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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.
Household objects – tools, tables and tableware, vegetation and animals transformed into human sustenance and apparel – can appear to bear agency (for instance, the ability to nourish another physically) only as a result of human recognition or production of that agency. Yet a quilted surcoat, a wooden stool, or a brass spoon is no more a product of the household than is a human member of it, such as a wine merchant, whose very identity depends upon the structures of the household. Similarly, inanimate objects are no more fundamentally
Only True Source of Art is Our Heart’, as its title, takes the reader on a tour of an idealized yet presumably universal German home. Starting with a message from Heinrich Himmler (1900–45) warning that a country is only successful so long as its citizens remember their ancestors, the author then presents the reader with photographs of household objects alongside individual descriptions of the sensory experiences associated with each object, all attempting to invoke feelings of invented racist nostalgia. Not only are
Texts are bodies that can light up, by rendering human perception more acute, those bodies whose favored vehicle of affectivity is less wordy: plants, animals, blades of grass, household objects, trash. Jane Bennett, ‘Systems and Things’ This book is devoted to the emotional allure of textual objects. When we choose to inhabit the space of a book, we accept an invitation to fashion
narrow focus on a singular object in order to progress towards ‘total design’. Ideal objects In the 1960s VNIITE was preoccupied with developing evaluation criteria and methodologies for design processes. Household objects were the first item on the agenda: from 1965 to 1966, in cooperation with the Design Institute of Poland, VNIITE conducted research on the contemporary standards of domestic space and furnishing for different consumer groups, and on consumer requirements for different categories of goods. This research was related to the development of typologies
into towns was a reality for many. The domestic object as bequest both marks difference and provides continuity: it offers the opportunity to explore a series of rites of passage or radical changes in the life of the testator, but it can also bridge disjunctures, and its very physicality can have a cohesive power in times of change. There is a stability inherent in this conception of household objects which offers a powerful image of the domestic as rooted in time, and in the community of human connections with both the living and the dead
Continent combined the symbolic meanings of the souvenir with their curiosity and specimen collecting to transform their leisured travels into knowledge-finding pursuits. In both connoisseurship and science, women carved out agency by creating their own travel narratives and attaching them to readily available objects, whether small household objects, personal effects or samples from nature. Late eighteenth-century women imbued these mundane items with the spirit of their travel narratives. The souvenir was the exclusive possession of the traveller, for only she had
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
This book analyses Anna of Denmark’s material and visual patronage at the Stuart courts, examining her engagement with a wide array of expressive media including architecture, garden design, painting, music, dress, and jewellery. Encompassing Anna’s time in Denmark, England, and Scotland, it establishes patterns of interest and influence in her agency, while furthering our knowledge of Baltic-British transfer in the early modern period. Substantial archival work has facilitated a formative re-conceptualisation of James and Anna’s relationship, extended our knowledge of the constituents of consortship in the period, and has uncovered evidence to challenge the view that Anna followed the cultural accomplishments of her son, Prince Henry. This book reclaims Anna of Denmark as the influential and culturally active royal woman that her contemporaries knew. Combining politics, culture, and religion across the courts of Denmark, Scotland, and England, it enriches our understanding of royal women’s roles in early modern patriarchal societies and their impact on the development of cultural modes and fashions. This book will be of interest to upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on early modern Europe in the disciplines of Art and Architectural History, English Literature, Theatre Studies, History, and Gender Studies. It will also attract a wide range of academics working on early modern material and visual culture, and female patronage, while members of the public who enjoy the history of courts and the British royals will also find it distinctively appealing.
-ordered structure of sectional cases that fills a wall. Regardless of its type (sectional, collapsible or shelves), it has a definite module and rhythm […] Ceramics, glass, light fixtures, books, prints, souvenirs, plants, fabrics and other household objects infuse this structure, fill it, introduce vibrancy to it; everything ties in a coherent whole.1 Hence, while encouraging vibrancy and a certain diversity in the modern Soviet home, Piletskii specified that such diversity should be constrained, subjected to a spatial grid. However, he did not mean that all the objects in a