Across One Sixth of the World

Dziga Vertov’s Across One Sixth of the World marked the height of the early revolutionary avant-garde film in the 1920s, before the cultural encroachment of Stalin’s...

Stalin and the Muses

Personally, I have a much more heightened interest in the Sots-art movement of Komar and Melamid more than any other movement in Soviet art....

The Artistic Journey of Aleksandr Deineka

Aleksandr Deineka lived and worked in the early beginnings of the Stalinist regime during the “imposition” of the official art style of Socialist Realism,...

Socialist Realism Revisionism and The Blue Space

This is The Blue Space by Arkady Rylov, and this was the work that Alla Efimova centered her argument for a call for a...

Tatlin and Faktura

  This is Vladimir Tatlin’s “Counter-Relief,” one of the prime examples of his avant-garde Constructivist movement of the pre-Revolutionary Russian modernist art scene. One...

What is a Spiral Jetty?

From the way he writes about it, Robert Smithson was a man inspired when he created Spiral Jetty, the almost “modern Prehistoric” landscape artwork in...

A Wave of Activism in Art

Activist art only further blurs the distinction between what is art and what is not art (if such a distinction can be made, or...

Helms vs. Mapplethorpe for the Undisputed Heavyweight Championship of the American Art Scene

The Jesse Helms theory of art is an interesting one to say the least. Basically, in as many words, it is anti-homosexual bigotry directed...

Shoot, the Mass Media, and Undertones of the Vietnam War

Chris Burden ushered in a new era of performance art with his “masochistic” works, such as his most famous/infamous piece Shoot. Shoot itself holds a special...
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The (Anti-)Marxist/Communist Propaganda: The Storming of the Winter Palace

The grandest, albeit possibly ideologically destructive, early Soviet mass spectacle is without a doubt The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920). The spectacle itself was...
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