiia chitatelia i knigi: Kratkoe vvedenie v bibliotecheskuiu largely agrarian country and became even more Art Put to the Test explores early Soviet life through psikhologiiu (Kniga, 1977). On theater endangered as a result of the civil war that ravaged a series of exemplary spaces of experience . Following spectators , see, for exampl e, M. B. Zagorskii . "Kak reagiruet zritel'7 " Russia's economy over the next five years: when the the premise that subjects are physically and socially Let, no . 6 (1924); and A P Borodin, Bolsheviks finally took control of the nation in 1922, defined through constant interaction with their "O razlichny kh priemakh izucheniia Russia's industry had fallen to 30 percent of its environments, the book examines nine spaces that teatral'nogo zrite lia:· Sovetskoe iskusstvo 9 (1925), prewar capacity. What is more, from the perspective were used to interpellate Soviet citizens -the battle· of Marxist theory, the proletariat was technically not ground, the school, the press, the theater, the home, a class at all but rather the social force that abolishes the storefront, the factory, the festival, and the exhibi­ class affiliation as such to establish for the first time tion -and concludes with thoughts on the paradigm in history the conditions for a truly universal subjec­ of demonstration itself, exemplified by the ubiquitous tivity. A universal subject, however, can have no image of Lenin's outstretched arm. In emphasizing inherent identity. As a result, one could neither define the ways in which visual production was shown and the beneficiary of the Bolshevik revolution theoretically shared, this book seeks to redefine art of the early nor manifest it empirically. Soviet period by considering its metabolic exchange This absence resonated in the arts of the period. with the people and spaces around it. The mass organization Proletkul't (Proletarian Culture) The wide variety of objects addressed in these was founded in 1917with a mandate to develop the pages attests to the range and pluralism of expression culture, habits, and lifestyle for this missing subject, explored by postrevolutionary makers . From paint· yet many remained skeptical that this could be done. ings to dinner plates , every class of object needed None other than Leon Trotsky concluded in 1923 restructuring; activities as disparate as brushing one's "that there is no proletarian culture and that there teeth or building monumenta l public works were never will be any.''1 Haunted by uncertainty over the freighted with symbolic as well as practical signifi· social identity of art audiences, researchers at the cance. Very few moments in history exhibit a cultural time mobilized experimental methods to contour this output comparable in its diversity, resourcefulness , or mysterious addressee: visitors to museum exhibitions sheer frenetic energy. If, as Evgenii Polivanov claimed were scrutinized and dissected according to every in 1931,the process of linguistic evolution accelerates possible parameter, from gender and age to education exponentially when more social groups are given and profession; consumers of the printed word were access to means of expression and encounter each subjected to analysis according to a new research other in the field of language, one could assert a field dubbed "bibliopsychology";and theater spectators similarly causal relationship between creolization and 17 3, Evgenii Polivanov, "Revoliutsiia i invention in other symbolic fields such as art: the more realization in the display space offered by the press 7. Asja Lacis, quot! literaturnye iazyki Soiuza SSR;' in inclusive and heterogeneous the body of art produc­ itself" (p. 84). "Moscow Diary," ( Za marksistskoe iazykoznanie (Moscow, 1985), p.82- 1931), pp, 73-94 . Bruno Latour has ers and audiences grew, the more rapidly Soviet society Klutsis's kiosks belong to the countless proposals made the same argument about turned out one aesthetic innovation after another.3 for new modes of existence that came out of this 8. Sergei Mikhailo creolization and technoscientific "Velikodushnyi rog invention in We Have Never Been As some of the Russian Formalists liked to observe, brief diapason (as the Russians called it). The Soviet no. B (1922), pp. 1 Modern, trans. Catherine Porter the best art came not from purebred, specialized culture of invention was inherently also a culture (Harvard University Press, 1993). cultural producers but from those who combined of testing, called forth by an era of profound skepti­ 9. Building upon! concept of Nachl, 4. See Shklovskii on the necessity professional identities and frameworks of experience cism toward inherited knowledge and customs. temporalities of aI for artists and authors to have a that were normally unconnected. War and Peace Everything from the number of days in the week to "survival" have be "second profession." Viktor Shklovskii, developed in Alex could never have been written if Tolstoy hadn't also "O pisatele i proizvodstve;' in Literatura conventions of child-rearing came under exacting ChristopherWooc fakta, ed. Nikolai Chuzhak (Federatsiia, been an artillerist, insisted Viktor Shklovskii. 4 scrutiny. This rigorous reevaluation extended as well Renaissance (MIT 1929). pp, 189-94 ; and Tekhnika The Latvian Riflemen likewise included several to art and literature , whose prerevolutionary struc­ See also Georges pisate/'skogo remesla (Molodaia important essays gvardiia, 1930) artist-artillerists, such as Gustav Klutsis (Gustavs tures and idioms were similarly subject to interroga­ Warburg and afte Klucis) and Karl Ioganson (Karlis Johansons): these tion. How would the geometric abstraction of Image: AbyWarb1 5. Walter Benjamin, "On the Present Anthropology," 0. avant-gardists were recognized in their dual functions, Suprematism and the transrationalist language of Situation of Russian Film," in Selected no. 1 (2002), pp. e Writings, vol, 2, ed Michael W. both guarding and exhibiting at the Kremlin in 1918, Futurism, for example, fare outside the cloistral the Image, Before Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary as Kathleen Tahk discusses in her essay "Battleground." contexts where they had incubated before the war, of Anachronism;' Smith (Harvard University Press, 2005), in Compelling Vis, p, 14, The nascent Soviet government took another remark­ when they now joined in the jostle and din of public in and out of Hist, able step, as Yve-Alain Bois points out in "School," life in the new Soviet republic? Could the arsenal and Robert Zwijn, 6. On the drive to test in modern ity, when it mandated a working synthesis of museum, of Constructivist devices, which had migrated from Minnesota Press, see Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (University of Illinois Press, 2007), laboratory, and classroom settings in its arts institu­ exhibitions and book covers to theater and clothing, 10, Eigenzeit, or t i p. 164. tions. The government also financed, at times lavishly, be adapted, say, to instill physical hygiene and individual artifact. to the field of me the mass commemoration days that Kristin Romberg modernize labor habits? Russian art was put to the where it is used t analyzes in "Festival," operating, as she argues, under test, assigned new vocations