Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 18, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a book launch of “Collective Body” by Christina Kiaer. Moderated by Noam Elcott.
Join us for a discussion to mark the launch of Christina Kiaer’s book “Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism” (University of Chicago Press, 2024), which offers a new account of Socialist Realism not as a totalitarian style but as a fiercely collective art system.
Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, “Collective Body” presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s corporeal version of Socialist Realism as an alternate experimental aesthetic that activates affective forces for collective ends.
“Collective Body” traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Terror and beyond. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limit case of the system he inhabited and helped to create.
Christina Kiaer is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. She is the author of “Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism” (MIT, 2005); co-author with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill of “Revolution Every Day: A Calendar” (Mousse, 2017); editor of the exhibition catalogue “Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory” (Scheidegger & Spiess, distributed by Chicago, 2025); and co-editor with Eric Naiman of “Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside” (Indiana, 2005).
Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art at Columbia University and an editor of the journal Grey Room. Elcott is the author of the award-winning book “Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media” (University of Chicago Press, 2016), as well as essays on art and media from the 19th century to the present, published in leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. He co-directed The August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia, 2016-2021), recently co-edited a special issue of Grey Room on “Art Beyond Copyright” (2024), and is a Principal Investigator of the Data Science Institute grant on “AI and Style: Art, Technology, Law.” His current book projects are “The Social Portrait: Types and Antitypes in August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks.”
