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SUMMARY:Designs of Spring: On the Natural Form of Communism - Professor Ro
 bert Bird\, University of Chicago
DTSTART:20120503T163000Z
DTEND:20120503T180000Z
UID:TALK37897@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:21355
DESCRIPTION:From the early 1930s the desire to re-make both human nature a
 nd the natural world united artists\, scientists and other intellectuals i
 n a broad cultural consensus\, predicated on dialectical materialism and t
 he primacy of practice. One notable aspect of the Stalin consensus (as I c
 all it) was the way in which artists from across the Soviet media system d
 rew inspiration from controversial innovations in botany and genetics\, mo
 st directly linked to the name of Ivan Michurin. With a shifting focus on 
 poetry\, film and graphic art (children’s books\, caricatures and poster
 s) I will trace how notions of biological form overlapped with aesthetic d
 ebates in the Stalinist period. I shall also examine what happened to this
  consensus in the Thaw period of the early 1960s\, when artists re-discove
 red the archive of the avant-garde only to find that the alliance between 
 science and art had become unsustainable. Artists to be discussed include:
  Aleksandr Dovzhenko\, Fridrikh Ermler\, Elizaveta Polonskaia\, Nikolai Za
 bolotsky\, Andrei Voznesensky\, Petr Miturich\, Vasilii Fomichev.
LOCATION:Winstanley Lecture Hall\, Trinity College
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