Anke Hennig

Über die Dinge
Texte der russischen Avantgarde
VOLUME 181

Among Things

More than sixty excerpts from writings by Russian artists including Kazimir Malevich, Daniil Kharms, Varvara Stepanova, and Dziga Vertov document the avant-garde’s engagement with one fundamental fact of industrial everyday life: the confrontation with “things.”

Many radical tendencies champion the thing as an alternative to the conventional work of art: only the actual thing counters the evanescence of experience in the modern age. The revolutionary visual artists see it as their mission to work in solidarity with industrial production and design new things for a “New Man”; the writers of a “literature of the fact” similarly aim to write books with titles like Wood, Coal, or Cement. Theorists, meanwhile, debate whether art should focus on scrutinizing the specific thinglike quality of its own artistic language or on exploring the things that its language can only point to. The philosophers of the Russian school of phenomenology synthesize such considerations when they ponder the “language of things” and the thing’s “social meaning.”

Anke Hennig (b. 1971) joined the Collaborative Research Centre Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits at Freie Universität Berlin in 2013. Her scholarship focuses on the theory and poetics of Russian formalism, conceptions of the synthesis of the arts in the Russian avant-garde and totalitarian aesthetics, and the temporal dimension of the medium of film.