Christina Kiaer – författare

A study of the Socialist Realist aesthetic focusing on the artist Aleksandr Deineka.  Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Christina Kiaer traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Terror and beyond. In so doing, she demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian style but as a fiercely collective art system that organized art outside the market and formed part of the legacy of the revolutionary modernisms of the 1920s. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers’ imaginations by evoking the elation of collectivity, making viewers not just comprehend but truly feel socialism, and retaining the potential to inform our own art-into-life experiments within contemporary political art. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limit case of the system he inhabited and helped to create.

What did it mean to live as a subject of early Soviet modernity? In the 1920s and 1930s, in an environment where every element of daily life was supposed to be transformed by Soviet ideology, routine activities became ideologically significant, subject to debate and change. Drawing on original archival materials and theoretically informed, the essays in this volume examine ways in which Soviet citizens sought to align their private lives with the public nature of Soviet experience by taking the Revolution "inside." Topics discussed include the new sexuality, family loyalty during the Terror, the advertisement of Soviet commodities, the employment of domestic servants, children's toys and Pioneer camps, and narratives of self, ranging from diaries to secret police statements to monologues on the Soviet screen and stage. Bringing into dialogue essays by scholars in history, literature, sociology, art history, and film studies, this interdisciplinary volume contributes to the growing understanding of the Soviet Union as part of the history of modernity, rather than its totalitarian "other."

Anna Andreeva (1917–2008) was a Russian textile designer and leading artist at the famous Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow 1946–84. Named after the Polish-German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the factory was a site of collective female design labour that shaped the fashion and material culture of late socialism. Andreeva’s spectacular patterns range from the abstract and geometric — recalling the early Soviet avant-garde — to the cosmic and space-age to the cybernetic to the gorgeously-stylised floral to elegantly-schematised narrative pictures of Moscow, electrification, the cinema, Russian folk art and Central Asian motifs. Her designs for mass production were among the most popular textile prints distributed within USSR in the 1960s and 1970s.Collective Threads showcases Anna Andreeva’s outstanding art through reproductions of her drawings, sketches, and historic fabric samples as well as documents from the Red Rose factory collective, Soviet fashion magazines, and images of international exhibition designs. The illustrations are supplemented with essays contributed by international scholars, curators, and critics who explore Andreeva’s work and career and place it in historic and artistic context.