Soviet philosopher and art critic Mikhail Lifshitz published the book “The Crisis of Ugliness” in 1968. It was an anthology of polemical texts against Cubism and Pop Art—and one of the only intelligent discussions of modernism’s social context and overall logic available in the Soviet Union—making it popular even among those who disagreed with Lifshitz’s conclusions.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the scandalous publication, artist-curators David Riff and Dmitry Gutov are hosting the “If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties” exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Russia. The exhibition is also the result of a three-year Garage Field Project initiated in 2013, which aims to offer new perspectives on overlooked or little-known events, philosophies, places, or people relating to Russian culture.
Featuring artworks from artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Oleg Filatchev, Valery Khabarov, Larisa Kirillova, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, the exhibition takes Lifshitz’s book and related writings as its starting point to re-explore the vexed relations between so-called progressive art and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the motivations and implications of Lifshitz’s singular crusade against the modern classics.
The “If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties” exhibition will run through May 13, 2018. For those who can’t make it to the exhibition, watch the video below for a guided tour with co-curator David Riff.
