“El Lissitzky and the Mobility of Deleuzian ‘Minor’”

Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Annual Conference. Panel: Avant-Garde Arts in Russia and Eastern Europe

Feb. 2021  

“…It is endlessly tempting to frame Lissitzky’s participation in the Jewish book culture as the artist’s version of utilizing the folkloric as a long-untapped source of artistic inspiration. Russian avant-garde artists time and time again turned to the scenes of rural life and Russian folk art, not to mention the re-emergence of interest in Orthodox icon painting in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, it is perhaps fair to say that Lissitzky had no need to reinvent the past, romanticize, and re-ignite the culture that was largely absent from Russian modernity. For Lissitzky, that alternative culture was alive in real time and he took a big part in its development. Deleuze, in his advocating the revolutionary nature of the “minor” positionality, calls on the writer to work on “finding his own point of underdevelopment, … his own third world, his own desert.” Unlike ethnically and culturally Russian artists, Lissitzky did not need to re-enter “his own desert”—in a way, he refuses to abandon it completely. This productively stereoscopic positioning within two art practices resolves the need for a choice of either national or ideologically universal orientation of artistic production —a choice between a living dog and a dead lion.”