Lifshitz Seminar

November 8+9, 2013, 1 p.m.-6:30 p.m., each day
With Dmitry Gutov (Moscow) and David Riff (Moscow)
Language: English

Admission: free
Registration at: dressler@wkv-stuttgart.de

In the framework of the exhibition Giving Form to the Impatience of Liberty the Moscow based artists Dmitry Gutov and David Riff present the Lifshitz Institute, which was founded 1994 in Moscow. This institute dedicates itself to the re-reading of the work of Soviet thinker Mikhail Lifshitz (1905–1983), who, as Gutov states, was one of the most untimely and “paradoxical figures of the Communist epoch.” Lifshitz is as famous for his contributions to uncovering Marx’s “hidden aesthetic” in the nineteen-thirties as he is notorious for his orthodox Marxism and conservative anti-modernist cultural criticism. The latter reached its climax in his book The Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop-Art, published in 1968. By contrast, Gutov and others understand Lifshitz to be a far more manifold thinker and detect an anti-Stalisnist essence in his work.

An event in the context of Politics of Form
Special funding: Innovationspreis Baden-Württemberg

During the two-days-seminar Gutov and Riff introduce the writings and thinking of Lifshitz and discuss their re-readings of the same.