[spectre] CONF: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Avant-Garde (Vienna, 25-26 Sep 24)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Natalia Ganahl <nataliaganahl at gmail.com>
Date: Sep 16, 2024
Subject: CONF: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Avant-Garde 
(Vienna, 25-26 Sep 24)

Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Sep 25–26, 2024

The Actuality of the 20s: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet 
Avant-Garde.

Organized by: Dr. Natalia Ganahl nataliaganahl at gmail.com; Prof. Dr. 
Sebastian Egenhofer.

The new materialist philosophies and social practices prompt us to 
revisit the transdisciplinary endeavors of the early Soviet period, 
where a materialist shift was realized not only in scientific and 
philosophical thought but also in art and social production. This shift 
involved integration of production into systems of energy and 
information exchange, the dissolution of entrenched epistemological 
binaries and the development of new practices in form-building that 
focused on the exploration of earth resources, industrial technology, 
physiological processes. Also new modes of institutionalization emerged, 
characterized by horizontal principles of workshops and laboratories.

Within this highly active intellectual landscape, transdisciplinary 
initiatives began to emerge, that go beyond the boundaries of the 
classical cogitatio universalis. Some of the artistic and theoretical 
challenges are only now becoming fully apparent, as new epistemologies 
emerge. As Pavel Florensky remarked in a letter about his own project of 
"concrete metaphysics", some concerns take 100 years to gain academic 
validity. Soviet modernism received its first productive reception in 
Western Europe and the USA as early as the 1970s. More recent editions 
and research show the new round of attention, which seems to be 
symptomatic. Ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Caucasus and new 
dictatorships are once again sharpening the contrasts between light and 
dark in this new exploration of the past. What can we learn today from 
the discussions and experiments of the 1920s?

Program:
Room 1, Garnisongasse 13, Сampus Hof 9, 1090 Wien 25. 9

9.00 - 9.45 Introduction round

9.45 - 10.30 Ekaterina Ivanova (Lotman-Institut, Ruhr Universität Bochum)
State Institute Of Artistic Culture: Establishing a new Discipline.

10.30 - 11.15
Maria Silina (Université du Québec à Montréal, Ruhr-Universität Bochum).
Creative Beholder in Soviet Museum: Anatoly Bakushinsky's museum 
seminars and bodily practices of art perception.

Coffee break

11.30 – 12.15
Boris Stepanov (Centre for Central and Eastern European Studies 
(Eur'Orbem), University of Sorbonne, Paris)
The city as a laboratory of new pedagogy: Educational experiments in 
Russia in the 1920s

12.15 – 13.00
Alla Vronskaya (Universität Kassel, Professor of Architectural History 
and Theory)
Monistic Modernism: Soviet Architecture and the Philosophy of Life

Lunch break

14.00 - 14.45
Tobias Dias (School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, 
Berlin)
Bogdanov in Berlin: Deskilling, Artistic Research, and the International 
Constructivists

14.45 - 15.30
Alexander Dmitriev (Prague, Charles University)
“October of Thought”: Intellectual modes of early Soviet modernity in 
the 1920s

Coffee break

15.45 - 16.30
Stefanie Kitzberger (Universität für Angewandte Kunst, Wien)
 From Work to Frame. Universalizing Artistic Production in Early Moscow 
Constructivism

16.30 - 17.15
Jacob Stewart-Halevy (Tufts University, USA) Deindustrializing Productivism

Coffee break

18.00 - 19.30 Keynote Lecture, Discussion
Alla Mitrofanova (Independent Researcher, St. Petersburg)
Can reality be different? Philosophical forks of the period of the 
Russian Revolution and their echoes in the 21.century.

26.9.
Master Students Panel: 10.00– 10.40.
Martina Gratl (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
„Art into technology!” The concept of technique by Vladimir E. Tatlin.

10.40– 11.20.
Polina Tumanova-Litke (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
Tatlin and «Tatlinism»: The reception outside Soviet Russia in the 1920s

11.20-12.00.
Sophie Wagner (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
Production of dictatorship: The leader portrait in the context of the 
photographic design of the USSR in Construction. Lunch 12.00-12.45

13.00-13.45
Natalia Ganahl (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
The new hylomorphism by Pavel Florensky in the 1920s.

13.45 - 14.30 Anna Montebugnoli (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), 
Rome)
Materialising the Metaphysics of Light. For an Archaeology of the 
Cinematic Image at the Intersection of Florensky’s “Concrete 
Metaphysics” and Russian Avant-Garde Cinema

Coffee break

14.40 - 15.25
Sebastian Egenhofer (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien)
 From General to Restricted Suprematism: Malevich's Second Peasant Cycle 
and the Politics of Collectivization.

Final discussion

16.00 End of the conference

Reference / Quellennachweis:
CONF: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Avant-Garde (Vienna, 
25-26 Sep 24). In: ArtHist.net, Sep 16, 2024. 
<https://arthist.net/archive/42634>.