Technical Difficulties: Abstraction’s Entanglements in the World, 1918–1933

Abstract

This dissertation reexamines abstract art in Russia and Germany during the interwar period, proposing an alternative vision of the practice’s worldly relations and political stakes through a novel focus on its modes of making. Following its celebrated “invention” in prewar European art, abstraction in these subsequent years—it is argued here—found itself suspended precariously between the breakdown of art’s previous academic techniques and the fraught promises of modern technology. Framed by this technical impasse, this dissertation highlights how prominent avant-garde practitioners reimagined artistic production via intricate negotiations with other forms of making, implicating their works—at times consciously, at others unwittingly—within technical logics of Western modernity unfolding across transnational or global scales. Crossing into the domains of science, craft, and industry, these relations surface a very different picture of abstraction’s ambitions, entanglements, and consequences in the world. With its introduction, this study recovers period arguments for framing interwar abstraction by means of making and process, found in the writings of critics Nikolai Tarabukin and Lu Märten as well as in the practice of artist El Lissitzky, whose movement from Moscow to Berlin and Hannover during the 1920s mirrors the geographic trajectory of the subsequent chapters. From this starting point, chapter one turns attention to painter Aleksandr Rodchenko’s engagement with scientific images in post-revolutionary Russia, tracing unanticipated linkages of his practice to Brazil. Chapter two examines Hannah Höch’s sewing and embroidery pattern collages, uncovering their intimate connections to financial crisis and networks of global distribution. Finally, chapter three charts how Kurt Schwitters’s obsessive scrutiny of misprinted matter from commercial print factories unexpectedly led his practice toward collusion with an intensely rationalized project of world standardization. In each of these cases, the making practices of interwar abstraction came into formative contact with larger technical dynamics, a fact afforded broader reflection in the conclusion.