Comradely Objects

This book offers a new perspective on the history of Soviet design. It argues that the 'comradely objects' of Russian productivism were not just shabby copies of western commodities - they were agents of progressive social relations with a discernible inheritance from the 1920s avant-garde.

At the intersection of cultural history, material culture studies, memory studies and feminist geopolitics, Journeys of Soviet Things is an oral history of socialist globalisation constructed around the journeys of Cold War era Soviet objects in India and Cuba. During the Cold War, an important means to perpetuate Soviet ideals of modernisation and anti-imperialist solidarity across the world was the circulation of ‘banal’ objects, produced in the Soviet Union and purchased, awarded, and gifted for use in homes across the world. Based on oral accounts of Indian and Cuban interlocutors, this book examines the itineraries of Soviet objects such as cars, washing machines, cameras, books, nesting dolls, porcelain, and many other things. Explored this way, the Cold War is a matter of personal, affective, everyday experience. At the same time, by indicating the cohabitation of things in their home from around the world, interlocutors also go on to undercut simple geopolitical binaries that pit Soviet against American techno-politics. Accounts of Soviet objects in India and Cuba reveal a bricolage of preferences that crisscrossed ideological dualities of East vs West, communist vs capitalist, making for an alternative cosmopolitanism that was in equal measure shaped by personal, local, and national histories and experiences. This book will appeal to readers interested in Cold War history, the history of transnational solidarities, and Soviet material culture.

A passionate call to rediscover the political and emotional joy that emerges when we share our lives In an era of increasing individualism, we have never been more isolated and dispirited. A paradox confronts us. While research and technology find new ways to measure contentment and popular culture encourages us to think of happiness as a human right, misery is abundant. Segal believes we have lost the art of “radical happiness”—the liberation that comes with transformative, collective joy. She argues that instead of obsessing about our own well-being we should seek fulfilment in the lives of others. Examining her own experience in the women’s movement, Segal looks at the relationship between love and sex, and the scope for utopian thinking as a means to a better future. She also shows how the gaps in care that come from the diminishing role of the welfare state must be replaced by alternative ways of living together and looking after one another. In this brilliant and provocative book, Segal proposes that the power of true happiness can only be discovered collectively.

Even in well-established democratic societies, the political system currently faces a crisis of civic engagement and participation. Increasingly, this lack of engagement and the accompanying erosion of institutional legitimacy result in antidemocratic, populist currents gaining ground. It is an important challenge for both the humanities and the social sciences to analyse this crisis and discuss possible answers that may contribute to strengthening the position of the democratic public sphere in the political process, thus emphasising the crucial role of civic engagement and participation in renewing democracy. The articles in this volume seek the sources for such democratic innovations in a variety of existing, less formalised practices and experiences in public space: in citizens' forums and other concrete arenas for democratic debate and participation in the media in general, including social media and other digital platforms; in social movements; and in artistic interventions in the public sphere. The volume presents selected and edited papers and keynote lectures from the international research conference The Democratic Public Sphere - Current Challenges and Prospects, which was held at Aarhus University on November 5-7, 2015. It includes contributions by keynote speakers Mark E. Warren, Nick Couldry, Donatella della Porta, and Stephen Duncombe.

Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer curcial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.

"George Maciunas is typically associated with the famous art collective Fluxus, of which he is often thought to have been the leader. In this book, critic and art historian Colby Chamberlain wants us to question two things: first, the idea that Fluxus was a "group" in any conventional sense, and second, that Maciunas was its "leader." Instead, Chamberlain shows us how Maciunas used the paper materials of bureaucracy in his art-cards, certificates, charts, files, and plans, among others-to subvert his own status as a "figurehead" of this collective and even as a biographical entity. Each of the book's chapters situates Maciunas's artistic practice in relation to a different domain: education, communication, production, housing, and health. We learn about his use of the postal service to make Fluxus into an international network; his manipulation of US copyright law to pursue a "Soviet" ideal of collective authorship; his intervention in Manhattan's zoning restrictions as founder and manager of the "Fluxhouse" artists' lofts in SoHo; and his performances protesting against normative ideals of health and family, focusing on his own, ultimately failed medical self-management. Fluxus Administration is not a biography, but it does delve more deeply than any other book into Maciunas's life and work, showing the lengths to which the artist himself went to disrupt any easy account of himself"--

The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold brings together a wealth of scholarship on one of the foremost innovators in European theatre. It presents a detailed picture of the Russian director’s work from when it first emerged on the modern stage to its multifarious present-day manifestations. By combining an historical focus with the latest contemporary research from an international range of perspectives and authors, this collection marks an important moment in Meyerhold studies as well as offering a new assessment of his relation to today's theatre-making. Its dynamic blend of research is presented in five sections: Histories enlarges on more conventional subjects like the grotesque and Biomechanics, to overlooked topics such as Meyerhold's ‘failed’ projects and his work in film; Collaborations and Connections extends understandings of Meyerhold’s well-known collaborative capacities to consider new cultural influences and lesser known working relationships; Sources engages with hitherto untapped material in Meyerhold’s oeuvre by reproducing and contextualising previously untranslated primary sources on his work; Practitioner Voices offer lively, on the ground, testimony of the contemporary impact of Meyerhold's practice; Meyerhold in New Contexts maps the routes of his practice across continents and examines ways in which his work is being applied in a number of contemporary scenarios, such as motion capture, computer-based 3D visualisations, and the ‘new normal’ of digital pedagogy. This is a key resource for students and scholars of European Theatre, acting theory, and actor training, as well as for those more broadly interested in the socio-political impact of theatre.

A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her essays, reviews, and fictions. DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers embarked on her first art projects focusing on blockchain tech in 2011, making her one of the first artists to engage in creative, speculative, and conceptual engagements with "the new internet." Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks along with her essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous. Her deep understanding of the technical history and debates around blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy. Remodeling the tropes of conceptual art and net.art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture, and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.