We will start off with a talk by Postdoc Yulia Karpova (title and abstract below). The talk will be about 30 min with some time for questions, followed by an open networking hour. (Some) Refreshments will be provided.

Common principles? The visions of a socialist object object in Soviet industrial design and decorative art in the 1960s-70s

The ideas of the 1920s avant-garde were highly important for the formation of Soviet state-sponsored design profession in the 1960s. As some several scholars demonstrated, the vision of an object as an expedient tool and an organizer of daily life, promoted by such avant-garde theorists as Boris Arvatov and Nikolai Tarabukin, was adopted and further elaborated by the staff of the All-Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE). Following the 1920s theorists of “productivism,” the 1960s theorists drew the border between applied art and industrial design and attempted to establish a universal classification of design activities with rigid compartmentalization of principles and goals. However, the problem of a “proper” socialist object also occupied the minds of decorative artists who produced unique or limited edition artworks. In fact, the visions of socialist object in these two professional communities were interconnected, so that some theorists even spoke about the commonality of principles. In this presentation, I will discuss the development of dialogue and polemics between the theorists of design and decorative art as a crucial part of the reflection on late socialist materiality.