“The Dynamic Spirit of Russian Modernism” Debuts in Webster Hall

The Russian avant-garde emerged as the revolution dissolved the nation-state and made chaos an everyday reality. The past burned as the present moment magnified to harbor the uncertain future. In the project of drawing the future from the present, these artists unilaterally rejected received forms: they considered their culture’s bourgeois past to be tainted by toxic ideology. The avant-garde chose to service the revolution by creating new forms to sculpt utopian subjectivity — to shape the mind