2006 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize Honorable Mention
The AAASS Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published English in the United States in the previous calendar year.
Christina Kiaer
The 2006 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize committee awarded an honorable mention to Christina Kiaer, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, for Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, published by the MIT Press.
Christine Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions is a richly-researched excursion into the saturated field of Constructivism that manages the ultimate hat trick: to say something new. She takes us beyond the established categorical path of Groys, humanizing the Constructivists by placing them more squarely in the material and philosophical contradictions of NEP. Using Benjamin to mediate between artistic innovation (cast as “revolutionary”) and the new consumer appetites legitimized by NEP, she enters sympathetically into the unique atmosphere of the 1920s, when artists were evolving their stripped-down, idealist-materialist aesthetics of design and world-recreation. The book thus becomes a gripping account of utopian aspiration and historical improvisation rather than a retrospective analysis of ultimate failure. Kiaer most acutely poses topics that are almost never explored. She untangles the seeming oxymoron of “constructivist advertising” and lays bare, through the example of Rodchenko, this central dialectical pivot in early Soviet history, showing how planners made peace with ways of extracting surplus value and delivering it through commodity spectacle. Kiaer does all this in a book so luminously written and gorgeously illustrated that Sovietologists, art historians, and students of modern culture of all stripes will find it a treat to open and impossible to put down.
