JONATHAN PLATT
THE AVANT-GARDE IN SEARCH OF ITS SHORES
June 15-17
3-day intensive seminar
Professor Jonathan Platt
In this seminar we will examine the relevance of historical and neo-avant-garde discourses to contemporary Russian art practice. If the historical avant-garde emerged at a time when Russian art moved in step with (and often one step beyond) trans-European trends, the subsequent experience of the Cold War saw it diverge along a more or less unique art-historical path. The aim of our seminar will be to analyze and discuss this divergence as a source of both problems and opportunities for contemporary Russian artists.
Our primary focus will be one of the central questions of avant-garde thought:
How does art relate to “life” in the context of modern (mechanized, spectacular) mass culture?
This question has specific relevance for the idiosyncratic Russian context. Lacking a vibrant bourgeois culture industry until the mid-1990s, the evolution of avant-garde discourses in twentieth-century Russia occurred in dialectic not with the gloss and kitsch of popular culture as its principal semiotic “other”, but with the agitational propaganda of the Soviet state. Bearing this distinction in mind, we will examine two of the most important discursive formations to emerge as avant-garde answers to the problem of art and life in the modern age.
Our first session will focus on the principle of avant-garde criticality, both as simple defamiliarization and as medium-specific, formalist reduction. We will also consider works in the “expanded field” of modernist criticality (such as minimalism) that depart from strict reductionism, but preserve an ethos of aesthetic purity. Our second session will turn to the legacy of Dadaist and Constructivist aesthetics and their critical blurring of distinctions between modern art and life. Of principal interest in this session will be contemporary discourses of multiplicity, flux, and relational aesthetics. Our final session will turn to the historical fate of Russian avant-gardism in the twentieth century, with specific attention to contemporary Russian and St. Petersburg art.
READING LIST
Session 1: Clean Criticality and Mass Cultural Mess
* Viktor Shklovsky, “The Resurrection of the Word” (1914) and “Art as Device” (1917)
* Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)
* Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and “Modernist Painting” (1961)
* Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944)
* Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967)
* Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (1969)
++ introductory remarks:
* John Berger, Ways of Seeing
* Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, “Warhol in the Pushkin Museum”
Session 2: Critical Mess
* Guy Debord, “Towards a Situationist International” (1957)
* Claes Oldenburg, “I Am for an Art” (1961)
* Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Elimination of the Audience” (1966)
* Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974)
* Benjamin Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture” (1980)
* Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992)
* Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998)
Session 3: Russian Contemporary Art: Local Critique or Critical Locality?
* Ilya Kabakov, “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away” (1977)
* Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978)
* Collective Actions, “Ten Appearances” (1986)
* Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (1988)
* Evgeny Dobrenko, “Socialism as Will and Representation” (2007)
* Press Release for Peter Belyi’s Danger Zone (Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, 2007)
* Alexei Yurchak, “Necro-Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet” (2008)
