Параллельная публикация на английском и русском языках в рамках сотрудничества фонда V-A-C и издательства Pluto Press. Текст приводится с сохранением оригинальных орфографии и пунктуации.
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.
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.