Mobile Modernisms: The Last Projects of the Soviet Avant-garde, 1928-1937

In her Academy project, “Mobile Modernisms: The Last Projects of the Soviet Avant-garde, 1928-1937,” Glebova examines five iconic yet little studied projects completed by Soviet avant-garde artists in the decade following Stalin’s rise to power. Ranging from experimental studio exercises to photomontage, installation, sculpture, architecture, painting, and design, these projects represent complex and stunningly diverse attempts to think visually and materially through the ideology of early Stalinism. In endeavoring to make sense of new political realities, the protagonists of this project—El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Vera Mukhina, and Boris Ender—created objects that challenge received views of this decade as one of “totalitarian art.” Rather than the sudden foreclosing usually associated with the end of Soviet modernism, Glebova argues that this period witnessed a radical (albeit shortlived) expansion of pictorial means inspired by the ideals of movement and mobility, including across national borders. Glebova traces the genealogy of this concern with mobility, which arose, in part, from the avant-garde’s ideologically driven experiments to express what it saw as the dynamic, dialectical nature of Soviet Communism in the 1910s and 1920s. She also explores how changing notions of space and borders in the 1930s Soviet Union shaped understandings of mobility.