If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties

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If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties

Why I am Not a Modernist

Garage has published <a href="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/1/8/1830/file-4ae91c2d-507b-43c1-aae7-c2803dfeab56.pdf">a&nbsp;guide</a> in Russian and English specially for the exhibition If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties. The printed version is available with the Museum ticket.
A full bibliography for each room is available <a href="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/1/8/1829/file-bd12013a-ed8b-4b18-9965-42cd5f9a9c2a.pdf">as a PDF</a>.
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The year 1968 looked very different from a Soviet perspective than it did from a Western one. The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces was a fatal event. It put a sudden end to the so-called &ldquo;Prague Spring,&rdquo; and with it to the brief but intense cultural and political liberalization of the previous decade. Soon stagnation would set in, or so the story goes.
Only months before the invasion, the Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Mikhail Lifshitz (1905&ndash;1983) published a study of cubism and pop art called The Crisis of Ugliness. A uniquely detailed and illustrated source on modernist art, it was widely read across the Soviet Union. Very few actually agreed with its author&rsquo;s views. The Soviet intelligentsia was abandoning Marxism en masse, but Lifshitz came out as its staunch defender in the aesthetic field. To him modern art was &ldquo;a system of devices for the creation of a moral alibi&rdquo; for the cultural consumer. The only way forward, he reaffirmed, was realism, rooted in the classical tradition and driven by amateur creativity or &ldquo;the artistic self-activity of the masses,&rdquo; as it was called in the Soviet Union.
In 1968, such a position seemed to many like it might be part of the new hard line in Soviet domestic and foreign policy. There are clues, however, that Lifshitz&rsquo;s orthodoxy had nothing in common with its government-issue version. His writing is far more subtle and well-informed. It demonstrates a deep, first-hand familiarity with the avant-garde&rsquo;s devices, its agenda, its problems, and its paradoxes. Armed with this knowledge, Lifshitz demands that the art of the twentieth century be read on its own anti-aesthetic terms, as a historically necessary step. And, in the frame of his polemic, he makes his own radical, communist counterproposal to what we today call contemporary art.
The exhibition If our soup can could speak&hellip; departs from Lifshitz&rsquo;s seminal book. The result of a three-year Garage Field Research project, it takes an in-depth look at Lifshitz as a writer with a sense for uncanny contradictions and sublime historical ironies. In a series of rooms inspired by film sets, art historical interiors, and the settings of intellectual life in the Soviet Union, the exhibition delves deep into the Kafkaesque atmosphere of the Soviet epoch. It tells the story of Lifshitz&rsquo;s notorious attack on modernism, revealing what is at the same time a declaration of love for art.
Visitors are welcome to handle the books and printed materials on display.
<a class="button button--black" href="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/1/8/1812/file-a441dde0-a8cc-41a4-acd1-500e55c1fc88.pdf">DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE</a>

If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties. Exhibition guide

David Riff is talking about the exhibition If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties.
David Riff, curator of the exhibition If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties, talking about the reconstruction of Andy Warhol's Factory at Garage.
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David Riff is talking about the La Maison Cubiste.
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David Riff is talking about the VKhUTEMAS&mdash;room at the exhibition If our soup can could speak...
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A guided tour with David Riff

Listen to the sounds of 1960s, compiled for the exhibition If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties by Denis Boyarinov, music journalist, editor at Colta.ru, and curator at Sound Up.
<iframe src="https://tools.applemusic.com/embed/v1/playlist/pl.95909b8cefad4d7f9077e367b5cc2f16?country=ru" width="100%" height="500px" frameborder="0"></iframe>

 A Playlist for If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties

As a part of the public program accompanying the exhibition If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet sixties a discussion will take place between Yoel Regev and Dmitry Gutov of the possible connections of his thoughts with radical movements in Jewish mysticism.
&ldquo;This means that our mind, being true to its definition, should actively seek in reality points charged with universality&hellip;&rdquo; This phrase of Mikhail Lifshitz, which essentially summarizes his approach to idealism and his interpretation of materialist aesthetics, correlates in a strange way with Kabbalistic-Hasidic strategies of &ldquo;seeking points of holiness&rdquo; in the worlds of &ldquo;impurity&rdquo; and &ldquo;externality&rdquo; in order to &ldquo;clarify&rdquo; and &ldquo;elevate&rdquo; them. It is not a case of a chance parallel or a historical-cultural &ldquo;influence&rdquo;, but of a common epistemological field.
This discussion has been initiated by the Eshkolot Project, which is supported by The Genesis Philanthropy Group.
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Erogenous Zones of Reality: Lifshitz and Materialistic Kabbalah. Yoel Regev talks to Dmitri Gutov

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A Playlist for If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties

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