2000 Reports

Poet and Technology as the Political-Aesthetic Project: Towards the Similarity of the Russian Avant-garde of the Twenties and Stalinist Cinema

Khrenov, Andrei

The Western presentation of the revolutionary “Golden Age” by leftist art historians of the October journal promotes the concept of liberated, creative labor and “human” technology. This view accords with Peter Burger’s theory that the avant-garde traditionally seeks to break down the boundaries separating art and life. If the October radicals point out that Stalinism liquidated all the social/artistic achievements of the twenties, the theorists of Moscow conceptualism argue that the Stalinist discourse merely incorporated the totalitarian aspirations and utopian methods of Russian experimenters, such as the will to power, mastery over the collective subconscious, or the creation of the New Man as the total work of art. These two paradigmatic approaches, two opposing interpretations of the Russian avant-garde, could not be explained without the other. To some degree, both are but reflections of each other.