Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism

Arts & Photography

Fore, Devin

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche. Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhaus polymath László Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by the conflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays, which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by Carl Einstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in the photomontages of John Heartfield. Fore's readings reveal that each of these "rehumanized" works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration is based. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of the interwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming more tenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes but posited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a human subject quite unlike anything that had come before.

Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (October Book)

Mit Pr

The paradox at the heart of the return to realism in the interwar years, as seen in work by Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, and others.
The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche.
Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhaus polymath László Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by the conflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays, which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by Carl Einstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in the photomontages of John Heartfield.
Fore's readings reveal that each of these “rehumanized” works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration is based. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of the interwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming more tenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes but posited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a human subject quite unlike anything that had come before.

Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (October Books)

MIT Press]

Premiered in St. Petersburg in 1913, and written in “zaum”--a Russian Futurist nonsense language--Victory over the Sun was a vastly ambitious opera, a collaboration between the poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, the composer and painter Mikhail Matyushin and the painter Kazimir Malevich (who made his legendary “Black Square” painting for the work). Anfang Gut. Alles Gut. documents a longterm project by an ever-expanding group of artists, musicians, architects and writers who, since 2008, have worked with the opera’s historical documentation and reception history to translate this mythic gesamtkunstwerk into the present. Katrin Bahrs, Thomas Baldischwyler, Tschilp, Nine Budde, Natalie Czech, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Kirsten Forkert, Emma Hedditch and Elizabeth Orr, Fox Hysen and Susanne M. Winterling, Heiko Karn and Katrin Mayer, Nicholas Matranga, Ruth May and Michaela Melián are among the many artists contributing to the book.

Anfang Gut, Alles Gut: Actualizations of the Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun 1913

Behrens, Roger

Kunsthaus Bregenz

This two-volume box set documents a collaboration between writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, artist Thomas Demand, stage designer Anna Viebrock and curator Udo Kittelmann.

The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.: Thomas Demand, Alexander Kluge, Anna Viebrock

Lerner, Ben

Kushner, Rachel

Kluge, Alexander

Lethen, Helmut

Gravina, Niccolò

Oberender, Thomas

Scotti, Aurora

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Fondazione Prada

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Books by Fore, Devin