Description
Avant-Garde and Psychotechnics presents an innovative look at the Russian avant-garde and its cultural encounters with the sciences in the 1920s. The book examines some of the lesser known entanglements between architects, filmmakers and philosophers, on the one hand, and experimental psychologists and physiologists on the other. In Russia, famous avant-garde artists, such as El Lissitzky, Vassily Kandinsky and Dziga Vertov, helped propagate a movement referred to as "psychotechnics" that was emerging at the time in Germany and the United States and eventually led to a "psychotechnical boom." At the end of the story told in the book, it becomes clear that this boom continues to the present day. By analyzing concrete projects undertaken by Russian artists and scientists in cooperation with one another, and by drawing on as-yet-unpublished archival material, Avant-Garde and Psychotechnics challenges the established notion of socialist sciences. At the same time, it provides an entirely new picture of what was thought to be modern art, thereby demonstrating that artistic experimentation had much more than a mere metaphorical meaning in Russian arts in the 1920s.
In 2007 Avant-Garde and Psychotechnics was acknowledged with an award for interdisciplinary research by the Wilhelm-Ostwald-Society, Gro bothen. In 2011 the book received funding from the VolkswagenStiftung to be translated into English and Russian (the Russian edition was published by NLO books in 2019). The original German edition also received favorable reviews in NZZ, NTM, Derive, Junge Welt and Sehepunkte.
Author: Margarete Vöhringer
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 07/31/2023
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.18lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d
ISBN13: 9781032532646
ISBN10: 1032532645
BISAC Categories:
- Art | History | General
- History | Russia | General
- Science | History
About the Author
Margarete Vöhringer is currently a Professor for the Materiality of Knowledge at Georg-August-University Göttingen. Her research interests include materiality and aesthetics of the sciences; art an science; history of collecting and exhibiting; Russian avant-garde; cultural techniques of seeing. Some of her publications include Anthology published with Anne Kathrin Reulecke) Sehstörungen. Grenzwerte des Visuellen in Künsten und Wissenschaften, Berlin 2019, Anthology published with Anke Te Heesen) Wissenschaft im Museum - Ausstellung im Labor, Berlin 2014, Anthology published with Sabine Flach) Ultravision. Zum Wissenschaftsverständnis der Avantgarde, Berlin 2010 and Anthology published with Yvonne Wübben) Phantome im Labor: Die Verbreitung der Reflexe in Hirnforschung, Kunst und Technik. Themenheft der Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32 (1), Frühjahr 2009.
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