This compelling new account of Russian constructivism repositions the agitator Aleksei Gan as the movement’s chief protagonist and theorist. Primarily a political organizer during the revolution and early Soviet period, Gan brought to the constructivist project an intimate acquaintance with the nuts and bolts of “making revolution.” Writing slogans, organizing amateur performances, and producing mass-media objects define an alternative conception of “the work of art”—no longer an autonomous object but a labor process through which solidarities are built. In an expansive analysis touching on aesthetic and architectural theory, the history of science and design, sociology, and feminist and political theory, Kristin Romberg invites us to consider a version of modernism organized around the radical flattening of hierarchies, a broad distribution of authorship, and the negotiation of constraints and dependencies. Moving beyond Cold War abstractions, Gan’s Constructivism offers a fine-grained understanding of what it means for an aesthetics to be political.

About the Author

Kristin Romberg is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Embedded Aesthetics and
Situated History

1. Critical Masses: Mass Action and the Prehistory of
Russian Constructivism

GAN’S CONSTRUCTIVISM

2. Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an
Embedded Modernism
3. Constructivist Tectonics and the Wegenerian
Revolution
4. The Typographic and Tectonic Conditions of Gan’s
Constructivism

GAN’S PRODUCTIVISM

5. The Communist City: The Total Work of the
Constructivist Object
6. The Communist City, Side B: Montage and the Concrete
Human Character
7. Art in the Battle for Time: Cinematic Realism and the
Rationalization of Labor

Abbreviations for Archival Sources
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index

Reviews

"Kristin Romberg delivers an earth-shattering reevaluation of the Russian constructivist discipline of tectonics in her new biography of the art movement’s leading agit-man, Aleksei Gan. . . she has written such a tectonically textured testament to Gan—a book that attempts to synthetically respond to the demands of other fields external to history or Slavic studies—as might have made its protagonist proud."
— H-Net

"Devotedly and dauntingly researched (ten archives combed, no page unturned, every typeface identified by font and size), convincingly argued and eloquently written."
— Russian Review

"Romberg’s book illuminates the past but is oriented toward the future. It exemplifies a participatory, rather than receptive, mode for critical writing. Most importantly, it recalibrates the reader’s assumptions about the history of Constructivism, who makes it, and how it can be written."
— ARTMargins

"What is particularly noteworthy in Romberg’s account . . . is an awareness that no discussion of the Constructivist object is complete without considering, first, the changed material and social conditions for its production, including a new conceptualization of artistic labor; and, second, without allowing for its status as art, even where that term must no longer be understood, bourgeoisie-style, in terms of representation or institution."
— Art Journal

"This book rewrites the history of Constructivism in the visual arts, graphic design, and film from Gan’s hitherto obscured perspective, and the research Romberg has done to reveal such a fine-grained image of her main protagonist is truly herculean. Born of the archive and yet entirely expressive of the moment in which it was written, this book is an extraordinary achievement. Romberg has reconceived what is possible to accomplish in the art historical monograph, and the story she tells is one we urgently need today."—Megan R. Luke, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Southern California

"Gan’s Constructivism is a deeply original and urgently contemporary book. Abandoning the methods of traditional object-based aesthetics, Romberg reveals a second, previously unrecognized current within Russian Constructivism that emerged out of theater and fugitive performances of 'self-activity' rather than out of graphic arts or sculpture. The recovery of this event-based practice establishes an entirely new point of origin for the Russian avant-garde and its legacies."—Devin A. Fore, Professor of German, Princeton University

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews