Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SAGDESOR (The Second Avant-Garde: Design of Domestic Objects in Soviet Russia, 1953-1991)

Teaser

SAGDESOR addressed a problem of reevaluating the historical role of design and decorative art in social, cultural and political life in late Soviet socialism. Late socialist design culture has a lasting influence not only in contemporary Russia, but internationally, in terms...

Summary

SAGDESOR addressed a problem of reevaluating the historical role of design and decorative art in social, cultural and political life in late Soviet socialism.
Late socialist design culture has a lasting influence not only in contemporary Russia, but internationally, in terms of cultural diplomacy, global migration, formal and informal communications between people and institutions. SAGDESOR has demonstrated that late Soviet material culture was dynamic, perceptive of the international design development, and responding to it in the ways that transcend the official ideology of state socialism. Evaluating the legacy of Soviet design and decorative art is instrumental for understanding the perspectives of contemporary Russian design, art, and cultural initiatives.

Objectives:

to conduct research in Russian archives, libraries and museums and through personal interviews;
to share the research results with Danish and international scholars and the broader public in Russia and Denmark;
to facilitate the research network on Russian and Soviet materiality;
to prepare the ground for exploring, writing and teaching transnational history of the 20th century design.

Conclusions:

The design legacy of late socialism continues to be important on the agenda of Russian cultural institutions. My introduction of SAGDESOR to Russian colleagues resulted in discussion for further collaborative work on publications and public talks;
My project attracted interest of Danish institutions, too. I was fortunate to cooperate with the Department of Art and Cultural Studies at Copenhagen University, the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding, and the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University. This cooperation resulted in several public lectures and an international interdisciplinary conference;
My book proposal responded to the interests of the editors of the series ‘Studies in design and Material Culture’ at Manchester University Press.

Work performed

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August-December 2016:

August-November: reading secondary sources;
September: short research trip to St. Petersburg;
November 7: presentation on the use of new materialism in Soviet design studies at Cultural Transformations research programme, Aarhus University;
November 17-18: talk ‘From Nature-Style to Environmental Objects: Visions of Ecology in Leningrad Design, late 1970s-1980s’ at the annual convention of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies in Washington, DC

January – July 2017:

January 23: talk “Overcoming the Chaos of Forms: Some Remarks on Researching Soviet Product Design”at the Russian Studies seminar at Aarhus University;
February-March: two-month research trip to Moscow and St. petersburg.
Februar 23-25: participation in the conference All Things Living And Not: An Interdisciplinary Conference On Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives In Slavic Studies at The Harriman Institute, Columbia University, New York, paper \"\"Portraits of Things and Bio-Plasticity: Materialities of the 1970s Soviet Decorative Art\"\";
May 9: paper “Soviet-Nordic design connections in the 1960s-1970s: forgotten history” at the department of Art and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University.

August 2017 – January 2018

August-November: completion of modules I and II of Teacher Training Course at Aarhus University.
September 7-9: participation in the Design History Society annual conference Making and Unmaking the Environment at the University of Oslo with the paper \"\"Environmental Design Pedagogy in Leningrad in the 1980s\"\".
October 11: guest lecture “Moscow Avant-Garde” in the course Urban Space and Representation in Russia, taught by Birgitte Pristed at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University
October 12: guest lecture ‘Late Soviet Design and Environmentalism’ in the course Culture and Nature in Russia: Between Ecology and Apocalypse, taught by Birgitte Pristed at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University.
October 13: informal talk on the Soviet debate about the principles of decorative art and design at the Friday seminar at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University
November 13: open lecture “Common Principles? Visions of a socialist object in soviet industrial design and decorative art in the 1960s-70s” at the Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark.
November 21- December 5: second research trip to Moscow and Petersburg.


February- July 2018

March 8-9: with Birgitte Pristed (Aarhus University) and Olga Gurova (Aalborg University), convening an international interdisciplinary conference “The Body of Things: Gender, Design and Material Culture in Late Soviet Russia.”
March 17 – 30: final research trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
May-July: preparing two chapters for collective volumes.
Late July: signing the contract with Manchester University Press for Open Access book Comradely objects: Design and material culture In Soviet Russia, 1960s-80s.

To sum up: within the 24 months I gathered a large amount of textural and visual materials, gave six public lectures and two guest instructor lectures to students, organized and convened an international conferences, prepared two volume chapters that are forthcoming in print and that will be published as pre-proof versions at my academia.edu pages and promoted on other social media, and, finally, prepared the first draft of a monograph.
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Final results

My project:

- for the first time systematically explored the afterlife of the avant-gardist idea of a socialist object in the Cold War era;
- responded to the ongoing tendency of design history to shift from the narratives of celebrated designers towards the histories of collective work, negotiations, mediations, exchange and transformations of ideas;
- showed a new perspective on a subject of socialist material and visual culture that is attracting more and more attention of scholars, curators and the public internationally;
- through theconference “The Body of Things” it opened a dialogue between scholars of Russian material culture – including design, fashion, everyday life and art-making. Currently we are discussing the possibility of the next conference to be held in Perm, Russia, and a special journal issue;
- contributed to the growing attention to the latest decades of the Soviet Union. Unlike the reformist period of Nikita Khrushchev’s leadership, that was recently covered in numerous publications, discussions and exhibitions in Russia, the period of 1970s – early 1980s, when Leonid Brezhnev was in power, is stereotypically called “the era of (cultural and political) stagnation” and associated with the dualism between silent conformism and dissidents. Historians of art and architecture call for reconsidering the Brezhnev era as the time of diverse cultural strategies and responses to the political and economic constraints. As architectural historian Olga Kazakova recently remarked, this period is important to analyze, because it immediately preceded the 1980s perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is the recent past that has a long lasting influence on Russian society, and its material legacy is still prominent in many Russian cities and regions. With my public talks, forthcoming articles and the monograph, I enter the dialogue about this legacy.

Website & more info

More info: http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/yulia-karpova.