Art and Production

by Boris Arvatov, John Roberts (Editor), Alexei Penzin (Editor)

Now nearly a century since it was first published in 1926, Boris Arvatov’s Art and Production remains a classic text of the early Soviet avant-garde. This is the first English edition of this influential work—a crucial intervention for those seeking to understand the social dynamic of art and revolution during the period. Derived from the internal struggles of Soviet constructivism, Arvatov’s writing played a major role in the split that occurred in the constructivist movement of the early 1920s—Productivism. Arvatov acknowledges the problems of a factory-based Productivism, and he presents a new role and function for art outside the conventional studio and traditional gallery setting. Dealing with issues such as artistic versus productive labor, the artist as technician, the multidisciplinarity of art, and the struggles of finding new relevance amidst the contemporary participatory art trend, Art and Production offers a timely and compelling manifesto for contemporary debates on art and politics.
 

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1926

Reviews

[Avşar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arvatov renders most of the early 20th century practitioners of art redundant and makes theoreticians seem mainstream. His ideas are remarkably marginal and achingly legitimate. What is wonderful is that what he suggests artists become is almost an industrial designer. His indifference and disbelief even for the slightest possibility of the cultural and social impact of art could be overlooked in this context.

[Dante]

Spellbinding excces and exaggeration, Arvatov's missive against the slack bourgeois backwardness of the easel-form, and rallying cry for the dissolution of art, is a singular pleasure. Arvatov's periodisation of craft production and high art forms in order to conjure the proper place of artistic practice in communism- wedded to production, dissolved into the planned society - is an object lesson in mythic historiography for militant ends. The suggestions of art-worker inquiry into industrial design remain well in advance of the present, and the knots he gets caught within regarding the character of proletarian subjectivity and its overcoming are the contradictions we want to be caught up in.

[Kseniya Buraya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Моя последняя книга об искусстве.
Искусство «само в себе» — вот и все, до чего мы сейчас дошли.
Хороший список статей.