By Isaac Kaplan
As this year comes to a
close, so too does the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution. At the height
of the Cold War, it seemed that the revolution was practically unmatched in
historical relevance, giving birth to one of the two powers that could light
the powder keg of mutually assured destruction and quite literally end the
world. But almost three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legacy
of the Russian Revolution—essentially ignored in Vladimir Putin’s Russia—is
more murky, especially in light of the horrors of the Soviet regime, including
Joseph Stalin’s paranoid purges and the death of untold millions from famine.
So what is to be done to
mark, parse, critique the revolution for the centennial in the proverbial West?
Some, including leftist art historian T.J. Clark, would prefer we just “let it
go.” But a fantastic exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago does just the
opposite, focusing on the urgent questions raised by those revolutionaries and
artists in 1917.
On view until January 15th,
“Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test” is a stunning
display of art, photographs, furniture, and other objects created by
individuals who questioned the ideologies of the past after the Russian
Revolution’s historic break, putting forward a multiplicity of models for what
an uncharted future could look like. As curator Matthew S. Witkovsky puts it,
the show stems from the core question, “What happens when you have an
earth-shaking change in society in which artists are taking a very active
part?”
Indeed, the exhibition is
grounded in an open-ended questioning, rather than in a chronological march
towards the eventual violent repression of the Soviet state under Stalin.
“Rather than binding our chosen objects firmly to the fate of a miscarried
revolution, ‘Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia!’ allows for more skid and slippage
between art and history,” write Witkovsky and co-author Devin Fore in the
catalogue introduction.
The exhibition is divided
into 10 thematic areas (Factory, Festival, and Press among them), which are all
worth exploring. The line between art and propaganda was often thin, or even
porous. The warm visions of a communal utopia often masked much different
realities, or even allowed them to continue, as much as they provided a model
to aspire to. …………….
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-revisiting-radical-soviet-art-created-amid-russian-revolution?utm_medium=email&utm_source=11563748-newsletter-editorial-daily-12-13-17&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-
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