Cooperative Avant-garde: Rhetoric and Social Values of the New World of Arts in the System of the All-Russian Union of Artists’ Cooperatives ’Vsekokhudozhnik’

Abstract

The article discusses the early period (1928-1932) in the development of the first national organization of Soviet artists - cooperative 'Vsekokhudozhnik' - within the framework of institutional history and criticism. The main principles of this institution are analyzed and compared with the key ideas of left avant-garde trends in the Soviet art. The analysis of institutional characteristics of 'Vsekokhudozhnik' relies on materials of central and regional archives. Parallels are drawn between the key characteristics of this cooperative and the Russian avant-garde's aspirations to radically transform the art world. The author demonstrates the following overlapping views: ideas about the new identity of an artist; the new status of material objects; depersonalization of art and promotion of collective forms of production; importance of independent art and the need for overcoming (through negation and destruction) the bourgeois market institutional model of art. The conclusion is made that the system of artists' cooperatives served as a platform for testing the principles of political economy of Soviet art and that many of these principles are consistent with manifests of avant-garde movements in the 1920s (production art and literature of fact). In later periods, this platform was used to establish the economic institutional model of socialist realism (planned art production, mass production of copies, system for distribution of commissions, censorship, and so on).