Sarah Warren – författare

In the turbulent atmosphere of early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia, avant-garde artists took advantage of a newly pluralistic culture in order to challenge orthodoxies of form as well as social prohibitions. Very few did this as effectively, or to as broad an audience, as Mikhail Larionov. This groundbreaking study examines the complete range of his work (painting, book illustration, performance, and curatorial work), and demonstrates that Larionov was taking part in a broader cultural conversation that arose out of fundamental challenges to autocratic rule. Sarah Warren brings the culture of late Imperial Russia out of obscurity, highlighting Larionov's specific interventions into conversations about nationality and empire, democracy and autocracy, and people and intelligentsia that colonized all areas of cultural production. Rather than analyzing Larionov's works within the same interpretive frameworks as those of his contemporaries in France or Germany-such as Matisse or Kirchner-Warren explores the Russian's negotiations with both nationalism and modernism. Further, this study shows that Larionov's group exhibitions, public debates, and face-painting performances were more than a derivative repetition of the techniques of the Italian Futurists. Rather, these activities were the culmination of his attempt to create a radical primitivism, one that exploited the widespread Russian desire for an authentic collective identity, while resisting imperial efforts to appropriate this revivalism to its own ends.

In the turbulent atmosphere of early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia, avant-garde artists took advantage of a newly pluralistic culture in order to challenge orthodoxies of form as well as social prohibitions. Very few did this as effectively, or to as broad an audience, as Mikhail Larionov. This groundbreaking study examines the complete range of his work (painting, book illustration, performance, and curatorial work), and demonstrates that Larionov was taking part in a broader cultural conversation that arose out of fundamental challenges to autocratic rule. Sarah Warren brings the culture of late Imperial Russia out of obscurity, highlighting Larionov's specific interventions into conversations about nationality and empire, democracy and autocracy, and people and intelligentsia that colonized all areas of cultural production. Rather than analyzing Larionov's works within the same interpretive frameworks as those of his contemporaries in France or Germany-such as Matisse or Kirchner-Warren explores the Russian's negotiations with both nationalism and modernism. Further, this study shows that Larionov's group exhibitions, public debates, and face-painting performances were more than a derivative repetition of the techniques of the Italian Futurists. Rather, these activities were the culmination of his attempt to create a radical primitivism, one that exploited the widespread Russian desire for an authentic collective identity, while resisting imperial efforts to appropriate this revivalism to its own ends.

Developments within continental philosophy and humanistic theory within the 21st century have increasingly turned to more embodied, including ecologically-attuned, accounts of the basis of experience, acting as a corrective to social constructivist views that foreground distinctively linguistic and cultural forces in comprehensively shaping worldly affairs. Some of these accounts struggle to find a way to articulate how experience that outstrips the human can be articulated by situated human perspectives (e.g. new materialisms and speculative realisms), while others struggle to outrun the legacy of deeply anthropocentric, immaterial methodologies and concerns (e.g. eco-phenomenologies). Using a transactional or “neutral monist” pragmatist metaphysics (a la John Dewey) as a theoretical touchstone, this book will provide a philosophically rigorous yet accessible and empirical account of how localizable botanical entities and their undergirding landscapes provide a material wellspring for humanistic affects, endeavours, and relationalities, demonstrating how privileging so-called “human” or “extrinsic” values must always necessarily entail acknowledgement of and protections for greater-than-human existences and the conditions and goods that typify them.