Category: ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2003. 245 pages.

In 1996 Jutta Scherrer, the eminent Russia scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, published a collection of essays titled Requiem for Red October (Requiem für den roten Oktober, Leipzig: Universitätsverlag).

These essays, written over the course of the decade from 1986-96, describe the changes affecting the Russian intelligentsia during a time period when, at least initially, the notion of a perestroika of the Soviet system still had the potential of a remodel rather than the tear-down it became in the … Read more

Anna Sokolina, Ed. Arkhitektura i antroposofiia. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo KMK, 2001. 268 pages, 348 illustrations.

In her introduction to this pioneering Russian volume, Anna Sokolina notes that the anthroposophical movement, established by Rudolf Steiner, arose on the basis of dissatisfaction with an increasingly rationalistic, technological bias in approaches to society and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Seeking to return modern culture to a holistic attitude toward human creativity and the environment, Steiner was particularly interested in the challenge of architecture–at once the shaper of the physical context and one of the preeminent forms of artistic endeavor.

Indeed, … Read more

Ekaterina Dyogot: Russkoe Iskusstvo XX Veka (Russia 20th-Century Art). Moscow. Trilistnik, 2000 

Let me start with a warning: This is not a textbook. Anyone who turns to this book should have at least some idea of 20^th-century Russian art and its major protagonists. Also, the title is suggestive: The book purports to write the history of art, not of artists. You won’t find biographical detail here or even an overview over the output of one artist at a time.

The book is not even a history in the sense that it tells a linear story of … Read more

Laura Hoptman – Tomáš Pospiszyl (eds.), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2002

For a long time, art in East Central Europe has been placed on the periphery of interest of most academics in the West. The situation got even worse due to the political division of the world during the Cold War era.

Whereas postcolonial discourse crucially undermined the dominance of Western culture and changed the premises of both presentation and interpretation of visual art, Eastern European art and culture seems to lack exoticism and … Read more

Pawel Polit, Piotr Wozniakiewicz (eds), Refleksja konceptualna w sztuce polskiej. Doswiadczenia dyskursu: 1965-1975/ Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art: Experiences of Discourse: 1965-1975. Essays by Alicja Kepinska, Andrzej Kostolowski, Pawel Polit; interviews with Andrzej Turowski and Jerzy Ludwinski. Centrum Sztuki Wspólczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Warszawa 2000/ Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw 2000. 280 pp., 162 black and white ills, bibliography; biographical entries; index of names. Text in Polish and English.

This bilingual publication, which in the words of its editor Pawel Polit, aims to “provide a synthetic overview of Polish conceptual art” twenty-five years after the period of its … Read more

Balkan as Metaphor. Cambridge/Mass: MIT Press, 2003, 382pp. $29.95

Balkan as Metaphor introduces new theoretical and conceptual tools for theorizing and understanding the Balkans. The essays continue the intellectual tradition of deconstructing and problematizing the region, by foregrounding when and how the West became complicit in the discourse on the Balkans.

While the common leitmotiv of these essays is that the Balkan is an intellectual construct, loaded with multivalent ideological meanings, the main aim of this volume is twofold: To disappoint and impress the Western gaze. This is accomplished through dense, theoretical discussions that often, implicitly or explicitly use … Read more

Dragan Kujundzic ed.: The Other Europe and the Translation of National Identity. Social Identities. vol. 7 No. 4 (December 2001)

The name of that alterity is “Europe”. Why is Europe a cargo? And what is exactly so precious about Europe? Why does writing a critique of Europe – a project of translating national identities – amount to protection and betrayal, not protection or betrayal?

The Other Europe as the writers in the collection invoke it is tinted both by a Benjaminian melancholy and by a spirit of experimentation. On the one hand, modern and contemporary European histories are rediscovered, and … Read more

Angel Angelov. Konkretni utopii. Proektite na Kristo (Concrete Utopias. The Projections of Christo). 119 pages, Sofia (Bulgaria): Open Society 1997.  

As evident from the title, in his book Angel Angelov argues that many of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects, along with the events surrounding them, constitute concrete utopias. The aesthetic discourse defining such utopias is intended not to criticize and reject the existing social reality, but to affirm it in alternative ways. In this way the aesthetic fulfills its utopian function of being an alternative of the social status quo. Not the artists alone, but whole segments of … Read more

Küpper, Stephan. Autorstrategien im Moskauer Konzeptualismus. Il’ja Kabakov, Lev Rubinshtejn, Dmitrij A. Prigov (Berliner Slawistische Arbeiten 11). Frankfurt a.M. e.a., 207 p. 

Stephan Küpper (Berlin) examines the problems of authorship using the examples of three contemporary Moscow concept artists: the image and text artist Kabakov, and the two text artists Rubinshtein and Prigov.

As befits a work on authorship, the book itself is a reflection on the mechanisms of one’s own dominance of a presented text. Thus, the problems of authorship are reflected on one hand formally: the table of contents does without numeration and thus hierarchization of the parts … Read more

Mikhail Berg, Literaturokratiia: Problema prisvoeniia I pereraspredeleniia vlasti v literature (Literaturocracy: Problems of Appropriation and Redistribution of Power in Literature). Moscow: NLO, 2000. 352 pages.

A colleague of mine once confronted me with a strange question: In terms of success and posterity, who did I think was the winner: Bakhtin or Academician Viktor Vinogradov?

In spite of the question’s absurdity, both of us seemed to understand perfectly well what it was about. In this imaginary literary race, my friend was betting on Bakhtin, whose speech genre theory gave him a life after death in worldwide recognition.

Purely out … Read more

Boris Groys: Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien. Munich: Hanser 2000, 232 pp.

“Nothing is itself”, declares Rilke in the fourth Duino Elegy. For Rilke, this sentence is less an ontological stocktaking than an incentive to seek a poetical form to be able to express the “authentic”.

If this sentence were to be the header for Boris Groys’ new book Unter Verdacht (Under Suspicion), it would serve more as an expression of an irrefutable hunch that something else is concealed behind everything than as a description of a state. Groys calls this hunch “suspicion”.

Everything that presents itself as a … Read more

Jan Cavanaugh, Out Looking In: Early Modern Polish Art, 1890 – 1918, University of California Press: Berkeley 2000.

Having read Jan Cavanaugh’s Out Looking In, two different opinions are called to mind. In defense of the impressionists, whose works had been widely attacked, Emile Zola claimed in 1877, “The artists ought to find poetry in the stations as their fathers found it in the forest and fields.”

Promoting modern French art in Poland, painter and art critic Stanislaw Witkiewicz argued in 1884 that it is quite insignificant whether a work depicts Jan Zamoyski’s victory over Prince Maximilian or … Read more

Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi. Aleksandr Rodchenko. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998. 

This exhibition catalogue, published in conjunction with the first major American retrospective of Aleksandr Rodchenko at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, is a significant contribution to the fairly limited literature on this artist currently available in English. Scholarly essays by exhibition organizers Magdelana Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi are supplemented by texts contributed by Varvara Rodchenko and Aleksandr Lavrent’ev, the artist’s daughter and grandson (custodians of the Rodchenko-Stepanova Family Archive, a major source of materials for the exhibition).

The numerous … Read more

Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996).
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000).

Slavoj Žižek’s book The Indivisible Remainder opens with a statement of national belonging: “As a Slovene”. This embrace of Slovene national identity seems to be at odds with the writings of the philosopher with the reputation of being one of the “hottest” post-structuralist thinkers in the West. It is especially unsettling to read this simple declaration of self-possession and “presencing” of what is, without a doubt, a form of separatist “postmodern nationalism” from a philosopher whose work had until recently been part of a … Read more

Guenter Hirt; Sascha Wonders [eds.]: Praeprintium. Moskauer Bücher aus dem Samizdat. [Praeprintium. Moscow samizdat books.] CD-ROM. Bremen: Edition Temmen 1998, 230 pp.

Praeprintium, an exhibition that presented for the first time a large spectrum of Moscow samizdat publications to a Western audience, was shown at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin/Preussischer Kulturbesitz, at the Weserburg Museum in Bremen, in Graz, and in Vienna. The show was curated by two scholars who operate under the pseudonyms of Günter Hirt and Sascha Wonders. The cover of the catalogue for the exhibition is black. Adorned with a typewriters typeface, it serves as a reminder of … Read more

Margarita Tupitsyn: El Lissitzky. Beyond the Abstract Cabinet. With essays by Matthew Drutt and Ulrich Pohlmann. New Haven-Hanover: Yale University Press and the Sprengel Museum, 1999.

Accompanying the traveling exhibition of Lissitzky’s photographic work, which was curated by Tupitsyn at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and the Fondacao de Serralves in Porto, this book attempts to give a scholarly overview of Lissitzkyís career. It includes three essays authored by Tupitsyn, Matthew Drutt, and Ulrich Pohlmann, and a section titled “Archive,” which, as it features photos from Lissitzky’s private archive, is a valuable contribution … Read more

Denise Youngblood, The Magic Mirror. Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. xvi+185 pp. (paper).

Cinema is indubitably one of the indices by which modernity has come to be measured Apart from being a technical marvel whose very existence is intrinsically associated with the twentieth century, the act of making and watching movies paved the way for a further phenomenon of the modern age: leveling social and cultural boundaries between the “high” and the “low.” Movies not only synthesized elements of high art and popular culture and democratized the space of public entertainment, but also created … Read more

Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Despite the growing literature on early Soviet photography, most studies remain limited to the photographic activity of a few avant-garde artists. This exclusive focus is problematic, as much of the history of Soviet photograph has been treated in terms of conflict between avant-gardists and other practitioners, about whom very little is known. As a result of this simplification, Soviet photographs, publications, exhibitions, and theories have frequently been misinterpreted. Furthermore, most existing scholarship fails to address the broader setting of Soviet photographic practice, in terms of both more … Read more

Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. xvii + 506 pp. (75.00 Hardcover)

The art of soviet socialist realism like that of Fascist Germany, has been inextricably linked to to ideological (totalitarian), rather than aesthetic, considerations by scholars and critics. Both Russian and Western art historians have codified this connection to such an extent that almost any discussion of Soviet artists or their works invariably turns to the political and social implications of cultural events rather than a consideration of the art itself. In Socialist Realist Painting, Matthew Cullerne Bown attempts … Read more

Karl Gernot Kuehn: Caught. The Art of Photography in the German Democratic Republic, University of California Press, 1997.

The title of this extensive documentation of 45 years of GDR-photography by Karl Gernot Kuehn (Caught) already refers to the two principal intentions of this book: to present a detailed analysis of how political pressure and constraint shaped photography (and photographers) in the former GDR, how they “caught” the artists in the act, but also to document what it was that these artists themselves “caught” with their camera, once again with special emphasis on the relationship between photography and … Read more

Komar, Vitaly. Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1997

There should be a warning on the cover of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s Painting by Numbers: The Scientific Guide to Art: “This is not a book.” From the opening page, offering “America’s Most Wanted” painting (“dishwasher-size,” as preferred by 67% of the representative sample), the reader becomes a participant in a radical happening, 1990s-style, with polls, endowments, global travel, and practical jokes. Komar and Melamid, two émigré artists who launched their American career some twenty years ago with the project … Read more