Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West & Picasso: The Communist Years & French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art Before, During and After Vichy - Book Review

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres 2000 432 pp; 13 color ills., 179 b/w $5500; $2495 paper

GERTJE R UTLEY

Picasso: The Communist Years

fresh Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 288 pp; 40 color ills., 175 b/w $5500

MICHELE C CONE

French Modernisms: Perspectives upon Art before, during and after Vichy

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2001 224 pp; 35 b/w ills. $7000

EMILY BRAUN

Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics below Fascism

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2000 316 pp; 16 color ills., 215 b/w $7000

In Dreamworld and Catastrophe by means of Susan Buck-Morss, "the Cold War discursive binary of totalitarianism versus democracy is challenged at its core" (p xiii). This binary has begun to be questioned with the closing of the hundred that produced it, generating increasing interest in the agricultures of the so-called totalitarian regimes that propagated the losing versions of the 20th century's dream of industrial modernity: Communism and Fascism. If the dominant binary structuring the history of 20th-century art has been abstraction versus realism, single of its powerful corollaries has been modernism versus totalitarian art. This binary is being reexamined as well, as art historical scholarship and museum exhibitions are turning to previously dismissed twinklings of 20th-century Western art like Soviet Socialist Realism and Fascist art. (1) Because the state-supported and -mandated artistic production of these regimes challenged art historical protoplasts of modernism based on quality, originality, or social critique, totalitar ian art has in like manner far been studied primarily beneath the rubric of visual agriculture Most commentators have devoted more attention to the cultural function of these images as undefiled ideology than to the specificities of their pictorial form. at the same time this work demands to be understood not sole culturally and functionally but also art historically, as distinct kinds of visual images that engage with the histories and categories of art. We ne fresh critical models that can account one as well as the other for the specific meaning and function of the forms of totalitarian realisms within the "dreamworlds" of their totalitarian tillages and for their relation to the modernist forms of nontotalitarian art. Of the four works considered here, two directly address totalitarian examples--Buck-Morss upon Soviet culture, Emily Braun upon Italian Fascism--while two others take it up more obliquely-Gertje Utley upon Picasso's politicized figuration during his Communist years and Michele Cone upon collaborationist art under the Vichy regime. Taken together, they put in mind of some of the methodological moot points involved in confronting this material, as well as possible directions for inventing of recent origin models of interpretation.

Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West is a work of political philosophy that is also an "experiment in modes of visual culture" (p. xv) It asks what the history of the 20th hundred would look like, now that the Gold War is above if we were to analyze the similarities between the sum of two units dominant dream-worlds of industrialized modernity rather than the differences. Against the received wisdom that the West won the chilled War, she argues that "the historical experiment of socialism was in like manner deeply rooted in the Western modernizing tradition that its defeat cannot on the other hand place the whole Western narrative into question" (p xii). Her unapologetic thesis is that the sum of two units systems were linked as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of by their violent abuse of state power as through their common utopian dream that mass sovereignty paired with mass production would bring about social harmony. Historical fragments and images from the Soviet Union are her main examples, on the other hand this is not a Slavic Studies book; rather familiar and unfamiliar Soviet images are here unmoored from their usual historical connections and made to signify as dream images of mass utopia that were shared across the 20th hundred A photograph of silent film star Douglas Fairbanks swinging a hand-held megaphone in brow of a huge crowd while promoting United States rule bonds on Wall Street during World War I faces a photomontage of Lenin leaning without from his high perch in El Lissitzky's design for the Lenin Podium. A photograph of a carbonized iron plant in Gary, Indiana, faces individual of a steel plant below construction in the socialist city Magnitogorsk in 1930 which was built using American technology, paid for [i]or[/i] part of to the other the sale of imperial art treasures from the Hermitage. Four pages later we meeting Raphael's Alba Madonna with the cryptic caption "1 Raphael = 1/2 Magnitogorsk" (the Hermitage's Raphael was sold for 17 million gold dollars to the carburet of iron magnate Andrew Mellon to help pay for the technology transfer; he later donated the painting to th e National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in a bargain to avoid prosecution for tax evasion). There are many more of that kind visual "constellations" in the work providing "reflections on Soviet modernism as it associateed to Western modernism, crossing boundaries between discursive terrains usually kept apart, trespassing among different academic domains in order to make loose the material from any exclusive possession" (p 97)