Books by Matthew Jesse Jackson
Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary: Soviet Children's Books and Graphic Art
by Robert Bird, Matthew Jesse Jackson
Two of the most striking manifestations of Soviet image culture were the children’s book and the poster. Both of these forms testify to the alliance between experimental aesthetics and radical socialist ideology that held tenuously from the 1917 revolutions to the mid-1930s—and did so much to shape a distinctly Soviet civilization. The children’s books and posters in Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary plot the development of this new image culture alongside the formation of new social and cultural identities.
Described here and set in context by experts in the field, the University of Chicago Library’s collections of Soviet graphic art allow one to trace the complex relationship between Soviet ideology and aesthetic culture over a crucial period, from the beginning of Stalin’s Great Breakthrough in 1928 to the reconstruction and regrouping that followed World War II.
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The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes
A compelling study of unofficial postwar Soviet art, The Experimental Group takes as its point of departure a subject of strange fascination: the life and work of renowned professional illustrator and conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov.
Kabakov’s art—iconoclastic installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts—delicately experiments with such issues as history, mortality, and disappearance, and here exemplifies a much larger narrative about the work of the artists who rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. By placing Kabakov and his conceptualist peers in line with our own contemporary perspective, Matthew Jesse Jackson suggests that the art that emerged in the wake of Stalin belongs neither entirely to its lost communist past nor to a future free from socialist nostalgia. Instead, these artists and their work produced a critical and controversial chapter in the as yet unwritten history of global contemporary art.
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Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture
by Stephanie Smith, Robert Bird, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Christopher P. Heuer, Tumelo Mosaka
In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interracial togetherness was still only a vague rumor on Madison Avenue.
Vision and Communism presents a series of interconnected essays devoted to Viktor Koretsky's art and the social worlds that it hoped to transform. Produced collectively by its five editors, this writing also considers the visual art, film, and music included in the exhibition Vision and Communism, opening at the Smart Museum of Art in September 2011.
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