The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts

“Lead, zinc, copper, coal, gold, cadmium, silver, oil, tungsten, corundum, gasoline, nickel, marble, Glauber’s salt [and] phosphorites” flow from Kazakhstan through the “full arteries of railroads,” delivering its “industrial blood” across the Soviet Union “to feed the factories and plants,” before returning “in the shape of airplanes, tractors, excavators, automobiles [and] turbines.” This entry, under the heading “Socialist Metabolism,” appeared in an issue of the showcase journal USSR in Construction devoted to the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet Kazakhstan, cataloging the precious minerals, metals, rocks, and hydrocarbons extracted from the Central Asian republic to supply the expanding socialist industrial complex. In an ideological balancing act, the raw materials come back in the form of machinery to transform the mountains, bring water to the steppe, and tend crops and herds, completing the biomorphic cycle by which “the riches of the Earth’s interior become riches of the surface—meat, wool, leather, fish and cotton.” This short passage, in a richly illustrated edition designed by artist couple Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, does not fail to emphasize that the metabolic exchange of material substances in the socialist industrial organism pulsates “in obedience to the beating of its mighty and wise heart—the Kremlin,” inadvertently revealing the imperial agenda hardwired into this circulatory system.

ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 3-10.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00410

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/2/3/131434/The-Socialist-Anthropocene-in-the-Visual-Arts

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