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Conference Program: Afterlives of (Soviet) Constructivism

Illusions Killed by Life: Afterlives of (Soviet) Constructivism continues the series of annual interdisciplinary conferences that have been taking place at Princeton University in the last few years. Made possible by the generous funding from Princeton’s institutions, this year the conference brings more than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, and Eurasia.

Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies
Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Princeton Conjunction – 2013:
An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

“ILLUSIONS KILLED BY LIFE”:
AFTERLIVES OF (SOVIET) CONSTRUCTIVISM

May 10-12, 2013
Princeton

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

MAY 10, 2013
9.30 am – 11.00pm
PANEL 1: WHAT IS CONSTRUCTIVISM?
CHAIR: Ellen Chances (Princeton University)

Tina Di Carlo (Oslo School of Architecture and Design)
Constructivist Deconstructivist? Modern Haunts in
“Deconstructivist Architecture”

Pablo Mueller (City University of New York)
Shaping “October”: The Reception of Soviet Constructivism by the American Art Journal

Kristin Romberg (The College of Wooster)
The Tectonics of Minimalism

DISCUSSANT: Yve-Alain Bois (Institute for Advance Study, Princeton)

11.00am – 11.30am – break

11.30pm – 1.30pm
PANEL 2: VISION IN MOTION
CHAIR: Hal Foster (Princeton University)

John Tyson (Emory University)
Hans Haacke’s Discrepant Constructivism

Masha Kowell (University of Pennsylvania)
Poster-Specificity: Constructivist Design and Early Post-Stalinist Political Posters

Eva Forgacs (Art Center College of Design, Pasadena)
Deconstructivist Neo-Constructivists in Hungary (1960-1990)

David Crowley (School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London)
Staging for the End of History: Avant-garde Architectural Visions at the Beginning and the End of Communism in Eastern Europe

DISCUSSANT: Esther da Costa Meyer (Princeton University)

1.30pm – 2.30pm – break

2.30pm – 4.30pm
PANEL 3: DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION
CHAIR: Caryl Emerson (Princeton University)

Iliana Veinberga (Art Academy of Latvia)
Ambiguous Revival of Gustav Klutzis’ Legacy in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia

John Kenneth MacKay (Yale University)
The Dreamer or the Dream: Vertov’s Constructivist Legacy

Ilia V. Kukulin (National Research University – Higher School of Economics)
Regeneration of the Method: Former Participants of the Literary Center of Constructivists and Their Pupils in 1936—44

Elise Thorsen (University of Pittsburgh)
Reconstructing Constructivist Poetry in the Sixties

DISCUSSANT: Devin Fore (Princeton University)

              4.30-5.00pm – break

5.00pm  KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

GINZBURG AT KISLOVODSK:
THE ORDZHONIKIDZE SANATORIIUM AND THE END OF MODERNISM IN RUSSIA

by RICHARD PARE,
the author of Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32.

MAY 11, 2013

9.30am – 11.30am
PANEL 4: STYLE AND EPOCH
CHAIR: Steven Harris (University of Mary Washington)

Inessa Kouteinikova (Independent Scholar)
Turkestan “Constructivism”: Between the Imperial and Socialist Colony

Mari Laanemets (Academy of Arts, Tallinn)
Reconstructing Art and Architecture: Absorbing the Legacies of Constructivism in Soviet Estonia in the 1970s

Daniil Leiderman (Princeton University)
“Shimmering” and the Dematerialization of the Avant-garde in Moscow Conceptualism

DISCUSSANT: Jane Sharp (Rutgers University)

11.30am -12.00am – break

12.00pm – 1.30pm
PANEL 5:   EXPERIMENTS FOR THE FUTURE
CHAIR: Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University)

Virág Molnár (The New School for Social Research/ Eugene Lang College)
From Constructivism to “Routinized Modernism”: The Zigzag Trajectory of Constructivist Architecture in Postwar Hungary

Vladimir Kulić (Florida Atlantic University)
Constructivism Revived: Vjenceslav Richter and the Legacy of the Avant-Garde in Socialist Yugoslavia

Michal Murawski (University of Cambridge)
The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw: A Stalinist ‘Social Condenser’ in a Capitalist City

DISCUSSANT: Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania)

1.30pm – 2.30 pm – break

2.30pm – 4.30pm
PANEL 6: FROM MATERIAL TO ARCHITECTURE
CHAIR: Petre Petrov (Princeton University)

Alexandra Köhring (University of Hamburg)
Soviet Brutalism? Faktura/Surface Texture in Postwar Architecture

Pep Avilés (Columbia University/Princeton University)
Traveling Ideas: Von Faktur zu Texture

Maria Kokkori  (The Art Institute of Chicago)
The Penguin Pool and Other Buildings: Berthold Romanovich Lubetkin, an Emigré Constructivist in Britain

DISCUSSANT: Xenia Vytuleva (Columbia University)

4.30pm – 4.45pm – break

4.45pm – 6.30pm
PANEL 7: BIOGRAPHIES OF OBJECTS
CHAIR: Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University)

Djurdja Bartlett (University of the Arts, London)
From Utopia to Fashion: Dress in Postwar East Europe

Yulia Karpova (Central European University, Budapest)
Ornament is No Crime: Compromises with Decoration in Soviet Design of the 1950s – the 1960s.

Tom Cubbin (University of Sheffield)
Senezh Studio and Karl Kantor’s Theory of ‘Artistic Design’ 1964-1968

DISCUSSANT: Irina Sandomirskaja (Södertörn University)

MAY 12, 2013

9.30am – 11.15am
PANEL 8:  SOCIALIST CITY
CHAIR: Esther da Costa Meyer (Princeton University)

Fabien Bellat (Versailles School of Architecture)
Constructivists-Stalinists Gardens

Sergey Kropotov (Ekaterinburg Academy of Contemporary Art)
Assembling Point for New Urbanites: Architectural Complex of the Uralmash Factory Square, 1930-1970

Iuliia Skubytska (University of Pennsylvania)
From Factory to Neighborhood: the Workers’ Settlement of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, 1930s-1960s.

DISCUSSANT: Steven Harris (University of Mary Washington)

11.15am – 11.30am – break

11.30am – 1.15pm
PANEL 9: ARCHAISTS AND INNOVATORS
CHAIR: Irena Grudzinska Gross (Princeton University)

Daria Bocharnikova (St. Petersburg State University)
“We Are not Going to Copy Constructivism!” or the Meaning of Innovation in Soviet Architecture after 1954.

Vadim Bass (European University at St Petersburg)
The Composition Rehabilitated: Architectural Propaedeutics of Soviet Constructivism in Artistic Education of the 1930s –2000s

Anya Bokov (Yale University)
Parallel Experiments In Soviet Architecture: From VKhUTEMAS to EDAS 

DISCUSSANT: Joshua Kotin (Princeton University)

The conference is sponsored by:

The Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies
The Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies
The Council of the Humanities
The Department of Art and Archeology
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
The School of Architecture
The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies
The University Center for Human Values
The Program in European Cultural Studies