the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Maria Gough
Media & Revolution: The Comintern Project of Gustavs Klucis
This lecture took place on May 6th, 2011 at 6:30 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
In the early 1920s Gustavs Klucis, a leading member of the Soviet avant-garde, proposed a pioneering series of para-architectural structures--"radio orators,” “screen radio orators,” “screen tribune kiosks,” and “slogan stands"--for the broad public diffusion of revolutionary speech, moving images, and printed matter in Moscow’s streets and squares. Since its rediscovery in the post-war period, Klucis’s so-called Comintern project, which is known to us through a corpus of thirty-odd drawings, has long fascinated contemporary artists, architects, and graphic designers, many of whom have cited or repurposed it in their own endeavors. In her talk Maria Gough reconstructs the historical parameters and significance of Klucis’ original project, focusing on the ways in which the artist utilized the medium of drawing in order to imagine--in the wake of the advent of the-then new media of radio and film--an equally dynamic vehicle of revolutionary communication.
About Maria Gough
Maria Gough is Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her primary area of research and teaching is European Modernism, with a particular emphasis on the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes, though she also writes on contemporary art. Her research has appeared in October, New German Critique, Modernism/modernity, RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, Parkett, Artforum, and the Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, and her book on the Constructivist debates of the 1920s, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, was published by the University of California Press in 2005. She is currently writing a book on the intermedia projects of El Lissitzky and Gustavs Klucis (Gustav Klutsis), and another on the photographic practices of foreign visitors to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Her most recent publications include “Kentridge’s Nose” (October 134 [Fall 2010]), a reflection on the South African artist’s production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera House last year, and “Corps Concept,” an essay on the Soviet collective (Artforum [February 2011]). With Jodi Hauptman, Curator of Drawings, she is preparing an exhibition of drawings and print media by Klucis that will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in March 2012.