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system of clear principles and guidelines for all types of objects and for professionals of all affilia- KARPOVA 9781526139870 PRINT.indd 94 20/01/2020 11:10 Objects of neodecorativism 95 tions who designed them. At the beginning of the 1960s, applied artists and artists-engineers all assumed the role that Susan Reid calls ‘accredited taste professionals’: they were equipped with specialist knowledge and employed by the state to improve material culture and particularly the modern home.7 This was the apogee of the Khrushchev-era aesthetic turn. However, what
. Material installation, for Kantor, is a dynamic system that takes diverse forms and satisfies continuously changing needs. Kantor viewed the projects for collapsible furniture, developed by Soviet designers in the 1960s, as a step towards such ‘material installations’.13 However, the final goal of Soviet designers should be the overcoming of objects – razveshchestvlennie, which Cubbin aptly translated as ‘de-artefactualisation’.14 Shifting from objects to ‘material installations’ would eventually lead to ‘total’ design that left no room for irrational consumer desires
particular were chosen. It also does not explain the slightly mixed chronology (interchanging objects from the 1920s and 1960s) or the conspicuous absence of anything from the late 1930s to the 1950s. The question remains: what was the logic behind this order of things? I suggest that the commonality between these images, which would have been immediately comprehensible to the journal’s readers, was a particular aesthetic that gradually emerged in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953 and became pronounced by the late 1960s. I do not use ‘aesthetics’ as it is used
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.
room should be uniform in appearance. In the ‘period of the predominance of excess in architecture and furniture’ (late 1940s– early 1950s), both furniture and brown goods were bulky and ponderous, KARPOVA 9781526139870 PRINT.indd 65 20/01/2020 11:10 66 Comradely objects often featuring polished surfaces, and each object demonstrated individual dimensions and finishing. These designs were distasteful, Piletskii argued. With the arrival of modernist aesthetics to the Soviet home in the 1960s, furniture became lighter in terms of weight and colour, and singular
summarises, ‘the Khrushchev era represented a great but uneven leap forward in creating the basis for a modern way of everyday life and a radical stylistic reorientation in domestic spaces and the visual appearance of cities towards a new aesthetic of socialist modernism’.27 From the second half of the 2000s, a younger generation of scholars has been complementing and expanding the narrative of the ‘Khrushchev modern’, often tracing design developments after the early 1960s. They have explored the tensions within design reformism, identified earlier by Reid: tensions
5 A new production culture and non-commodities After the two turns in Soviet material and visual culture – the Khrushchevera aesthetic turn and the mid-1960s anti-functionalist turn – Soviet material culture became a site of great plurality and diversity, otherwise rarely associated with the Brezhnev era. Whereas VNIITE theorists explored the possibilities of flexible and user-sensitive systemic designing, as the preceding chapter has discussed, the critics and practitioners of decorative art chose self-reflection as their foremost professional strategy. This
foundation of the Designers’ Union of the USSR in 1987, the fulfilment of Iurii Soloviev’s old dream, did not usher in the triumphant age of the comradely object. The political and economic circumstances of perestroika were very different from those envisioned by either the 1920s productivists or the design professionals of the 1960s to early 1980s. The establishment of semi- autonomous design studios within the Designers’ Union gave the most successful and ambitious designers relative freedom from the guidelines of VNIITE and further dissolved the idea of a comradely
paramilitary domestic terrorism and widespread socio-political unrest. If the political years of the 1960s had transformed into terrorism, as Paladino sees it, then artists felt an imperative to bring formal liberty back to their work, to tell history in a different way (Paladino, 2019 ). Bonito Oliva would call the work of the Transavanguardia an affirmative practice, characterized by flows and an expansive “fluid penetration” ( 1979 : 20). Of importance to this discussion is that Bonito Oliva's expansionist rhetoric often positioned the work of art as one that acquires
chromaticising of my memory. Colour photography was newly available at this time. When I look through our old family photo albums, everything is black and white – in fact right through into the early 1960s. And then, around 1956, the occasional colour photo turns up. Here is one of my sisters and me, inexplicably inserted among pages of black-and-white photos, dated 1956 on the back. The effect is something like the 1998 film Pleasantville, in which a teenage brother and sister are transported through their television set into the black-and-white world of a 1950s sitcom, a