Books by Christina Kiaer
Revolution Every Day: A Calendar
by Zachary Cahill, Robert Bird, Christina Kiaer
With 365 calendar pages, Revolution Every Day juxtaposes Soviet graphic art―primarily posters from the 1920s and ‘30s, by artists such as Valentina Kulagina―with works on video and film, including excerpts from Dziga Vertov’s films, post-Soviet videos by artists such as Olga Chernysheva and more.
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Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (The MIT Press)
How Constructivist artists in Russia between 1923 and 1925 developed a counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by producing objects meant to be "comrades" in the creation of an egalitarian socialist culture.
In Imagine No Possessions, Christina Kiaer investigates the Russian Constructivist conception of objects as being more than commodities. "Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades," wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1925. Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by examining objects produced by Constructivist artists between 1923 and 1925: Vladimir Tatlin's prototype designs for pots and pans and other everyday objects, Liubov' Popova's and Varvara Stepanova's fashion designs and textiles, Rodchenko's packaging and advertisements for state-owned businesses (made in collaboration with revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky), and Rodchenko's famous design for the interior of a workers' club. These artists, heeding the call of Constructivist manifestos to abandon the nonobjective painting and sculpture of the early Russian avant-garde and enter into Soviet industrial production, aimed to work as "artist-engineers" to produce useful objects for everyday life in the new socialist collective.
Kiaer shows how these artists elaborated on the theory of the socialist object-as-comrade in the practice of their art. They broke with the traditional model of the autonomous avant-garde, Kiaer argues, in order to participate more fully in the political project of the Soviet state. She analyzes Constructivism's attempt to develop modernist forms to forge a new comradely relationship between human subjects and the mass-produced objects of modernity; Constructivists could "imagine no possessions" (as John Lennon's song puts it) not by eliminating material objects but by eliminating the possessive relation to them. Considering such Constructivist objects as flapper dresses and cookie advertisements, Kiaer creates a dialogue between the more famous avant-garde works of these artists and their quirkier, less appreciated utilitarian objects. Working in the still semicapitalist Russia of the New Economic Policy, these artists were imagining, by creating their comradely objects, a socialist culture that had not yet arrived.
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Collective Threads Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory
Captures the influential work of Soviet textile designer and artist Anna Andreeva.
Anna Andreeva (1917-2008) was a Soviet textile designer and leading artist at the famous Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow from 1944 to 1984. The former Giraud silk factory, nationalized in 1919 after the October Revolution and renamed to commemorate the murdered Polish-German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, became a site of collective female design labor that shaped the fashion and material culture of late socialism. Andreeva's spectacular patterns range from abstract and geometric to cosmic and space-age and to pictorial themes of the city of Moscow and Russian folk art. Her mass-produced designs were among the most popular textile prints distributed within the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s.
Collective Threads contributes to the recent intensive interest in textile art by continuing the feminist emphasis on woman makers but shifting the focus from handmade women's craft to a different model of industrial-scale textile production deliberately organized along collective lines within the Communist system. It showcases Andreeva's outstanding art through reproductions of her drawings, sketches, and historic fabric samples as well as documents from the Red Rose factory, Soviet fashion magazines, and images of local and international exhibition designs. Essays contributed by international scholars, curators, and critics place Andreeva's work and career in a historical and artistic context.
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