Projection and Montage: Revolutionary Visions in Early Soviet Visual Culture

Amirkhan Saifullin

This dissertation examines the artistic method of Projectionism, whose development by Solomon Nikritin (1898–1965) after the October Revolution art historians have not yet explored. Its main objective was to reveal and transform reality through visual representation in light of the Soviet project. As my analysis will make explicit, in essence the specific innovation of the Projectivists was to give a primacy to the creation of ideas over objects  in artistic practice and to prioritize the process this creation entailed over the result it yielded. As a method that is conceived to “project” ideas instead of things and to organize perception instead of sensations, I will demonstrate that Projectionism represented one pole in the opposition of two imperative forms of organizing post-revolutionary vision. Thus, it is my argument that early Soviet visual culture should be viewed not through the optics of “utopia” and “construction,” but through those supplied by what I will define as Projection and Montage. In building upon this new conceptual base, my analysis will show how the organization of both modes of vision was genealogically linked to the world-building project of “Soviet Enlightenment,” an intellectual enterprise to develop social and cultural consciousness of the proletarian masses through an appeal to theory mediated by the means of philosophy, science, and art.