PUBLIC TALK: How to Make a Revolutionary Object: the drawings of Gustavs Klucis

A public lecture by Professor Maria Gough, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University.

This talk focuses on a corpus of presentation drawings for new media-driven structures for the revolutionary street: radio-orators, projection screens, advertising stands, slogan signs, and newspaper kiosks. Executed in the early 1920s by Gustavs Klucis (Gustav Klutsis), a Latvian immigrant to Moscow who would later enjoy renown as the leading Soviet photomonteur of the interwar period, these striking drawings have long captivated artists, architects, and designers due to their optical dynamism and graphic presence, explicit intertwining of radical aesthetics and agitational politics, and perspicacious concatenation of media and small-form architecture for revolutionary purposes.

Professor Gough is in Australia as a Visiting Professor at Edith Cowan University and this guest lecture is sponsored by the Edith Cowan Centre for Global Issues.