Reconstructing the Historical Avant-garde: Art and Politics in Constructivism and Surrealism
DOI : 10.17057/kahoma.2013..34.008
Publisher : 현대미술사학회
Research Area : Art History
-
Situating Constructivism and Surrealism within the social and political context in the 1920s-1940s, this paper explores the conflict between aesthetic experiments and political engagement which the two historical avant-garde movements delineated. Intending a redemptive and reconstructive historiography that illuminates the complex social history of what Peter Bürger regarded the “failed project” of the historical avant-garde, I draw critical attention to the practical and symbolic impact of radical politics on artists and their practice. More specifically, I shed light on how and why the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard in the early- to mid-twentieth century made alliance or split up, and address how their conflicted relationship culminated in postwar abstraction dominated by formalist aesthetics. Russian Constructivists, particularly Vladimir Tatlin and the artists who moved toward Production Art as early as the early 1920s, attempted to bring art into life by “sublating”autonomous art in revolutionary society. But the political vanguard led by the Bolshevik party increasingly “quashed” the cultural avant-garde’s unbound formal experiments in the name of the historically necessary “proletariat dictatorship”, eventually imposing Socialist Realism as the only legitimate artistic doctrine in socialist society. Likewise,French Surrealists engaged actively in international Communism after the late 1920s,attempting to equate the freedom of the mind with the liberation of mankind from socio-political oppression. Yet, opposing Stalin’s party and Fascist regime which made a mutual non-aggression pact, Surrealists turned to Trotsky as the only viable revolutionary political visionary. Breton and Trotsky’s 1938 “Manifesto for Independent and Revolutionary Art” came out in this historical context of rapidly aggravating politics at the dawn of World War II. Tracing the complex and conflicted relationship between art and politics in Constructivism and Surrealism, I examine the political engagement of the artist in revolutionary society and address the dilemma of the artist facing the historical necessity of class liberation and the artistic freedom of aesthetic creation as two conflicting exponents.
-
[book] Andersen, Troels / 1968 / Vladimir Tatlin, In Exhibition Catalogue / Moderna Mueet
[book] Bell, Daniel / 1960 / The End of Ideology / Free Press
[book] Bowlt, John E / 1991 / Russian Art of the Avant-Garde / Thames and Hudson
[book] Breton, André / 1985 / Manifestoes of Surrealism / University of Michigan Press
[book] Breton, André / 1978 / What is Surrealism? / Pathfinder
[book] Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. / 1989 / Constructing (the History of) Sculpture, In Serge Guilbaut / MIT Press : 85~110
[book] Buck-Morss, Susan / 2000 / Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West / MIT Press
[journal] Corcoran, Paul E. / 1989 / Godot Is Waiting Too: Endings in Thought and History / Theory and Society 18(4) : 495~529
[book] Danto, Arthur / 1988 / After the End of Art / Princeton University Press
[book] Davenport, Guy / 1974 / Tatlin! Baltimore / Johns Hopkins University Press
[book] Duroizoi, Gérard / 2002 / History of the Surrealist Movement / University of Chicago Press
[book] Foster, Hal / 1932 / Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism, In Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914-1932 / Rizzoli : 241~253
[book] Gough, Maria / 2005 / The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution / University of California Press
[book] Greenberg, Clement / 1965 / Art and Culture / Beacon Press
[book] Guilbaut, Serge / 1983 / How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, In Freedom, and the Cold War / University of Chicago Press
[journal] Hukuyama, Francis / 1989 / The End of History? / The National Interest (16) : 3~18
[book] Hukuyama, Francis / 1992 / The End of History and the Last Man / Free Press
[book] Ioffe, Dennis G. / 2012 / The Russian Avant-Garde and Radical Modernism / Academic Studies Press
[thesis] Jung, Eun Young / 2006 / The Legacies of Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Tatlin in Dan Flavin’s Fluorescent Light Installations of the 1960s / 박사 / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[book] Krauss, Rosalind E. / 1981 / Passages in Modern Sculpture / MIT Press
[journal] Lewis, Helena / 1993 / Surrealists, Stalinists, and Trotskyists: Theories of Art and Revolution in France Between the Wars / Art Journal 52(1) : 61~68
[book] Lodder, Christina / 1984 / Russian Constructivism / Yale University Press
[book] Milner, John / 1983 / Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde / Yale University Press
[book] Niethammer, Lutz / 1992 / Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? / Verso
[journal] Niethammer, Lutz / 1989 / Afterthoughts on Posthistoire / History and Memory 1(1) : 27~53
[book] Molok, Nikoai / 2007 / Footnotes on Geopolitics, Market, and Amnesia, In Exhibition Catalogue / Art Chronika
[book] Nokov, Andrei B. / 1973 / Tatlin’s Dream / Fischer Fine Art Limited
[journal] Short, Robert S. / 1966 / The Politics of Surrealism / Journal of Contemporary History 1(2) : 3~25
[journal] Storr, Robert / 2000 / The Dream of Utopia/Utopia of the Dream / MoMA 3(4) : 2~5
[book] Taylor, Brandon / 1992 / On AKhRR, In Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992 / Manchester University Press : 51~72
[book] Trotsky, Leon / 1981 / Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art / Pathfinder Press
[book] Trotsky, Leon / 2005 / Literature and Revolution / Haymarket Books
[book] Waxman, Chaim I. / 1968 / The End of Ideology Debate / Funk & Wagnalls
-
263 Viewed
Print this page
Search PDF