Christina Kiaer will discuss Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism. She will be joined in conversation by Matthew Jesse Jackson, professor in the departments of art history and visual arts at the University of Chicago. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with the University of Chicago Department of Art History, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies (CEERES).

About the Book

Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration as an experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Christina Kiaer 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 canvases. In so doing, she demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian style but as a fiercely collective art system that organized art outside the market and formed part of the legacy of the revolutionary modernisms of the 1920s. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers’ imaginations by evoking the elation of collectivity, making viewers not just comprehend but truly feel socialism, and retaining the potential to inform our own art-into-life experiments within contemporary political art.

About the Author

Christina Kiaer is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. She is the author of Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, coauthor with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill of Revolution Every Day: A Calendar, and coeditor with Eric Naiman of Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside. Her most recent book is Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism.

About the Interlocutor

Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches in the departments of art history and visual arts at the University of Chicago. Jackson is the author of Il’ia i Emiliia Kabakovy: Gde nashe mesto? [Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Where Is Our Place?] and of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes, winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award from The Dedalus Foundation, as well as the Vucinich Book Prize. He is also editor and co-translator from the Russian of Ilya Kabakov: On Art.

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