Avant-garde Art in the Age of Cold War

• Grant number: 24/02383-9
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: August 01, 2024
• End date: July 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Art Fundamentals and Criticism
• Principal Investigator: Gabriel Ferreira Zacarias
• Grantee: Gabriel Ferreira Zacarias
• Visiting researcher: Olga Rusinova
• Visiting researcher institution: Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project offers a new perspective on the late-Soviet art between the death of Stalin and the collapse of the USSR. It focuses on the artistic practices that survived the violent persecution of the avant-garde, and were in demand again in the 1960s-1980s. They spread among institutionalized Soviet artists who were especially keen on this legacy. Thus, they were encouraged to have personal agency to withstand the widespread ideological pressure, even though it was a great risk for them in the face of professional marginalization. However, I don't see artists' interests as immutable. I argue that in late-Soviet modernism, the attention to different aspects of the avant-garde knew certain ups and downs, turning into their opposite. It wasn't a linear development but full of contradictions, which makes it possible to read it against the background of international modernism. The study draws from the history of art in its intersection with social history and cultural anthropology. These processes were most pronounced in the metropolitan centers, so the project looks primarily into the art of Moscow and Leningrad\St. Petersburg, including the territories around both capitals. (AU)