Машины зашумевшего времени

Bruce Elder B.

Buchloh B. H. D.

B"urger P.

Calavito M.

Carter E. R.

Cavendish P. H.

Celant G. — см. Селант Г.

Clark T.

Curtis J.

Dobroszycki L.

Dollenmayer D. B.

Dukhan I.

Elliott Gr.

Ellmann R.

Ernst P.

Fontius M.

Friedberg M.

F"urstenberg A. von — см. Фюрстенберг А. фон.

Furthman-Durden E. C.

Garrett L.

Gasiorek A.

Geyer M.

Giroud M.

Grieder P.

Griffin R.

Gurock J. S.

Hahn H.-J.

Haran B.

Hartley J.

Heckler C. H.

Heusser M.

Hildreth L.

Hobbs R.

Hoffmann D.

Hollein M.

Honour H.

Howes S.

Hynes S.

Jackson M. J.

Kadlec D.

Kastner J.

Keller A.

Keller O.

Kelly E.

Kennedy G. A.

Kerler D. B.

Klein L.

Klinger C.

Kriebel S. T.

Labrusse R.

Lange K.

Latham S.

Lavin M.

Lawrence K.

Levenson M.

Lima L. C.

Link T.

Lippard L. R.

Litvinoff E.

L"owy M.

Lydenberg R.

Mahoney D.

Marcus S.

Mateboer N.

McFarlane J.

McWilliam K.

Meighan M.

Mitchell R.

Montfort N.

Moore D.

Morris I.

Moser W.

Muldoon M.

Newman M.

Neyraut M.

Nicholls P.

Obermayr B. — см. Обермайр Б.

Osterhammel J. — см. Остерхаммель Ю.

Ott K.-H.

Peil D.

Petersson N. P.

Piekut B.

Pipes R.

Pontuso J. F.

Ricciardi A.

Rickwood T. M.

Robinson E. S.

Roose-Evanse J.

Salzer D. M.

Saussy H.

Schabacher G.

Schmidt H.

Selz P.

Stalling J.

Staёl N. de.

Stock N.

Stuffman M.

Teitelbaum M.

Thirion B.

Tiberghien G. H.

Tomei C. D.

Townsend S. H.

Tytell J.

Uhlenbruch B.

Veesgulani S.

Wallis B.

Wechsler J. G.

White A.

Wilson T.

Zurbrugg N.

Summary

MACHINES OF NOISY TIME: HOW EARLY SOVIET MONTAGE BECAME A METHOD OF UNOFFICIAL ART

Abstract

This book examines shifts in the meaning of montage in different historical situations and in various artistic media, including literature, cinema, theater, and visual arts. Its scope includes literature and art of Soviet Russia (both official and unofficial), Germany, France, and the United States from 1910 to the 2010s. While this book does not provide a cohesive historical sketch, it delivers comparative studies on artists whose works problematize common understandings of the avant-garde in art history.

This study argues that different types of artistic montage correspond to different conceptions of history, dividing the history of montage aesthetics and techniques into three periods: (1) constructing, (2) post-utopian, and (3) historicizing or analytic montage. This book intends to demonstrate how the revolutionary montage aesthetics of the 1920s was reinterpreted and adapted for critical analysis of utopian consciousness in unofficial literature and art of the 1960s and 1970s. This change became possible because unofficial art, unlike Soviet socialist realism, was connected with the experiments of European and American radical modernism and postmodernism.

The main points of this book can be summarized as follows.

Montage as a specific aesthetic method emerged in the very beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1900s and continuing throughout the 1920s, expressive, «sharp» montage — not only in cinema but also in visual arts and literature — was implemented as a method for the dynamic representation of contemporaneity. Montage produced an aesthetic portrayal of contemporaneity by depicting it as a space of emerging utopia/dystopia, full of conflicts and antagonistic oppositions. Moreover, «montage modernity» acquired the status of a totally new historical period, anthropologically and aesthetically different from all previous epochs. The aesthetics of montage was based on the experience of psychological trauma originating from urbanization, globalization (including the extensive contact of Western artistic circles with the art of China and Japan), WWI, and the subsequent civil wars in Russia and Germany. This book suggests that sharp montage was an element not only of avant-garde art, but also of the diverse movements of modernism and, later, postmodernism.

In the USSR of the 1920s, montage aesthetics acquired the features of a «grand style.» The difference between «present-day society» and the previous condition of society and culture was ideologized and politicized. In Soviet productions, the Bolshevik party and «progressive» men and women were dubbed the «avant-garde of humanity,» and were represented as the leading force in creating a new historical reality. This creation was represented — in Sergei Eisenstein’s films, Boris Pilniak’s novels, Gustav Klutsis’ photo-collages, and Sergei Tretiakov’s theater plays — as a creative violence that overcomes the dark, impersonal violence of non-regulated history. The aesthetics of montage was a tool to either glorify or stoically accept this violence. Stoical acceptance was chosen by, among others, Yuri Tynianov and Artem Vesioly. El Lissitsky’s 1920s works reveal the hidden mystical and occult sources of the «montage representation of history,» and undermine the common understanding of avant-garde art as «atheist» and «aggressive.»