[spectre] CFP: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Modernity (Vienna, 25-26 Sept 24)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Natalia Ganahl
Date: Mar 22, 2024
Subject: CFP: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Modernity 
(Vienna, 25-26 Sept 24)

Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Sep 25–26, 2024
Deadline: May 15, 2024

The Actuality of the 20s: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet 
Modernity. International Conference.

Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien.
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Egenhofer, Dr. Natalia Ganahl.

The materialist turn that came into force in Russia after the 
revolutions of 1917 encompassed knowledge and social politics, which 
simultaneously mutated into constructivist biopolitics and social 
control. As a turn in art, it was reflected in the reorientation of art 
and art theory makers towards the primary relevance of material-economic 
conditions, the data of scientific research and the reformatory 
discourses based on Marxism and Anarchism. The artistic practices of 
form-building turned to the exploration of natural resources, industrial 
technology and materials, energetic and physiological processes, as well 
as new forms of institutionalization according to the horizontal 
principles of the workshop and the laboratory. In the highly active 
intellectual landscape, transdisciplinary drafts emerge that go beyond 
the framework of the classical cogitatio universalis and aim at the 
fundamental reorganization of social life on the new principles of 
equality, non-alienated labour and social participation, permanent 
revolution of the forms of living. E.G. Kazimir Malevich, who saw the 
revolution as a further step towards the realization of the energetic 
dynamics of the world, defined it as a stage of a universal process that 
lies deeper than the utilitarian interests of individual classes and 
consists in overcoming the "objectification" of the world in images and 
representations. An energetic-materialist explanation of the world 
required a renewal of the understanding of art. The socialist path of 
art, according to the "proletarian monism" of Boris Arvatov,  consists 
in the "complete immersion of art in life", in the "creation of an 
incessantly created being".

In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the historical 
origins of materialist anthropology in the age of industrialization, 
with its questions about the relationship between material and thought, 
about free will and suggestibility, about the integration of individuals 
and groups in systems of energy and information exchange, etc. The 
relevance of these questions prompts us to turn to the transdisciplinary 
projects of the early Soviet period, where the materialist doctrines 
were realized not only in scientific-philosophical and social-utopian 
thinking, but also in social production. The topicality and challenges 
of some of the artistic, theoretical and scientific projects launched 
after the revolution are only gaining visible contours today. Russian 
philosopher of feminism and knowledge Alla Mitrofanova writes: "What 
seems to me important in these almost forgotten discussions is their 
resonance with contemporary philosophical attempts to construct new 
approaches to ontology, with notions of the historical materiality of 
the natural, and with the impossibility of separating nature and 
culture..." Together, we can expand this list: the epistemologically and 
ontologically motivated critique of the central perspective and 
individual subjectivity, the questioning of the documentary status of 
image media and the truth value of representation as such, the 
performative turn in theatre and agitative activism, the orientation of 
the arts towards the neurological processes in the body or the 
problematization of the systemic interconnectedness of 
material-energetic processes in nature and social production. The 
practice of epistemological actualization of historically earlier models 
and languages of knowledge also becomes possible. 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?

The international conference in the Department of Art History at the 
University of Vienna collects original contributions from researchers in 
all relevant disciplines. The 30 minutes presentations could be oriented 
towards the following lines: form and critique, theory and laboratory, 
matter and movement, institution and mobility, energy and politics etc. 
We welcome explorations that deal with pictorial and artistic works, as 
well as with new forms of creativity that were bubbling up in the 
immanent plane, in which thought, labor and organization belong to 
artistic activities.

Please send abstracts no longer than 700 words (English or German) and a 
short CV by 20 May 2024 to: natalia.ganahl at univie.ac.at

Notifications and Information will be sent out at the beginning of July, 
2024.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Modernity (Vienna, 
25-26 Sept 24). In: ArtHist.net, Mar 22, 2024. 
<https://arthist.net/archive/41490>.