Art and Production

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

Boris Arvatov's Art and Production is a classic of the early Soviet avant-garde. Now nearing a century since its first publication, it is 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, as it confronted the massive problems of cultural transformation after 'War Communism', Arvatov's writing is a major force in the split that occurred in the revolutionary horizons of Constructivism in the early 1920s. Critical of early Constructivism's social-aesthetic process of art's transformation of daily life - epitomised in studio-based painting, photography and object making - Arvatov polemicises for the devolution of artistic skills directly into the relations of production and the factory.

Whilst acknowledging the problems of a pure factory-based Productivism, Arvatov remains overwhelmingly committed to a new role and function for art outside the conventional studio and traditional gallery. Addressing issues such as artistic labour and productive labour, the artist as technician, art and multidisciplinarity and a life for art beyond 'art' - finding new relevance amidst the extensive social turn of contemporary participatory art - Art and Production offers a timely and compelling manifesto.

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.

[Ivan Kostovski · Rating 1.5 out of 5]

This guy’s ideas on art and what art should be are really stupid and bad.

[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.