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Piletskii suggested in 1964,12 traditional applied art objects, too, should stand out in a standard modern flat. This would not be an intrusion, however, but rather harmonious integration, aimed at finding a perfect balance between tradition and modernity in the home. Summarising popular advice books of the late 1950s to early 1960s, Iakovleva demonstrates the dialectics of freedom and rigidity in the ideal of the modern Soviet home: while design professionals encouraged householders to ‘play’ with colours and textures, this ‘game’ had clear rules. For example, if one
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
of vibrant things in the Soviet Union signalled the growing self-reflexivity of applied artists and anticipated the extensive debates about design criteria that would unfold throughout the following decades in late socialism. Up-to-date materialities As studies of socialist material culture clearly demonstrate, design in socialist countries was an integral element of socialist modernity. Notably, the landmark exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum that manifested the growing interest in socialist design was entitled (quite provocatively) KARPOVA
1960s became a forum for commentary on the fundamental challenges of Soviet modernity. It raised such questions as the place of individuality in the world of uniform mass production and consumption, the fate of traditional crafts in the industrial age, the role of diverse folk motifs in Soviet cultural internationalism and the meaning of sincerity and emotional connection in a socialist society. Meanwhile, the vision of a socialist object, promoted by VNIITE, was also far from uniform. Chapter 4 identifies the elements of critique in state-sponsored industrial design
: Siglo XXI . — (ed.) ( 2016 ). After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity . Leiden : Brill . García-Arenal , Mercedes and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano ( 2010 ) Un Oriente español: Los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma . Madrid : Marcial Pons ; English version as The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the
smemoratezza” are by the author. Other cited passages are quotations from the abridged English translation that was published in Domus alongside the original Italian. 20 This theorization is informed by Walter Mignolo's discussion of coloniality as the hidden space of modernity, and of fluidity as anathema to foundational ideas of Western civilization
Modernity in this case was expressed through hygienic light colours, minimalist contours, and new synthetic materials. 47 4.11 Hanovia ‘Homesun’ mercury vapour lamp, c . 1940. Metal, Bakelite, chrome, and quartz glass. Author’s collection. Unlike Hanovia’s ‘Homesun’, the Thermal
, exactly as, in the bar that I had just left, my gaze had been obliged to pass over certain excessively deformed countenances. A deeply submerged feeling of happiness that came over me afterward, on a square off the Cannebière where the rue Paradis opens onto a park, is more difficult to recall than everything that went before. Graeme Gilloch has pointed out that, for all their focus on the northern cities – Berlin, Paris, Vienna – the writers on or of modernity retained a fascination with the cities of the south. Georg Simmel wrote about Rome, Florence and Venice; and
and clocks were produced in 1928. Watches as a symbol of modernity emerged in a famous 1923 poster by Rodchenko and Mayakovsky, advertising the production of a Russian-Swiss firm Moser. The poster displays a human figure combined from different-sized timepieces and declares that ‘A person must have a watch’.22 Beginning in the 1930s, when all Soviet clock workshops were consolidated into several big factories and ultimately united in a trust, timekeeping devices primarily served the needs of the railways and the Red Army; needs that became even more pressing during
Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century , trans. A. Davies ( Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1995), p. 71; and Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity ( Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1990). 45 Auguste Rollier, ‘ The Share of the Sun in the